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[PATV] Tuesday, August 30, 2011 - Extra Credits Season 2, Ep. 15: Gamifying Education
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
This week, we offer some general examples for ways to improve education using game design techniques. Also, here's that link I promised: <a href="http://www.deathball.net/notpron/">http://www.deathball.net/notpron/</a>
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I have taken three classes that followed the "you start with 0 points and work your way up, at the end of the term what level you're at equates to a grade," and none of them worked well for me.
The first two were a shop class and a history class, but had a very similar problem, one my wife refers to as the "Lucky Charms" problem, where you eat all the marshmallows first and then are left with the cereal which you throw out. Similarly, I started with the parts of the course I was interested in, worked my way up to a C or B, and then lost interest in the rest of the assignments because their difficulty for me specifically was harder than I wanted to work to get a higher grade. And I was an A student otherwise. Students used to getting Cs and Ds gave up, satisfied with their grades and uninterested in doing further assignments much earlier. I think the real problem was that both teachers had a syllabus that they were required to teach, so they couldn't very well say that doing anything less than almost all the work in the course could be worth an A or they might be accused of not fulfilling the requirements of the course. In game terms, getting an A in the course equated to unlocking all the achievements in a game, and only people obsessed enough to do that kind of thing ever got As in those courses. More reasonably, getting a A in a course should equate to playing a game all the way through and maybe unlocking a few extra achievements, at least in my opinion.
The third class had the opposite problem. It was a college computer science course on a very wide topic. We were basically given a giant playground and told to 'go play,' and then at the end we were given a giant test about everything on the playground that we only had to complete 25% of to get an A. This worked for some people, but a number of us just sorta stood there trying to figure out what the heck to do first for most of the semester and ended up doing very little. We were given too large a pool of choices to make and it overwhelmed us. Plus the playground was large enough and there were few enough of us that if you didn't choose a popular swingset to play on, you could find yourself on your own with no support if you got stuck, and having wasted a large portion of the semester on something that might comprise only 5% of the test. It was like playing a guild-based MMO without any guilds. Without experienced groups of people who have collectively reverse-engineered the course to help you choose what to do first you spend a lot of your time dabbling on the edge learning stuff that proves to be completely not useful.
So I guess my advice is, scope is extremely important if you're using this model for gamifying your classes, much moreso than with traditional education. If you don't finish your syllabus in a traditional class all your students are in the same boat, and you can grade accordingly. But if you've already set up your leveling scheme and your students take forever to get to the first level, or lose interest after the third, you have a big problem on your hands. Ideally you want your scope to be broad enough that there are multiple paths to an A for students with different strengths, but not so broad that students have no clue where to begin, unless you want to rely on your students forming guilds and reverse-engineering your course.
In both of your scenarios, I think some level-based incentives (or the class-wide achievements they mentioned in the video), if done correctly, would have given students the motivation they needed to complete all the assignments and get higher grades, as well as giving them a reason to function as a whole instead of forming small groups and leaving others to feel excluded. It's good to see teachers applying these ideas to their classrooms, but they have to be implemented in the right way. Trial and error was a big part of the evolution of game design, and it may have to be used in a classroom setting as well.
I am developing my class on Moodle and would be interested in hearing from anyone who has tried Gamification in combination with Moodle or Blackboard or similar delivery platform.
Mad City Mystery, River City, and Environmental Detectives (MIT Education Arcade) are three augmented reality games that have a lot of success. I highly recommend checking these out and here are research papers for each one:
http://kevinforgard.supa.wikispaces.net/file/view/Squire-Jan_MadCityMystery.pdf
http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject/documents/KetelhutMUVESituated.pdf
http://education.mit.edu/papers/latest/AR - ETRD.pdf
I also highly recommend checking out Quest Atlantis, The Pandora Project, and Whyville as excellent collaborative games that facilitate scientific inquiry. If you have time to read a book, Kurt Squire's Games and Learning is fantastic and he discusses his use of Civilization in the classroom and Supercharged.
Happy gaming!
They don't use any gaming per-se, but they do have a grading/reward system - points, badges, progress bars - all used to motivate the student to do more (watch more lectures, solve more excercises, etc).
http://www.khanacademy.org/
There's also a TED talk by Salman Khan himself - a good watch for anyone interested in innovative education.
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
Battle of Sekigahara: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sekigahara
Tokugawa Ieyasu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Ieyasu
Butterfly (there's a picture of a butterfly crest at the bottom of the article in the section labeled "Tokugawa Ieyasu as a person): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly
Monarch Butterfly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly
And beat it I did!
Practical:
Aldrich, C. (2009). Learning online with games, simulations, and virtual worlds?: strategies for online instruction (1st ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.\
Gray, D., Brown, S., & Macanufo, J. (2010). Gamestorming?: a playbook for innovators, rulebreakers, and changemakers. Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly.
Iverson, K. (2005). E-learning games?: interactive learning strategies for digital delivery. Upper Saddle River N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
Kapp, K. (2007). Gadgets, games, and gizmos for learning?: tools and techniques for transferring know-how from boomers to gamers. San Francisco CA: John Wiley.
Kapp, K. M. (2012). The gamification of learning and instruction: game-based methods and strategies for training and education. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Game-Based Learning. McGraw-Hill.
Sheldon, L. (2012). The multiplayer classroom: designing coursework as a game. Austrailia?; Boston, Mass: Course Technology/Cengage Learning.
Squire, K. (2011). Video games and learning: teaching and participatory culture in the digital age. New York: Teachers College Press.
Theorietical / heavier reading:
Gee, J. P. (2007). Good video games + good learning: collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy. New York: P. Lang.
Gee, J. P. (2013). The anti-education era: creating smarter students through digital learning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Norman, K. L. (2008). Cyberpsychology: an introduction to human-computer interaction. Cambridge?; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1–6.
Sheridan, K., & Clark, K. (2010). Designing game design studios: Strategies to sustain intrinsic motivation.
Clark, K. & Sheridan, K. (2010). Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 19(2), 125-145. Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/33097.
West, D. (2012). How Blogs, Social Media, and Video Games Improve Education. Brookings Institution. Retrieved from http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2012/0424_education_technology_west/0424_edu_media_west.pdf
Williamson, B. (2008). Games and Learning Interim Report: Survey of existing research and criticism. Futurelab.
Conferences / Web:
http://www.fas.org/gamesummit/
http://gamesineducation.org/
http://glsconference.org/
I have more, I'm sure, and am interested in any sources that others find on the topic. I have created a robust game design for the Survey of Art History that I intent to implement with a really cool excel-based tracking system that awards badges, levels, and tracks skills based on course outcomes. If you have anything you want to share or are willing to brainstorm, hit me up: joshyavelberg@gmail.com
The best format for learning, in my opinion, would be to lecture, have guided practice, independent practice then be tested and retest until everyone understands. It might be a good idea to throw out the ability to fail altogether. Make it so that a person simply completes the class or he/she doesn't complete a class. Make it so that a person must pass all the tests to get any credit for it, but they can attempt the tests as many times as needed. Just like how boss fights can be attempted over and over until the proper method of defeating him is used. If there were no grades, yes, total points wouldn't matter but that's a good thing.
Points should not determine your final grade just as the level of your character in a game doesn't determine if you have beaten the final boss. Points show that you are more likely to succeed when it comes to passing a test, but they don't guarantee it. Making this change is the best change to the structure of a class that could be made.
Currently we have a system similar to Super Mario Land 2: The six golden coins except worse. The school as it stand now, in particular to college, is that a person has to go for 8-16 weeks, respectively, without serious failures otherwise they have to retake the entire class for it to count for anything, and most likely, it wasn't every aspect of the class that tripped them up, but specific parts of it. Super Mario Land could be completed in a much shorter time than a college class, and it could be completed at a person's own pace unlike a college class. In it death, losing all lives, meant all the bosses had to be beaten again which is sort of like having to take a class over again. It's not necessary to make a person beat the first boss that super easy every time they can't beat the super hard levels.
This would also motivate people to study and do research. I've spent tons of time researching how to beat or complete certain aspects of games. If I was allowed to retake a test and I keep failing it, I'd spend a bunch of time studying what I got wrong.
This is exactly what many good games do. Super Mario RPG for example. First it starts with what you know Mario saving Peach from Bowser, then it sets the stage for the new adventure. It tells the objective of the whole game from the beginning, defeat the giant sword and get the seven stars. After that it has toad give you some instructions on how to play. Directly after giving instructions the game helps you apply them with a guided practice. So we have been told what to do and to make sure we understood, we have been hand guided through the process, and they make this part of the game optional for those who already knew, which is the beauty of it. After this the player has a chance to practice their new battle skills on enemies without any assistance from the game. So, the player gets to battle some enemies earn experience which compares to class/homework and points. Then the boss fight comes, tests, and it's more difficult as it requires the player to have LEARNED how to play the game good enough to beat it, but doesn't it just seem silly if a game forced you to continue even if you didn't beat the boss, and if you failed to beat enough bosses at the end you didn't beat the game? What the point of having boss fights if regardless of your performance you progress? It seems silly to me, but this is actually how classes operate.
If you managed to read all of this you are awesome and I thank you for hearing me out.
Love style and that you worked in indirectly ingenious cluster of Grendels.
Japanese Edo Print of Battle of Sekigahara -> Japanese Hokasai print of cat (representing three of you) watching a butterfly (http://goo.gl/oY3QI) -> Monarch. Please fill key frames, if animation was too jumpy. I am new at this particular game.
I think Wolfmurphy's link skips a few steps, one painting does not necessarily link to another one, and if it does we skip all of the framing information that needs to be learned to make that painting informative within a context. Even in my link replacing Japan with "Japanese Artistry" will get one to story-telling and myth as well as any other topic, but also putting a framework for understanding the links of causation. I'm just finishing a semester abroad in Japan. The Butterlies here are GIANTS, and have beautiful colorizations.
1) The gamified AR reading system is horrible, because it is all publisher driven. Publishers who want to sell a new book will make sure their book gets a rating and a test so children can get points for their book. Old books whose copyrights have run out have no publishers shepherding them through this process (like old collections of fairytales) , and you get no credit for all the other kinds of reading you do in real life. What if you like newspapers or periodicals? What about reading product manuals, subtitles on foreign films, whatever? This is not the kind of learning that I want my children to be doing.
2) The pianos were nice, but then my son already had some piano/music skills, so he had nothing to do during the class. He would just be told to play on his own. Boredom, just like in traditional class.
3) Clicky tools, kind of neat, but it didn't fundamentally change the classroom. Teachers might notice if you tune out, but they can't make you pay attention.
How you design a rewards system in a classroom or grades... that is all fine to come up with new ways, but inevitably you are creating a system of external motivators. The only way to truly access internal motivation is to make it all optional. Learning should be something that people access because they want to, not because they will be given a grade, a progress report, or punished for not being there. Stuffing education into a human brain is the same as force feeding someone. They just outlawed fois gras in California, because they found the force feeding of geese inhumane. If we feel this badly for geese, how can we continue to do this to our children? We are every day force feeding them "education", and it's no wonder they come out with no motivation, no agency, no real desire or taste to keep eating, because their throats hurt from having tubes shoved down there. (Okay, brains and facts, but you get the idea.)
As you mentioned in anther episode, what makes a game a game is that you have the choice to pick it up or put it down. That's what makes it fun when you choose to pick it up, and the only real agency you have. The rest is what you call "skinner box" tactics, and why do I want our children trained to respond more to those? I would rather train our children to know them for what they are, systems of control. The rest is an illusion of agency, because games limit what choices you can make just as well as provide them. So what we really need are schools that allow you to make limitless choices in what you want to learn, what you want to get credit for, what you want to be doing right now. Maybe you don't want to spend an hour doing math right now, but you would like to take a nap or make some lunch? YES, you should be able to take care of your body first if that's what's more motivating for you right now.
No matter how wonderful the game, if you are a play tester and you are required to play this game for the external reward of making a living, you will get sick of this game. You will start to know that this is work. Everyone has their favorite genres/game types, and if told that they have to master games in genres that they hate, they will find that appalling and be just as unmotivated as they get in traditional school being told to study subjects that they hate. So no amount of "gamification" in terms of rewards and punishments will make a difference, if the child doesn't want to study something.
So I am going to predict that students will continue complaining about fancy game systems of grading or getting through a course, as they do about a lot of electronic courses being offered in colleges right now. Until you have a choice to decide what you want to learn, who you want to learn from, when you learn it, what methods you will use to learn it, etc. The more open and free the learning, the better it will take place. This is unschooling, and if you haven't heard of this movement, you can find more information about it by looking up "unschooling", "John Holt", or "John Taylor Gatto" for a start.
Schools can become unschooled if we simply make them optional resources (like public libraries) and not compulsory for our children. If we get rid of compulsory committee driven curriculum, school would be useful again. The library would be a lot less fun, if every time I went there, they told me the exact book I would be allowed to check out, because this is what I need to read at my "level", and I would have to earn points by reading each book in turn before I could "unlock" the next book... That is what's wrong with our school system. Lack of choice and agency, and it's way beyond implementing a different achievement system.