What Can Educators Learn from “Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom”?

So there I was, stranded at the bottom of a pit in the depths.

Shadows all around me, puddles of glowing purple gloom everywhere, the burbles of monsters slowly approaching…

No time to climb out – let’s build a hover bike!

And before you know it, I was zooming up and outta there!

Until I ran out of battery and went careening back to the ground. But I was out of the pit!

“The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” is a really great game – even for a nearly 50-year-old public school teacher like me.

As classes dwindled down in June and the summer approached, I noticed some of my students who had finished their work bringing the game in on their portable Nintendo Switch consoles.

Like me, they were enthralled by the level of choice the newly released game presents.

Rarely is there one answer to a problem.

The previous Zelda game in the series, “Breath of the Wild” (2017), threw the doors wide by giving players an open world to explore. No longer did you have to go down a linear path of which dungeons to complete in which order to defeat the bad guy. You could go in whatever direction you wanted, doing almost anything in whatever order you pleased.

The new game takes that even further. “Tears of the Kingdom” gives you three open worlds to explore and offers you the ability to build a wide range of contraptions to create your own solutions to problems.

For example, when I was stuck in that pit, I could have tried to climb out, I could have stood my ground, or I could have built almost anything imaginable that might help.

It’s that kind of increased choice that makes this game special and of particular interest to educators.

After all, this is something many of our students enjoy doing in their free time. The game sold 10 million copies in its first three days, becoming the fastest selling Nintendo game in history. That’s roughly $700 million and growing.

This doesn’t mean edtech companies should rush in to take over. Teachers and public schools are still the best way to educate students.

But the way I see it, if teachers can make learning more intrinsic and exciting, it’s a plus. These are my three major takeaways from the experience:

1) Power of the Sandbox

There are many types of video games.

Some are focused on action – such as shooting down the most enemies. Some focus more on puzzles to solve. Yet others are focused on building things like farms or homes or even civilizations.

Sandbox games are more self-directed. The idea is to create a space where gamers can do pretty much whatever they want. There’s no imposed objective. You’re given simple tools that you can easily see how to manipulate and you’re left to decide how to use them.

It’s based on the metaphor of leaving small children in a sandbox and just letting them play.

The most popular model is the game Minecraft. In it, players are thrust into a world made entirely of blocks that can be combined and recombined to build anything they want. It’s almost like a virtual world of LEGO bricks.

Players build structures like dream homes or space ships. Some tell stories. Some recreate real or imagined structures like the Eiffel Tower or the Death Star from “Star Wars.”

While there are also dungeons you can fight through to get more materials for your creations, the main emphasis seems to be on building.

Minecraft, in itself, is a very popular game and has been so since 2011.

However, “Tears of the Kingdom” takes this a step further by making the sandbox a tool in a world with a specific objective.

Like most Zelda games, you play as a character, Link, who has to save the princess, Zelda, and the kingdom of Hyrule from a bad guy, Gannondorf. The difference is that one of your tools to do that in this game is an ability to combine certain items together into structures.

These aren’t just blocks. They can be as complex as fans or lasers.

You can try to build a flying machine, but you have to make sure the fans or rockets or whether you’re using to propel them are pointing exactly where you want them, don’t consume too much battery, etc.

It takes design, testing, a knowledge of basic physics, etc.

For example, one of my first attempts at a plane kept flipping over. The reason – my fans were placed in opposite directions so that the lift given by one was counteracted by the other. Another device only went straight up. The reason – rockets only provide lift in one direction and quickly give out.

Players can easily get lost in building things. Sometimes that can seem way more interesting than the overall objective of beating the bad guy and winning the game.

However, there are certain game objectives that help you become a better builder – give you longer battery life, etc. So the game rewards you for progressing along each route – the story objective and the sandbox.

It’s a fascinating game loop that may keep this adventure fresh with replayability long after the main objective is complete.

So how does that impact education?

We know students like self-directed learning. If they are at all interested in the subject, giving them the power of following their natural curiosity can lead to amazing results.

This is often used in STEM lessons, where kids are given an objective and various tools and told to try to figure out how to achieve that objective. Who can build the highest tower that won’t fall over? Who can build the fastest race car on this track? Who can build a boat out of cardboard and duct tape that will float longest in a swimming pool? Etc.

However, it can also be done in other disciplines. You might study how the writer Langston Hughes communicates his message in a poem like “Mother to Son” and then ask students to do the same kind of thing in their own poem. You might read several stories and poems by a single author like Edgar Allan Poe and then ask students to find similarities between the author’s work and life.

In each instance, it’s not about just giving students tools and leaving them alone to discover what to do with them. It’s up to the teacher to provide a goal or a direction in which to go. The students take it from there.

The freedom of the sandbox by itself can be thrilling to some students in certain disciplines. But it can also be terrifying. Both aspects are necessary to reach the most students. When learning can be both intrinsic but directed, that’s when students get the greatest results.

We often pretend that students can do just as well without instruction – and there can be marvelous gains by some students in this way. However, teachers are there for a reason. We know the curriculum and many avenues to understanding it. We can point students many ways to understanding that they might not discover on their own.

Games like “Tears of the Kingdom” show the importance of both choice and direction.

2) Importance of a Learning Community

One of the things I was surprised about the most in “Breath of the Wild” and this new Zelda game is the way each created an online gaming community.

In particular with “Tears”, I found several YouTubers who focused on the game and made videos about nearly every aspect of it.

There were walk-throughs of various parts of the game: how to find different armor, defeat bosses and mini-bosses, build the best things, etc. However, there were also videos focused just on individual’s personal experiences with the game and even conjectures on the lore.

It is unclear how some of the elements from the first game impact the second that the developers kept intentionally vague. The community of players stepped in to fill in these gaps with theories that would put the best literary analysis to shame.

For example, the first game was full of Sheika Shrines. In the second game, the shrines were gone from most of the same locations. Instead there were new Zonai shrines in disparate locations. Why the discrepancy? There seems to be a growing consensus that the Sheika shrines were either dismantled by the Hyrulians and/or destroyed by Gannondorf when he reawakened to begin the current upheaval.

All of this really enhances the gaming experience. Not only do you feel less isolated, but you feel validated. You’re part of the act of making meaning out of the whole experience – listening to others, adding to the conversation, etc.

For example, there are certain enemies that just scared the heck out of me – chief among them were Gloom Hands. These are puddles of slime that come out of nowhere and shoot hands out at your character that can squeeze you to death in seconds.

Then I saw several videos where YouTubers explained how Gloom Hands freaked them out, too, (some complete with funny videos of them screaming when being ambushed by these creatures) and how to deal with them.

By watching these videos, I got to be much better at the game than I would have been otherwise. Some vloggers were so calm and reassuring when they said these sorts of creatures were easy to deal with and nothing to panic over that I felt way more confident. Moreover, if I did come across something that gave me trouble, I knew where to turn for help and guidance.

How important this is in the classroom!

Teachers often fill this role, but if we can create a community in the classroom, itself, that is even better. When students can discuss assignments and help each other through obstacles, that is so much better than the teacher being the only person in a position to help.

I try to foster as much discussion as possible in my classes through Socratic Seminars and informal groups. However, if you can get small group work to function while still being focused and productive, you can increase this aspect, too.

It’s all about the classroom you can create. You need shared values, empathy and students who understand how to best interact with each other. It’s easier said than done but a worthy goal for sure.

3) The Danger of Outside Assessment

This may be the most overlooked lesson from games to the classroom.

One of the biggest differences between the gaming and school experience is whether someone is looking over your shoulder or not.

In a video game, the player decides what he or she wants to get out of the experience. Do you want to simply beat the game? Or do you want to 100% it – achieve every goal the programmers put into it.

How long you take and how much you complete is up to you.

Sometimes the gaming community can contribute to this by giving opinions about which goals are worthy of completion, etc. However, whether you have achieved everything you want and the ultimate assessment of such things are really up to the individual.

Things are different in class.

On one level, students are assessed by their teachers. They grade assignments, give tests, etc. However, this is similar to the game, itself. When you fight Gannondorf, the game tells you whether you’ve beaten him and sometimes how well this is accomplished.

For example, there are a few different endings to the game that you can get depending on how well (or completely) you achieved certain objectives.

I think that’s similar to what the classroom teacher does. It’s part of the experience taken in context and (hopefully) well understood by the student.

The difference comes from forces outside the classroom.

Students don’t just achieve grades. They are also subject to standardized tests. These are assessments created out of context of the classroom, graded by hired hands, that are used to determine how well the curriculum has been learned.

They are artificial, biased and politically motivated.

Imagine if after playing a video game someone from the government had to come in and give you a score. Imagine if they made you play another (different) game to determine how well you did on this one. Maybe you feel like you aced “Tears of the Kingdom” but they said you didn’t do so well on “MarioKart” and thus failed the experience.

Outside assessment can kill intrinsic learning. It can make everything extrinsic – will this be on the test? What do I need to pass the test? Etc.

It would poison the video game experience as it poisons the classroom one.

We only allow it because of strange outdated ideas about learning and psychology. We pretend it’s all behaviorism – students given this stimuli should produce this response. We know that’s not how the human mind works, but politics and capitalism refuse to let us move beyond it.

Someone is making money off of this and we can’t disrupt that with real reform.

Perhaps if we looked more closely at how things function in the world of video games, we’d have a better idea of how to change things for the better in the classroom.

To better understand learning, we should look to the whole child – and the whole child’s experience outside of school.

This includes Zelda, Gannondorf and Link.

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