Gathering and organising information

Very much part of understanding the nature of a problem is recognizing what information is relevant to its solution. The essence of many real world problems is a lack of information. Children need to develop the skills of gathering relevant information and of organizing it in ways which will help them solve problems.

Once again, this is a central feature of many adventure games. At its simplest, this may consist of being presented with particular pieces of information quite explicitly and being told you need to remember this. It might be a password to get on to the next stage of the adventure or information about the effects of different kinds of magical spells you can use when faced with particular problems. Typing ‘WHOOSH’ into the com- puter at the right moment can make you invisible and help you get past the evil Troll!

At a more advanced stage, information is discovered in different loca- tions and needs to be remembered and used to construct increasingly complex series of moves and actions. This is where children are being required to become aware of the information they need and to search for it systematically. For example, they may discover that they cannot enter the Wizard’s house because they do not have the golden key. When they find the Goblin with the golden key, he will only give it to them in exchange for a bag of corn, and so on. Gradually, as more information is collected it is constructed into a sequence of moves. When all the information is in place and correctly organised, the problem can be solved, the lost princess is found, and good triumphs over evil yet again.

The range of information presented and the length and complexity of the sequence which needs to be constructed are obvious sources of progression in this kind of game. Another source of progression is the proportion of the information presented which is irrelevant to problem solution. In less challenging games the only information available is that which is needed to solve the problem. In more challenging versions, an increasing proportion of the information presented is actually irrelevant.

There is a special kind of software which may not seem to fall into the category of ‘adventure game’, but which should be included because it shares a number of key features, and particularly in relation to this issue of gathering and organising relevant information. These pieces of simulation software are actually just databases constructed as hypertexts, but they are

GAMES AND SIMULATIONS IN THE EARLY YEARS

set up so that the front end or user interface presents the data in an imaginative or ‘real world’ context within which each user has their own unique adventure. Such a program might, for example, present data on the events in a house over a calendar year by enabling you to set the date and time and then explore the house, or it might present natural environments within which you can go on a simulated nature walk or field study, equipped with a notebook into which you can paste text and a camera with which you can take snapshot pictures of discovered flora and fauna.

The advantage for the teacher of this kind of simulation database is that problems to be solved can be constructed by the user, rather than being predetermined by the software writers of the adventure game. There is also total freedom in terms of the order in which the problem solver views and collects information. Simpler and more complex questions and chal- lenges can therefore be set. Different problems can be devised which require different and progressively more sophisticated search strategies for relevant information. In one such program, which presents data on the events in a household over a year, one particularly exciting event is the arrival of a new baby. A whole range of different kinds of questions might

be posed, each requiring a different search strategy, thus: • What special event takes place on 3rd February? Find out as much as you

can about this event. • What begins to happen at one end of the bedroom on 21st January? Why does this happen? • What is the Baby’s typical daily routine in July, and how is it different in October? Why do you think it changes? • Where does the Baby sleep in the afternoon, and for how long? Does the Baby always sleep in the same place in the afternoons?

To answer some of these questions you have to start at a particular date and search the whole house. For others, you can start in a particular room. Some require you to go through the whole day, while for others you can concentrate on particular times. Some answers require only a limited number of pieces of information to be collected, while much more is needed for others.

In terms of children learning to distinguish relevant and irrelevant information in relation to any particular problem, and of devising strategies for collecting relevant information, these programs therefore have a particular value.

Gathering and organising information