How games are changing the education system

BY KATIE DEE

As young children, it’ s normal to utilize games and playtime as a way to discover and learn about the world around us. The ways in which play relates to cognitive growth and development throughout childhood and beyond has been carefully studied in psychology — however, it remains vastly underused within the education system.

With the majority of children having to adapt to online schooling in the wake of the pandemic, JD Calvelli, analyst at the University of Chicago ’ s Center for Radial Innovation for Social Change (RISC), began exploring the role that games and play can have in enriching a child's learning experience, especially in a remote setting.

“I think in general, the education system hasn ’t really caught up to the reality of today and the onset of modern technologies, ” Calvelli said, “A lot of that became especially evident postpandemic when we had to rapidly adapt to this new reality of people being in their homes and having to learn through digital technology and we weren ’t really ready for that. ”

He went on to explain that even though some of these technologies are not new, the education system has failed to take full advantage of them. He attributes this to the old school conception that work and learning are not meant to be fun, but rather, the antithesis of it.

“We seemed to have arbitrarily decided at some point that after you ’ re a baby it’ s no longer okay to learn through play… 76% of kids in the U.S. play video games, and so the gamification of learning is a way to introduce students to important concepts and meet them where they are, ” Calvelli explained.

In pursuit of bringing games into the education sector, RISC, in partnership with educational consultants Enable Education, has created its own learning game, Algo-Rhythm. This data science, music-based game allows children to look deeper at the data behind several popular songs.

With Algo-Rhythm, students can create playlists, explore how songs are made, and dance to the beat. Parents can also play along with their children and help them learn about today ’ s music and the way that data has helped to create it.

Intended for late elementary- to early middle school-aged children, the game utilizes Spotify API in order to determine a few key data points about the songs.

“Specifically, we focused on values that represented Danceability, Energy, and Tempo — which are each represented in the game as a number out of 10 whenever a player chooses a song in the playlist builder, ” Calvelli explained, responding to song requests, such that they fulfill specific asks. ”

Players are expected to use the data represented to them in order to make informed decisions about which songs to add to playlists, or which to use to fulfill certain song requests. The quicker a player is able to make these determinations, the more points they accumulate.

Calvelli and his team hope that this game works to teach children two important fundamentals of data science: the fact that data can be found anywhere, and that it can be used to help make more informed decisions.

“We really wanted to meet kids where they are, and try our best to give them an experience that would let them have a good time and, at the same time, teach them something or at least inspire them to look at the world in a way they didn't necessarily before, ” Calvelli said.

He explained that another hope for this game is to serve as an impetus to foster a greater interest in learning within students.

He explained that by teaching important data science skills through a

fun, interactive game, it is easier for children to become engaged in the topic and offers them the opportunity to learn about an important concept in a fun way.

“Ultimately, we hope that this can serve as that catalyst. We ’ re not driven by profit motive… So ideally that means that we can create something that really only exists for the purpose of trying to teach someone, ” Calvelli said.

Another purpose Algo-Rhythm serves is to close the knowledge gap around data and the impact that it has on the world.

Calvelli explained that not many people have a full grasp of what data actually means and the purpose that it serves. He hopes that introducing students to this concept in a way that feels accessible to them will work to solve this problem for the next generation.

“We hope that Algo-Rhythm can be the start of that conversation like, ‘ oh, data is important and we should be teaching students at a younger age about it and it should be integrated into our school systems in a more direct way, ’” he said.

Calvelli also discussed that bringing technology and games into the classroom can be a really meaningful way to offer kids a heightened sense of agency over their own education and the way they learn.

He spoke specifically about the beginning of the pandemic and how young children with active imaginations were expected to absorb important material through methods that failed to engage that imagination or even offer an outlet for much interaction.

“In order for something to be a game, there has to be a mechanic, there has to be something that the player does. So, the reality in this post-pandemic world is that there is a perceived lack of agency on the part of the students and incorporating play can return that agency in a meaningful way, ” Calvelli said.

He also explained that with the emergence of the Metaverse there is even more room for games to be brought into the education system in an immersive way. With the rise of virtual reality and the ability to fully bring students into these educational games, failing to do so would be a missed opportunity.

Calvelli expanded on this saying that this technology still has a good amount of room to further grow and develop. However, he believes that the Metaverse should ultimately become an important mechanism in the education field.

“If we conceptualize the Metaverse as an increasingly interactive, increasingly immersive, increasingly interconnected, virtual world… then the two most obvious benefits are that it opens up experiences and it shrinks distances, ” he said.

Based on that conceptualization, Calvelli believes that this technology will also serve as an equalizer of opportunity for students, making more sophisticated experiences more accessible to lower income students.

“If you ’ re in a school system that wants to run chemistry labs but that cost is too high, theoretically, the Metaverse will allow you to have that lab without the need to pay for the resources, ” he said.

According to Calvelli, as of right now the gamification of learning remains an untapped market within the Metaverse, but hopefully as the technology comes to fruition, that will change. He said, “We are interested to see, as time goes on, how more companies and pioneers in the Metaverse come to engage with the agency aspect and how they use that to help students learn better. ”

Calvelli also stressed the fact that the current education system is in need of an upgrade because children today are not being set up for success in the digital world we live in. He believes that the system has been stagnant for many years and by giving it some much needed TLC, students will benefit greatly.

“RISC believes that games and play are an important part of that new approach to education not only because it is engaging for students, but also because it has the potential to be a learning tool and to really break down the dichotomy that play and work need to be different, ” he said. z

BY JENNA SARGENT

Technology is always changing, and thus the way organizations manage around technology is always changing. There are always new methodologies entering the field, promising various benefits if only you could adopt it correctly.

Many of these fizzle out and remain nothing more than buzzwords, but according to Charles Betz, principal analyst at Forrester, DevOps has been an exception to this “IT fashion show. ”

Despite this, a majority of companies aren ’t where they could be when it comes to their DevOps evolutions.

According to Puppet’ s 2021 State of DevOps report, the majority of companies practicing DevOps are stuck in the middle of their DevOps evolution. This has remained mostly consistent over the past few years, dropping just 1% since 2018, to 79% of companies.

In 2021, Puppet found that 18% were at a high-level of evolution and 4% were at a low-level of evolution. Despite the percentage of companies in the mid-level of evolution, the percentage of those on the high or low end actually has shifted over the past four years of the study. By comparison, in 2018, only 10% were highly evolved while 11% were considered to be at the low portion of DevOps evolution.

So what is keeping so many companies in the middle? And what exactly does it mean to be in “ mid-level evolution?”

Puppet’ s report defines mid-level evolution as companies that “have introduced automated testing and version control, hired and/or retrained teams, and are working to improve their CI/CD pipelines. They ’ ve managed to start optimizing for individual teams, and if they ’ ve managed to avoid many of the foundational dysfunctions from which large organizations can suffer, they ’ re in a great position to start optimizing for larger departments, the

Betz argues that even though it might have stalled at a certain point in some organizations, DevOps as a practice in general has largely been a success.

Rob Cuddy, global application security evangelist at HCL Software, agreed, adding that DevOps is a continual evolution of trying to deliver better quality software faster. “So, you ’ re always going to be improving, and looking to improve as you go, ” he said.

Al Wagner, solution architect at HCL Software, added that changing technologies means that DevOps also has to continually change to keep up. It’ s a moving target, not a stationary finish line where once you ’ ve crossed it, you ’ ve succeeded at DevOps.

“As DevOps has grown, we discover new problems and new solutions to those problems, where every time we embrace something, if you think about cloud, it has only evolved post this term DevOps, and same with Kubernetes, Docker. So when people get stuck, the beauty of DevOps is it continually evolves and grows, and it's not locked down by a manifesto, ” said Wagner.

Even so, there are some bottlenecks that companies run into when they ’ re trying to evolve their DevOps practice. Cuddy believes one bottleneck is a lack of understanding of what you ’ re doing.

“The whole goal should be to improve the quality as it goes through the pipeline, ” said Cuddy. “But if you're just running scans, or running tests for the sake of running them, and you're not doing anything with the results, well, great, you've added a lot of automation, but now you've created a ton of noise. ”

Paul Delory, VP analyst at Gartner, also defined three main reasons why he believes an organization might struggle to move forward with DevOps.

First up is skills. Delory explained that a lot of initiatives get stuck because of a lack of talented people.

Those few that do have the matching skillset you ’ re looking for don ’t tend to stay on the market for very long, and they also get offered really high salaries, which might be difficult for all companies to match.

When companies find themselves in this position, they must look to growing these skills internally instead. But this option is a longer process, so it injects

further delays into their DevOps transformation.

“I think that's a big part of the reason why a lot of people get stuck on this plateau, ” said Delory.

The second reason people stall out in their DevOps transformation is that they might not actually need DevOps in every aspect of their business.

“If I look at the portfolio of applications that an IT department is asked to support. I think there are a lot of cases where essentially, you don't have the problem that DevOps solves, ” said Delory.

According to Delory, when talking about DevOps, we ’ re often speaking of fast moving, line of business applications that are directly impacting revenue. But not every application in the company is going to fit that bill, and thus, won ’t really be an ideal candidate for DevOps.

Delory gave the example of an employee phone directory as an application where applying DevOps wouldn ’t make sense.

“Your employee phone directory is probably a Ruby on Rails app that was written in 2009, and nobody's touched it since, ” said Delory. “Bringing in these kinds of DevOps transformation, cloud transformation, you could do that, but it's not really necessary, and I don't think you're going to see ROI on that in any reasonable time horizon. ”

The third factor that Delory thinks keeps people stuck in their DevOps transformation is politics and team structure.

For example, organizing a central operations team is something that some developers might not be too thrilled about, while others are happy about the change. The developers who don ’t want to have to manage their own infrastructure would be ready and willing to hand that over to someone else, and the developers who really like getting their hands dirty and being involved in that aspect would probably be the ones not too happy about having to adopt this new team structure.

“In all of these conversations around redesigned team boundaries and roles, getting it right is critical. And if you don't get it right, then that can definitely be a barrier to adoption, ” said Delory.

Cuddy agrees with this sentiment, and believes that the single biggest piece of DevOps is the people, not the tools or processes. “If you are not maintaining any kind of an organizational culture that supports DevOps that enables people that builds trust, that allows for flexibility, that allows room to fail fast and grow and learn, you're gonna get stuck eventually, ” said Cuddy. Cuddy believes that in order to successfully change culture, you need leadership buy in so that change can be enacted not only bottom-up, but top-

down. This idea has necessitated the need for value stream management. According to Wagner, when companies have been investing significantly in something like DevOps for years, they want to be able to see the relationship between their investments and business outcomes. “Leaders may not be seeing a return on investment, and perhaps there's not as much money coming back to the development teams to improve, ” said Wagner. “So it's really finding those bottlenecks using things like value stream mapping, value stream management, prioritizing, working closer with the leadership, the stakeholders to make sure that we are linking and that the things we do in the product teams are directly contributing to the business. ” z How does HCL Software help companies evolve their DevOps practices?

In a modern secure DevOps culture, teams seamlessly collaborate to increase delivery and productivity. The top organizations continuously seek new areas of efficiency, and they know that secure DevOps is never done. These organizations often rise to the forefront of their industries, using it as the launchpad.

HCL Software Secure DevOps is approaching this next decade strategically and with the full-cycle and scope of DevOps in mind, including development teams, IT and business units.

Leveraging our comprehensive solution set and business leaders with decades of industry secure DevOps experience, we have created a solution as unique as your business.

This means having the peace of mind knowing you have the tools you need with the leading experts in secure DevOps by your side.

From idea to production, HCL Software Secure DevOps provides solutions for source control and work item management, continuous delivery and testing, security scans and value stream management. z

n FEATURED PROVIDER n

n HCL Software: HCL Software is a division of HCL Technologies (HCL) that operates its primary software business. We develop, market, sell, and support over 30 product families in the areas of Customer Experience, Digital Solutions, Secure DevOps, Security and Automation.

Our mission is to drive ultimate customer success of their IT investments through relentless innovation of our software products.

n Atlassian offers tools like Jira and Trello, which can be used to make project management easier and enable cross-functional collaboration. Its solutions help companies stay on track as they work to deliver products. In addition to its offerings, it also believes that “great teamwork requires more than just great tools. ” To that end, it promotes practices like retrospectives, DACI decision-making framework, defining clear roles and responsibilities, and developing objectives and key results (OKRs)

n CircleCI is a continuous integration and delivery platform that enables teams to automate their delivery processes. It provides change validation at every step of the process so that developers can have confidence in their code. It also offers flexibility through the abilities to code in any language and utilize thousands of pre-built integrations.

n CloudBees: The CloudBees Suite builds on continuous integration and continuous delivery automation, adding a layer of governance, visibility and insights necessary to achieve optimum efficiency and control new risks. This automated software delivery system is becoming the most mission-critical business system in the modern enterprise.

n Codefresh is a GitOps-based continuous delivery platform that is built with Argo. It offers benefits like progressive delivery, traceability, integrations with CI tools like Jenkins and GitHub Actions, and a universal dashboard for viewing software deliveries. and standardize complex, enterprisescale application deployments to any environment — from mainframes and middleware to containers and the cloud. Speed up deployments with increased reliability. Enable self-service deployment while maintaining governance and control.

n GitLab allows Product, Development, QA, Security, and Operations teams to work concurrently on the same project. GitLab’s built-in continuous integration and continuous deployment offerings enable developers to easily monitor the progress of tests and build pipelines, then deploy with confidence across multiple environments — with minimal human interaction.

n IBM: UrbanCode Deploy accelerates delivery of software change to any platform – from containers on cloud to mainframe in data center. Manage build configurations and build infrastructures at scale. Release interdependent applications with pipelines of pipelines, plan release events, orchestrate simultaneous deployments of multiple applications. Improve DevOps performance with value stream analytics. Use as a stand-alone solution or integrate with other CI/CD tools such as Jenkins.

n JFrog’s DevOps platform offers endto-end management of software development. DevOps teams can control the flow of their binaries from build to production. Its DevOps portfolio includes tools like JFrog Artifactory for artifact management, JFrog XRay for security and compliance scanning, JFrog Distribution for releasing software, and more. app delivery. It includes Agile tools for team collaboration, the ability to scale to enterprise Agile tools, and DevOps management.

n Microsoft’s Azure DevOps Services solution is a suite of DevOps tools designed to help teams collaborate to deliver high-quality solutions faster. The solution features Azure Pipelines for CI/CD initiatives; Azure Boards for planning and tracking; Azure Artifacts for creating, hosting and sharing packages; Azure Repos for collaboration; and Azure Test Plans for testing and shipping.

n Octopus Deploy is an automated release management tool for modern developers and DevOps teams. Features include the ability to promote releases between environments, repeatable and reliable deployments, ability to simplify the most complicated application deployments, an intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard, and firstclass platform support.

n Opsera provides continuous orchestration of development pipelines in order to enable companies to deliver software faster, safer, and smarter. Its offerings include automated toolchains, no-code pipelines, and end to end visibility.

n Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution enables organizations to adopt and embrace Lean-Agile practices, scale Agile beyond teams, practice Agile Program Management, and better connect strategy to Agile team delivery while continuously improving the flow of work and helping them work smarter and deliver faster. With Planview, choose how you want to scale and when. We’ll help you transform and scale Agile on your terms and timeline.

n ServiceNow enables companies to do DevOps at scale. Developers are able to keep using the tools they love while still connecting with ServiceNow’s platform. The company enables automation of administrative tasks, while bringing together both ops and dev teams. z