THE SUBJECT OF ANALYSIS AND PURPOSE
Usborne/Popleaf’s Teach Your Monster to Read or TYMTR is a free reading promotional online game operating on www.teachyourmonstertoread.com and a purchased mobile application on IOS and Android. Since its launch in 2012, the application has gained millions of child users and high ratings from 4.4-4.6/5 in its three downloading platforms: App Store (4.6/5), Google Play (4.4/5) and Amazon (4.6/5) (Last assessed 4th April 2020).
The game was promoted by the UK governmental campaign, Hungry Little Minds, as a suitable learning app for young children, and nominated for many educational awards. The content of TYMTR focuses on phonics learning through mini games framed in a fantasy-picture-book-like narrative. Language levels are divided into three episodes: Teach Your Monster to Read: First Step, Teach Your Monster to Read 2: Fun with Words, and Teach Your Monster to Read 3: Champion Reader.
The Hungry Little Mind Campaign
Players will learn English reading from scratch by matching phonemes and graphemes, blending and segmenting sounds, constructing gradually complicated words, reading simple sentences and finally reading for purposes. As it is a language learning game for young illiterate players, I am interested to analyze how the game not only keep players playing but also acquiring language competency.
Advertisement for "Teach Your Monster to Read 3: Champion Reader"
FRAMEWORK
The Value Sensitive Design approach requires the analyst to pinpoint prominent values in the product and compare them against the stakeholders, the product's pervasiveness and durability through time to evaluate how its design responds to the values it wants to promote, answers to the stakeholders' needs, and deals with the struggles between different values within it.
According to Bogost (2008), procedural rhetoric includes all the game’s expression that conveys ideas or arguments of its author to its players. The prominent values I see in the designed procedures within and around the TYMTR game are users' generosity, reciprocity and autonomy. Hereinafter, I define the possible stakeholders and try to demonstrate how the game’s design reflects the above-said values and persuades users into learning and envisaging what meaningful education should be.
To understand the importance of generosity and reciprocity, I turn to child psychology studies on early-year children’s specificity of reciprocity (Vaish et al., 2018) and cognitive explanation of preschoolers’ collecting behaviors (McAlister et al., 2011).
On discussing value tensions between the dual users’ autonomy, I turn to Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to see how the game’s procedures motivate children’s self-study and Language Learning Autonomy Study (LLA) in digital practices to make sense of the game technological structure and users management. Finally, I discuss the game pervasiveness and time aspect when it goes beyond British-English-speaking communities.
STAKEHOLDERS
According to the TYMTR website, the game is meant for “children in the first stages of learning to read, or for older children who need a bit more practice”. However, despite the skill-based recommendation, the whole module is designed for 2 academic years “assuming 20 minutes of play per week” consistent with the direct users’ (which I will call ‘players’ for clarity) age preference ranged from 2-8 years old. These recommendations are shown on the game’s three purchasing platforms and websites that recommend the game, as follow: App Store, Google Play, Amazon, Hungry Little Minds, and Common Sense Media (Last assessed 4th April 2020). The recommended ages go in line with the game's closed system and its absence of in-game purchase, which ensure young users’ focus on learning and their safety from strangers, identity theft and unintentional purchasing.
The game's target group and ideal playing methods
The players can play TYMTR in either "Normal Mode" or “School Mode”. The Normal Mode is the mode that the players can play without signing in, and their playing results will not be recorded and shown to their adult mentors. Meanwhile, the School Mode for the game's indirect users (mainly parents and teachers, whom I will call “mentors”) to monitor players’ activities and progress. The design of everything outside the TYMTR game is tailored to communicate with the mentors. The TYMTR website provides information about the game content, worksheets, phonic charts, and activity ideas. The TYMTR blog constantly updates the mentors about the game’s achievements, discounts, and in-game updates. The TYMTR Facebook page provides parents and teachers the space to share testimonials and ideas for development. The child players, however, have no direct communication with the team or other users online. This design can be considered appropriate for the intended players of 3-6 years old and may imply that further socializing activities relating to the game are encouraged off-screen.
With the British-English narration, either players or mentors of TYMTR are supposed to be at least English-speakers and preferably British. This limitation can become a problem as comments on the TYMTR Facebook page show that non-UK parents are concerned with their children being confused by the British dialect in the game and suggested the design time provide more dialect options in the future. Their concern also reveals that the game’s pervasive operational platforms have allowed non-targeted stakeholders such as English-as-Second-Language (ESL) and English-as-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners, who might be older children or even adults, to also become the game's players and mentors
Some of the comments show the mentors' concern
about the British accent in the game
MAIN VALUES AND VALUE TENSIONS
Generosity and reciprocity
From the title to its playing procedure, generosity and reciprocity are values players encounter the most in TYMTR as the game's design tries to inspire children to be a ‘helper’ who teaches their monster(s) to read.
In episode 1, Monster’s spaceship crashes and, as the Monster cannot read the instruction by itself, the kings in eight islands (levels) offer to help fix the spaceship in exchange for Monster helping them gather the lost letters in various mini games. Each king offers three prize options and lets the player choose the prize he wants his monster to get after finishing the mini game. The prize can be either food that Monster eats right away or collectible accessories it can wear.
Instructions in the TYMTR website
In episode 2, Monster’s spaceship is seized by a pirate and the player must help Monster go through seven villages (levels) to retrieve the spaceship and help villagers find their lost letters in mini games along the way.
Instructions in the TYMTR website
In episode 3, Monster follows an SOS signal in the space to Jessica the Famous Wise Woman. The player has to help Monster find Jessica's spell book so that Jessica can banish the Green Goblin Prince and disenchant her friends in the 47 planets (levels) from his curse.
Jessica the Famous Wise Woman needs the Monster's help
Why the generosity and reciprocity play such an important role is, perhaps, the fact that they are some of children’s basic pro-social skills. According to Vaish et al.'s (2018) literature review on child psychology studies, the researches show that even from early years, children express care and share more with those who share things with them than those who not; their study also confirm that children (three-year-olds) share and express their care more towards those who has “intentionally” giving out things to benefit them.
The sense of ownership, which is created throughout the game via Monster’s customization and how the game keeps addressing other characters who need help from the players as “your monster” and “your friend”, even adds to children’s hard-wired motivation to help others and collect prizes.
Receiving things for good deeds, aside from creating a sense of pride and authority, can triply motivate children to adhere to the game to assist the characters, have positive socialization with them, and have fun in collecting things in return.
The Monster collecting items after succeeding
in helping the villagers in the game
A power bar is also a symbol of the player's positive progress in each mini game. Apart from that, the player collects from each level new graphemes and “Trickies” (tricky word monsters) which he can freely revisit and listen to.
The power bar (top left) shows the player's progress in each mini game.
Unlike in episode 1, while playing mini games and after completing each level in episode 2 and 3, the player is given stars and food instead of collectible prizes.
The collected star (top right) is a currency in the game.
“A friendly shopkeeper” starts to appear and let the player spend stars on collectible accessories. The message from this procedure in the game can be deemed as pro-consumerism as it normalises the idea that one should improve their academic skills to obtain more resources (stars) to consume and purchase more (goods). However, collecting stars like this can also provoke goal-oriented skills, which are part of children's executive functions that are necessary in planning one’s life, consisting of “categorization, inhibitory control, rule adherence and working memory” (McAlister et al. 2011, p. 13). The more complicated tasks of saving stars and deciding what to buy, therefore, help older players, who are likely to enjoy the game's higher levels, prepare themselves for future self-directed learning.
It is also important to note that from episode 2 onwards, Monster assumes the role of a literate benefactor who plays mini games to help others and “make him/her happy” (the narrator repeatedly reasons) instead of finishing tasks to gain help. This shows the game's attempt to confirm with the players that they or their Monster have progressed and earned the superior reading ability and autonomy as the helper.
In this way, TYMTR subtly changes its message from encouraging generosity and reciprocity to highlighting empathy and the power of literacy in helping people in need as its player grows.
Autonomy
Autonomy is another salient value in TYMTR. Benson (2009) points out that language learning autonomy can be seen in two lights, whether the need is pressured by globalized socio-economy or inspired by self-realization of learner agency.
Although TYMTR’s players might be too young to engage the game with these types of autonomy, their mentors must introduce them to the game with either autonomy or both. As literacy and communicative skills become a great advantage in “self-improvement culture”, where people are forced to upgrade themselves incessantly to benefit globalized industry and informative society (p.7), it is reasonable why a book publisher funded this game and the government suggests parents use it to boost children’s literacy from the youngest age. The value tension can occur when players fail to see the need to obtain literacy and his mentor fails to see the social forces that play up the need to make children literate as fast as possible.
Living in “self-improvement culture”, some parents may become too eager
to get their children to perfect their reading skills
and put too much pressure on them.
To alleviate this tension, TYMTR’s design focuses on showing children the fun in becoming literate and developing their autonomy in terms of self-determination to learn to read. Ryan and Edward (2017) explain that in SDT, learners’ sustainable motivation is based on three psychological needs: Autonomy (perceiving they have choices and power to decide what to do), Relatedness (feeling that what they do is important for what they care about) and Competency (being inspired to gain new skills to overcome challenges).
While generosity, reciprocity, ownership, empathy and collecting activities give children reasons to care and desires to hone their skills, the sense of being in control within TYMTR promotes players’ autonomy to learn.
The chart of three basic needs that support active learning
in the Self-Determination Theory
In gaining language learning autonomy on digital platforms, Chik (2018) suggests that learners must have the ability to know individual language needs and to know how to benefit from the digital world; these abilities can be acquired, according to the out-of-class learning theoretical model, through five aspects of digital practices: locality (learning environments), formality (how learning is institutionalized), pedagogy (interactions that give learners advice on how to learn), locus of control (learners’ degree of control) and trajectory (learners’ acknowledgment of their or others’ learning paths and patterns).
TYMTR’s formality is achieved by its content being assessed by the University of Roehampton’s reading experts3; players can also unlock a certificate after finishing each episode. Learning trajectory is shown to players through the aforementioned collecting activities and to mentors through their access to players’ stats in “school mode”, providing them chances to use pedagogy in helping players gain their skills. For the locality, TYMTR’s mobile and website systems allow players to play and learn from anywhere safely and sometimes in the eyes of their adults. Providing more games in the desktop version (the website), TYMTR suggests that home and classroom environments are advisable, if not preferable.
The Mentor can manage player accounts (above)
and see their performance (below) in the School Mode
(accessed 5 Sep 2022)
While players lack autonomy in app-selecting, their locus of control in the game is enhanced. In Normal Mode, players can create as many monsters as they want (one monster per game). To begin with, players do not have to worry about competitions because of the closed system. Each game has only one Monster, without other characters to compete with or time limit to rush towards. They can select mini games they want to play and find each grapheme.
When players make mistakes in mini games, the game does not play it up by expressing disappointment or telling them to “try again”. Instead, the narrator simply repeats the mission or gently points out the problem with light-hearted voice and a giggle (e.g. “Oh no you’re gone the wrong way” instead of a blatant “You are wrong.”)
On the contrary, players always get a positive remark whenever they make a choice and no matter how many times they have tried before succeeding, they are celebrated equally with prizes and praises (e.g. “Your friend is very happy now... She’s going to give you more games to play." and “The Tricky is amazed at how good you are at finding her. She’s so impressed she’s going to join you for the rest of your journey.”) Thus, players can focus on honing skills for pleasure of helping others, being thanked or praised, not for winning or avoiding shame. However, this ideology may be compromised if the mentors fail to acknowledge it and reveal or compare the child's progress to others’.
Watch the game casting of TYMTR Episode 1 in this video from Kidsplay.
TYMTR also provides simple and flexible control which is helpful and matches
young players’ digital ability. The narrator gives missions (e.g. “Defeat the dragon by finding “ur” sound”) but never explains the instructions (such as press on each word to see its fragments and select the grapheme that sounds “ur”).
Players can stop playing and continue at any point without losing progress. They have infinity chances to retry and perfection is not expected. For example, in Flower minigame, if they fail to jump at the flowers and listen to their sound, the flowers keep appearing until they manage to do so; In Rocket mini game,
neatness in towering the blocks is not compulsory to complete the mission.
Mentors, on the other hand, gain autonomy over players in “School Mode”, which can be accessed on mobile by enabling “School Mode” and entering the mentor’s “Star Code” (registration number) together with the username and password of a playing account registered under the mentor’s account.
As in 2020, the mobile app allows players to log in separately to either the "Normal Mode" or the “School Mode”, giving them a monitoring-free zone. On the contrary, the website allows players to play only in the “School Mode”, where they must log in through a specific hyperlink, connected to their mentor’s account. In this mode, the players will find three special games (i.e., Sighties, Minigames, and Flashcards) which record their progress individually as they play and adjust the difficulty accordingly to suit them. The mentor has the ability to adjust password for each playing account (Autogenerated, Editable or No-Password), delete or relocate it to other mentor's account, restart or change the episode for each player, and see the detailed stats informing his total playtime on two platforms, the grapheme he is currently playing and his competence for each grapheme in percentage. Each episode is securely saved and can be revisited anytime under the mentor’s permission.
Aside from players’ management and monitoring, mentors also acknowledge their autonomy on the game’s improvement, as the TYMTR website and Facebook overtly express their willingness to hear feedback. Their greater autonomy than players on monitoring and designing the game leads to another tension. Although TYMTR’s general procedural expressions subtly transmit rhetoric of preferable type of education where fun and freedom is the center of learning, some parents shared on TYMTR Facebook that children wasted too much time customizing Monster instead of learning, and the game should impose a time limit for such activity.
PERVASIVENESS
As said above, due to TYMTR’s global platforms for product purchasing, game operation and customer management, the game has been presented across cultures and countries. This leads to clashes between British-English and other dialects, which still need to be resolved in further game updates. The possibility that ESL and EFL learners can become its non-targeted users makes a new room for improvement (e.g. a local language or bilingual narration).
The game’s accurate British-English pronunciation and more tolerant pedagogy can even teach, if not replace, low-quality English teachers in some communities (e.g. some Thai schools) to improve their lesson. Easier accessibility to native teachers may disrupt hierarchical order in foreign language education and even make TYMTR a new competitor to local businesses of children’s language learning.
The game pattern can also be developed further for other language acquisition, which can lead to global disruption as it provides language learners more autonomy in selecting suitable teachers without geographical boundaries. Furthermore, while children’s attachment to Monster and other characters can be commodified and monetized, the game’s narrative can also turn into a longer story and used in transmedia storytelling to cover children’s other aspects of learning.
As of 2022, the game has been expanded to cover
not just literacy but also mathematics skills.
TIME
In terms of the design’s durability through time, TYMTR is covering the next levels of reading for its growing players by granting them three e-books after finishing the third episode. With this, children users become familiarized and attached more to online reading and digital language learning, which will benefit related digital business in the long run.
However, this does not mean that share-reading in family, school and other reading communities will disappear. In harnessing literacy, children can do many more reading-related activities and gain greater autonomy in their daily life; In learning through empathy, generosity, reciprocity, and passion, they are prepared to help other learners to learn. It can be a good idea if, in the future, children can use their acquired literacy to communicate with other TYMTR fans across the world, creating international friendships and understanding through language learning.
These cute and quirky characters are great assets
for future reading materials and merchandise.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, by employing generosity, reciprocity, and autonomy in the procedural design, TYMTR succeeds in motivating players to improve their reading skills and showing them a positive view of education. Its balancing emphasis on players' and mentors’ autonomy helpfully reduces their value tensions. While mentors can secretly watch players’ progress to facilitate, players are convinced to use the app willingly and have a choice to be unmonitored in Normal Mode. The unsolved tensions arise from players' and mentors’ unequal autonomy in communicating about the game’s improvements and from non-targeted users of foreign communities. These tensions not only leave rooms for in-game development and further transmedia activities, services, and products but will also lead to possible disruption in local authority and businesses of children’s English language learning soon.
REFERENCE
Primary text
Teach Monster Games Ltd (2020) Teach Your Monster to Read [Computer game]. Available at: www.teachyourmonstertoread.com (Last accessed 4 th April 2020)
Teach Monster Games Ltd. 2020. Teach Your Monster to Read (version 3.9). [Mobile app]. (Last Accessed 4 th April 2020).
Secondary text
Amazon (2020) Available from: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Teach-Your-Monster-to-Read/dp/B01HDXUH0O/ & sa=D&ust=1466773759765000&usg=AFQjCNHi260gpC4NWV-mGOVFE6ADv_1_bA(Last accessed 4 th April 2020)
App Store (2020) Available from: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/searchq=cache:YhsOO7hCp0AJ:https://apps.apple.com/us/app/teach-your-monster-to-read/id828392046+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=dk (Last accessed 4 th April 2020)
Benson, P. (2009) ‘Making Sense of Autonomy in Language Learning.' In: R. Pemberton, S. Toogood and A. Barfield. Maintaining Control: Autonomy and Language Learning. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Available from: 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099234.003.0002 (Last accessed 2nd April 2020).
Bogost, I. (2008) ‘The Rhetoric of Video Games.’ In: K. Salen. The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. pp. 17–140.
Chik, A. (2018) ‘CHAPTER 5: Learner Autonomy and Digital Practices.’ In: A. Chik et al.(eds.) Autonomy in Language Learning and Teaching New Research Agendas. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 73-92. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52998-5_5 (Last accessed 2nd April 2020).
Common Sense Media (2020) Available from: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/app-reviews/teach-your-monster-to-read (Last accessed 4 th April 2020)
Google Play (2020) Available from: https://play.google.com/store/apps/detailsid=com.teachyourmonstertoread.tmapp&hl=th (Last accessed 4 th April 2020)
Hungry Little Minds (2020) Available from: https://hungrylittleminds.campaign.gov.uk/#3 (Last accessed 4 th April 2020)
McAlister, A.R., Cornwell, T.B. and Cornain, E.K. (2011) ‘Collectible toys and decisions to share: I will gift you one to expand my set.’ British Journal of Developmental Psychology. 29:1–17
Ryan, R. M. & Edward, D. L. (2017) ‘Self‑Determination Theory An Introduction and Overview.’ In: Self-determination theory : basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness . New York: The Guilford Press. pp. 3-25.
Vaish, A., Hepach, R., Tomasello, M. (2018) ‘The specificity of reciprocity: Young children reciprocate more generously to those who intentionally benefit them.’ Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 167: 336-353.
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