Why we can't have nice things in Ed Tech

A very wise ed tech, entrepreneur Maria H. Andersen recently made the comment :

The EdTech industry is a mess. The software just creates more work, and there’s not enough money to create the software that would actually help companies pursue revenue growth above student growth, and teacher morale.

TL; DR; The only way to really have good ed tech is for people to do some of the work for free

Now, Forgotten Trail was originally developed with funding from a Kickstarter campaign. In 2015, we raised almost $55,000 which put us pretty high on the ranking for funds raised by an educational video game. If you know anything about making games, you know that's not a lot of money, even if you don't consider the need for adding educational content, but we did it. The game was pretty good for 2015. It was fun and taught a lot of math and Ojibwe history and culture.

I'm not going to talk about all the updates we needed to do from 2015 to now - like, in 2018, when browsers started disabling autoplay of audio, we had to change a lot of pages to only play audio when the player clicked the next button.

In 2020, thanks to funding from USDA, we added online reports so teachers could see the number of problems their students attempted and answered correctly and the standard those problems addressed. We also added a lot of accessibility features like hints and voiceovers.

7 examples that games are never finished, they're just abandoned

This probably goes for all software - there are always new features, better ideas. If you wonder why we didn't do all of these at the beginning, it's because we were making a game on a shoestring budget that still include a lot of content. Not only did we assess 17 math standards, but we also included activities to teach those standards, along with games made with Phaser, Javascript and Unity. (Yes, I know phaser.js is Javascript. Just hush.)

Over the past five months, three developers at 7 Generation Games have made a hundred changes to one game, Forgotten Trail, to make it easier for teachers to use in their classroom and less frustrating for students. Some of those changes were made by an intern - shout out to Melvin Saballos and to SciTechMN who helped fund his salary - and the rest were done by me and one of my co-founders in our spare time. Here are just 7 of those.

1. Added autocomplete="off" to every question. You know how a form will show the last answer you gave, so autocomplete your address, for example? Yeah, that's a bad feature if a computer is used to play the game by multiple students and a form shows what the last player answered.
2. Made sure in the wood chopping game that both h and H worked to pull up the help screen.
3. Moved a lot of elements on a lot of pages so that students did not need to scroll down to see a next arrow or an input box for an answer.
4. Added more save points so players come back closer to the exact spot at which they left the game when they signed out. This was important for kids with learning difficulties because they often didn't get very far before their time to play during class was up.
5. Created a "teacher cheat sheet" for the wood chopping game that gave questions students might have on game mechanics and the answers, because we realized teachers may not have time to play through the games.
6. Added a hint to the problem on converting from kilometers to miles to use a factor rounded to 1.6, because we realized that some students will use 1.6093445 or 1.609 - which are actually MORE correct.
7. Added voiceovers to more pages, so students can click on a "read it to me button" and have the voice of the game character read the page, not a generic text-to-voice audio.

All of these changes addressed three issues -and were UNPAID

Everything we did was aimed at either

• Making it less likely that a student would raise his or her hand and ask the teacher for help. If software is not intuitive, students get frustrated and play less. They also take teacher time from other tasks.
• Responding to concerns teachers raised. Differentiated instruction for students with learning differences was a major concern, which is why one of our first modifications was more voiceovers and hints.
• Increasing the longevity of the game by replacing outdated code libraries or processes. Nine years is an eternity in software time, but teachers who included the game in their curriculum nine, or three or five years ago, expect it to continue working. (Let me just add, if you have been teaching for nine years, you are gold. We need more experienced teachers.

Getting back to Maria's point - none of this was sustainable at the $55,000 in Kickstarter funds nor the $4.99 per game we initially charged. During the pandemic, thanks to funding from the USDA, we were able to make all of our games available for free. These updates are definitely not sustainable for a free product! In fact, most of our income comes from educational games we make for customers, from Native nations to non-profits to white-label games for publishers.

Personally, whenever I need to learn a new technology, whether it is creating images with Adobe Firefly or game design with AI Studio, I use it in a game I'm making, so 90% of my professional development time does double-duty as game development. My hobby in my spare time is updating game code. (What did you expect me to do, knit?)

The ugly truth is that with current technology, it is not cost-effective to make educational games without either getting government or philanthropic organizations to underwrite the cost or underpaying developers and designers.

We actually have an answer to this problem - and that is where the real money is - but you'll have to wait for next month's newsletter to learn about it.