Stories of Scaling: Field Day

By Adrienne Woods

Field Day Learning Games is a research lab in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research that designs free, research-based online learning games designed to be played in one class period (20-40 minutes). Field Day has achieved widespread distribution and impact through strategic partnerships with state agencies, public media groups, and other researchers. Played by millions of children each year, Field Day strives to create artful, story-like games that capture a world experience and align with education curricula in any subject.

David and Sarah Gagnon, Field Day Leads.

Invent: Leverage Magic Moments and Listen to Teachers to Build Momentum

Field Day grew out of a research lab at University of Wisconsin, where David Gagnon started out developing educational games to enable research on how kids learn. Ten years later, Field Day continues to bring contemporary research on learning to the public, using data from the games to study how children learn while serving millions of students with high quality educational games.

David describes Field Day’s research as exploring how to optimize learning theory within the continuum of complexity in games, which can range from very big, complicated, world-building games to very simple games more commonly used by teachers, like creating interactive quiz games with sound effects.

Field Day uses data from its games to incrementally test theories on how different designs create value for users. The team rigorously explores the components of features like narrative and identity building that optimize learning in complex systems.

“Our research questions are at such a high level that they require tens or hundreds of thousands of participants to answer,” David says. “We’re really looking into new methods of education, and research that can leverage large audiences within the context of digital games.”

Creative director Sarah Gagnon ensures that Field Day’s games engage learners in part through their high production value. By combining a team of researchers with an in-house, high quality game studio, “We’ve really married the research that we do with these gaming audiences,” David says.

Leveraging magic moments to scale. According to Sarah, much of Field Day’s work has been possible because the team was able to leverage a few serendipitous “magic moments” to build scaling momentum. Field Day got its start after David’s research group at the University of Wisconsin had developed a MacArthur-funded prototype augmented reality (AR) platform called ARIS (Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling). ARIS “has been one of the widest-used platforms for AR storytelling, especially by researchers,” Sarah explains.

Around this time, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) was looking for ways to engage teachers in new, innovative practices. The assistant state superintendent of DPI’s Division for Libraries and Technology, Kurt Kiefer, wanted to leverage emerging technology to produce results that had a statewide impact. With the help of some discretionary funding, Kiefer was willing to take a gamble on a team outside of DPI who were doing innovative work in the classroom at scale. “They were really attracted to some of the earlier stuff that we were doing with mobile phones and AR and game creation,” David relates. “So, they kind of gave us the jump-start as a team.”

Pivoting to break through. It took time to build Field Day’s business model. For the first two years, the team approached the work like a traditional research team. Their AR prototypes and teacher professional development (PD) events were well attended and attracted a lot of attention and press. But “when we’d follow up with teachers, there wasn’t any real measurable change that was taking place,” David recalls. “Teachers were kind of going back to the thing they did before, even after they spent a 3-day period with us. And we had spent a bunch of money on that.”

After a couple of years, the Field Day team decided to narrow their focus to what they felt was most important and exciting: the large-scale distribution of products that would make a difference around the country. This is when the real breakthrough occurred.

Coinciding with a move toward virtual schooling, DPI allocated funds to Field Day to pursue a new idea for teacher PD. The team brought in cohorts of 12 to 15 teachers every 3 to 6 months to co-create a suite of small games with the potential for widespread adoption. Teachers participated in an initial game jam and weekly play testing where they provided feedback and ideas to help refine the games, and then took them back to their students for additional testing. “Instead of calling it PD,” David says, “we called it a teacher fellowship, because we really wanted to recognize teachers as subject and field experts and give them resources.”

Field Day was able to use its funding to create a more equitable model. The team could pay teachers to attend the fellowship, rather than asking teachers to raise their own funds. The team could also work with teachers from both urban and rural areas of Wisconsin serving a mix of more affluent communities as well as communities with high populations of traditionally marginalized people. “It was just a much more diverse group that ended up coming and contributing to the game,” Sarah says.

After a few days of design work following the teacher fellowships, Field Day went through 9 months of rapid iterative prototyping and testing in classrooms. This process quickly produced Field Day’s first real public project, called the Yard Games — a collection of 20-minute simulation games about science concepts such as magnetism, buoyancy, and air currents. The games “went big fast,” David relates, and are now played “over a million times a year.”

Listening to teachers for a successful pivot. Bringing in teachers and listening to their needs was the key piece of the puzzle. David recalls that teachers said, “We need things that work on the technology we already have, and it cannot involve IT, it can’t have log-ins, it can’t need installers, it can’t have a lot of set-up.” Rather, teachers offered, “it’s got to just work like a webpage, and it’s got to be short — 20-40 minutes, so we can integrate it into what we’re already doing in a single class period.” They also pointed to the need for games to be standards-related. “You can’t just be inventing these ‘totally innovative,’ ‘new approaches’ to teaching and learning,” teachers said. “They have to be somehow linked to what we’re already doing.”

These suggestions led the Field Day team to stop thinking about always developing new technology. Instead, David shares, the team started thinking about how to focus on games that synced easily with, for example, “the Chromebooks that are already installed in 95% of classrooms.”

But this kind of thinking does not always dovetail with how researchers are taught to prioritize. “I think we were looked down on a little bit,” David says, because “that’s not the ‘edge’ of research.” Yet what followed, David continues, was “this trend that now we would call ‘learning engineering,’ where we realize there’s an entirely new form of research we can do now that wasn’t possible with the other methods. And this is low-hanging fruit that leads to new ways to approach learning science, new ways to do all sorts of research and method development, and the ability to ask questions that you just couldn’t ask previously.”

Apply: Promoting Creative Freedom and Meeting User Needs

Making art to achieve the mission. While David notes that some of Field Day’s work with AR was “very cutting edge,” he began to notice that the team’s presentations about the concepts of a project were always better received than the game itself. People were excited about the vision, but “when you would actually go play one of these games, it fell flat.”

Eventually, the team realized the missing piece: Field Day did not have an art and design team on board. “When we initially started Field Day, we were trying to do so many things,” Sarah says. “But we realized that if we were going to have a larger-scale distribution of anything, we needed to have professional designers and artists involved with it.”

David suggests, games are a “wide-open medium” and are “very compatible with being an art form.” Whereas textbooks or documentaries lead the reader down certain predetermined paths, game developers “get to tell rich stories, we get to create worlds, we get to show the immediate effects of actions on complex systems.”

Bringing in Sarah and her design team of artists made it possible for the Field Day team to build the games they were envisioning. Then, Sarah relates, “I think we did 12 games in 9 months, and they were being used by hundreds of thousands of kids pretty quickly. That was exciting.”

Promoting and financing creative freedom to support mission-driven work. Coming from a family of educators and artists, Sarah always had a vision to work with a collective of artists. When she joined Field Day, she found that games appealed to her because “they’re just the most complex and challenging things to make as a designer or artist.”

However, as Sarah points out, the video game industry for artists is often very siloed. “You don’t have a lot of creative control and you don’t have a lot of collaboration,” she relates. “You’re basically given a task list, and you have to do something in a ‘style’ that the head artist establishes and then you replicate throughout the whole game.”

On the other hand, Sarah continues, working with game tech people who allow the artists to take control of their own vision for a game is thrilling. Many artists end up working noncreative jobs to support their creative life, but David’s fundraising and grant-writing prowess has allowed Field Day’s team of artists to have insurance and full-time jobs where they do creative work and get paid for it. “I think having an environment that really works for artists has kept our team together,” Sarah says.

Understanding the needs of users. What sets Field Day apart from other research-based educational games? Sarah suggests that in addition to making the games practical for teachers to use in their classrooms, “we imbue existential angst into every game.”

Spending time with teachers led the Field Day team to really think about and embrace the reality of classrooms. Understanding their game users as kids “who show up to school, who haven’t had breakfast, who really couldn’t care less about history class,” Sarah says, “puts us as designers in a position where we feel like we need to earn the interest and the respect of both the teachers AND the players.”

David offers the example of Joe Wilder, one of Field Day’s first games with PBS. Instead of a “traditional ‘let’s-learn-history’ character with a big smile,” David remembers, the team thought, “What if we have a high-definition character that really doesn’t want to have to do anything, really wants to go play, really cares more about her grandpa and her pet badger than any of this adult world stuff?”

The big takeaway? “Meet kids where they’re at and invite them into exploration and play,” David says. Once users are invested in the game, “now we’re in a place where we can get back to the science part.”

Transition: Knowing the Customer and Finding the Right Pathways to Market

Identifying the customers versus the users. An important distinction of educational games, Sarah suggests, is “that the customer is different than the player, and that is not the case with almost every other game.” For other game types, children often ask their parents for the money to buy what they want. But with educational games, the customer is most often teachers or parents, and then the children are assigned to play it. “That is very tricky,” Sarah says, “and one of the reasons why I think educational games groups have struggled so much.”

According to Sarah, educational games fit best when they become part of the whole spectrum of tools that teachers use. “Nobody likes the term ‘captive audience,’” she says, “but when kids have to choose between filling in the blanks on some form that they have to do or playing a game, then then they’re often going to be more excited about the game.” Field Day is “not trying to compete with Fortnite,” Sarah laughs, but with any other classroom work teachers have to assign and children have to do.

Finding distribution partners. Another breakthrough moment for the Field Day team was when they realized that they needed distribution partners as a first step to disseminating their products. This approach is not typical within the research world, David suggests. “So much education research is tapping shoulders, hanging up posters to recruit participants on campus, and expending a large amount of human effort into getting 30 people to show up once to a lab.” Working with distribution partners allows educational game developers to “focus on doing the science and design.”

While Field Day found an early champion in Wisconsin DPI and partnered with PBS Wisconsin to obtain local distribution and resourcing, the team was also able to work out a distribution deal for the Yard Games with BrainPOP, a large media company out of New York that primarily specializes in video production. BrainPOP distributed the Yard Games for free on its website as part of its Game Up program. This educator-focused, multisubject collection of learning games were free to download, aligned with most curricula, and used in 25% of U.S. elementary and middle schools.

However, Field Day had to pivot after BrainPOP temporarily took down their Game Up site. Although they considered it an important first step to partner with a distributor rather than doing their own distribution, they noticed that their web traffic increased significantly after Game Up closed.

So, they began building a new site called Field Day’s Game Vault, where they host a collection of every free, vetted learning game that is playable online. Subscribers to the Vault newsletter also get access to a document called “Keys to the Vault” that outlines what Field Day has learned about how to make games work for teachers. Ultimately, “we want to help curate a list of great learning games for teachers, not just our own,” Sarah says, and “encourage other studios who are making games for schools to adopt these criteria. We want to see more of these games being used where they are needed.”

Now that Field Day has established more of an online presence, David says their next goals are to help develop national infrastructure to distribute games to every classroom in the country. “We are looking to work with teams while they are forming their proposals to help them plan for widespread adoption. We want to be the PBS Kids of grade 3+ learning games.”

Finding the right funding pathway. Another turning point in Field Day’s distribution journey was realizing that the goal was not to make money designing educational games. “Most of the narrative within games is to design some viral game hit that made some game designer $1 billion, and that is just such a fantasy,” Sarah explains. Grasping this point early on, the Field Day team “decided to give everything away for free, which really opened the door to do a lot of this distribution.”

This decision was important for reaching as many children as possible. As David explains, “we really want to be producing stuff that can work for the kids who only have a Chromebook, and who don’t have all those extra lab spaces and whatnot in their schools. And to do that, we’ve got to make sure that we’re separating revenue from teachers and kids. We don’t want their money.” So the team tried to find other sources for funding.

Field Day is almost completely funded either through grants the team writes or by being named in other researchers’ grants (often those from larger centers) as part of a broader impact strategy or dissemination strategy. At times, Field Day may follow the more traditional funding model of designing something for a client. However, David adds, operating primarily via client funding means that Field Day would often be more beholden to clients prioritizing revenue generation, rather than reaching as many children as possible. What motivates Field Day more is finding and partnering with others who have a similar mission.

Sarah acknowledges that this model does not work for everyone. Getting funding up front to help support the design of games, rather than expecting to make money on finished products, meant that the Field Day team would “never see a penny” from their games. But, Sarah says, “we knew for sure they would get played.”

However, Sarah said, “Some groups need their games to make money and need to run it as a business, whereas Field Day is “doing it as a research lab.”

David admits there are “ups and downs” in relying on grant funding and award cycles. A downside is that once they get a grant to work on a project, there is little to no funding to sustain that project long-term because no revenue is being generated from the project. However, short-term funding forces the Field Day team to think about how their games might be maintained long-term.

One way is to design games that have almost zero maintenance. The Field Day team codes most of their games in HTML5, which allows users to access the games online without having to download browser plugins or other software. “If we all left Field Day to take on different jobs,” Sarah adds, “most of these games would be able to continue on their own until HTML5 is retired, which I assume would be decades from now.”

Underresourced schools do not always have access to the most high-tech products, so ensuring long-term and low-maintenance access to games also aligns with Field Day’s commitment to equitable access to its products.

What Is Next for Field Day?

The Field Day team is always looking to make new connections and are looking to build an endowment for games as public media. They are currently on the hunt for a philanthropist or funding partner who believes in their mission and is interested in helping them coordinate new ways to fund the idea of public media creation through games.

For example, David explains, a middle school science curriculum could be entirely covered by a finite number of games. Field Day has already created 12 such games, and the right partner could help them make the rest. Another goal is to have enough funding to host a competition every year to give away a game to a researcher who applies to have their work turned into a learning game. The right partner could philanthropize this work.

The Field Day team is also excited to create a research community and research infrastructure around Open Game Data. “We’re generally trying to increase collaboration by expanding the portfolio of games that share data and researchers who use that data,” David says. “We’re looking for anybody that’s doing research in games or AR, VR, you know, interactive worlds, that want to share research infrastructure.”

Field Day recently received $500,000 in funding to compete for a Large Research Center grant next year for this idea. Currently, Field Day collects “something like 10 million data points a day,” David says. “We have systems that process that data and spit it out online to allow other researchers to work with these data. And we’re building this community around it.”

“We’re trying to fold in the whole country and figure out this network between distributors and researchers and studios. So I’d love to have anybody who is interested in this reach out to us.”

Key Takeaways

• Leverage “magic moments” and strategic partnerships to build momentum to scale. Field Day’s partnerships with education institutions (like Wisconsin DPI), media organizations (like PBS and BrainPOP), and research partners around the country significantly amplified the reach and impact of its learning games.
• Successful scaling may mean pivoting away from more traditional research or lab-based development. After noticing that their games were not finding traction with teachers, the Field Day team pivoted to focus on how to distribute effective products at scale. More actively including their customers (teachers) in the design of their games ultimately led to their first breakthrough with the Yard Games, even though this approach was not what researchers are traditionally taught to prioritize.
• Good art and design play a critical role in large-scale distribution. Well-designed and artistic media plays a vital role in making educational content accessible, enjoyable, and effective for diverse learners. Recognizing the importance of art and storytelling in driving children’s interest to play educational games, Field Day emphasizes creating engaging narratives and immersive experiences to enhance learning.
• Fostering a user-centered approach drives innovation and ensures relevance in evolving educational contexts. Listening to and incorporating feedback from users and customers helped Field Day create games that are practical and easy to integrate into existing curriculum and that meet educational standards. By focusing on low-maintenance, web-based games and establishing partnerships for distribution, Field Day ensures the scalability and long-term sustainability of its educational products. Being responsive to user needs not only improves the immediate usability and adoption of educational products but also contributes to their long-term impact and success in educational environments.
• Different funding models have both advantages and disadvantages. Prioritizing educational impact over profit, Field Day distributes its games for free and seeks funding through grants, ensuring accessibility to a wide audience. While the grant funding model aligns well with mission-driven research and development, it may lack long-term sustainability. Revenue-generating models provide stability but can divert focus from educational impact. Philanthropic funding and partnerships offer opportunities but come with their own sets of challenges related to alignment and sustainability. Ultimately, the choice of funding model depends on one’s mission, growth strategy, and ability to balance financial needs with long-term impact goals.