About a month ago we did an episode on Gamification.
In that episode, you may recall that I invited
people working in certain fields (including education)
to write to us if they wanted to hear James's ideas
for how to apply gamification to their work in greater detail.
And indeed they did.
Lots of teachers watching this show, apparently.
The response was overwhelming.
Teachers wrote in from all over the world
In fact so many of you wrote in that we haven't
yet even been able to answer all their emails
(for which I apologize)
Because the response was so huge and it will be a while
before we can finish replying to all of you,
we decided to just go ahead and do an episode on the topic
of gamifying education.
There are flaws in the way we teach today,
systemic flaws which cover every subject and every age.
Today we'll be looking at just a few of those flaws
and how gamification might solve them
in hopes that it sparks a broader discussion about how we can make education,
the foundation of our future
more engaging.
Our first topic: Grading
Right now we're using a grading system that is essentially de-motivational
and sets up a reinforcing feedback loop for failure.
Today's students first walk into a classroom or approach new assignments
thinking of themselves as having an A+
(at least subconsciously)
and from there, with every mistake,
there's nowhere to go but down.
We need to re-contextualize grading.
In games, we've learnt that progress encourages progress
and the human desire for efficiency is a far stronger motivator
than the fear of falling further from one's goal.
To this end, if you simply make all assignments worth points
(let's call them "EXP" for a lark)
have all students start at zero EXP
and always gain points as they go continuously progressing towards
clear and tangible 'levels' with their own benefits)
each assignment and each test feels
rewarding rather than disheartening...
it's more fun to gain stuff than to lose it.
Additionally, this methodology never leaves a student
at a point where they feel like they should just give up.
The best part is that you don't even have to change anything
about the way you already grade the class to do this
You'd still have the same total number of possible points the class was worth
and divide them in the same manner that we normally divvy up letter grades.
All you're doing is counting upwards instead of down
and corresponding the letter grades to "levels" as you go.
Lee Sheldon did a basic version of this for his class at Indiana University
and found it to be highly effective.
The only thing I felt that he could have done more was to give the kids "skills" as they leveled.
"If one student gets to 25,000 EXP
the whole class gets a free bonus 100 EXP"
or "If five students get to 15,000 EXP the whole class get a bonus 150 points
(or maybe a field trip or something, whatever you prefer)."
With this sort of reward system, you encourage the whole class
to be rooting for one another
and you encourage the best students to help out their classmates.
You encourage your students to function with camaraderie and as a team.
The best kids can't get the maximum possible score unless they can help their peers pull up their grades.
And at the same time, the kids who are struggling,
rather than resenting their classmates who are doing well,
are cheering them on, because other kids succeeding
is going to help their own grade.
Next let's talk about Agency.
One of the biggest hurdles to overcome in education
is dealing with kids who have no sense of agency
over their lives.
What do we mean by students having a sense agency?
It's simply the idea that they feel like they control their own destiny
that their choices matter.
A lack of agency can manifest itself in numerous ways...
students feeling like they "don't have an option to go to college",
the perception that "pregnancy is something that just happens"
or students feeling like they simply have no power over the life path
and choices that their parents make for them.
Without agency, it's almost impossible
to be motivated.
Rather than making decisions for the future,
people without a sense of agency simply stumble through life day to day without any long term goals.
But a sense of agency isn't a binary thing,
it's a scale; the more agency you feel over your life,
the better you tend to do and the more ambitious goals you tend
to be willing to set for yourself
(surprisingly I once read a study saying that people who had
a high sense of agency
were actually more resilient when external forces
beyond their control messed up their plans too.
Rather than having the expected ego shattering realization
that they didn't have any control,
people with a high sense of agency just started off towards their goals again,
undeterred,
because that was the way to control their destinies).
So how do we impart agency?
Games.
Almost any game can help hammer home the idea that you control the future.
In a game the cycle between choice and result
is generally much shorter than that in life and much more clearly indicated.
In a game the player tries something, fails,
tries something new
and keeps making new decisions until they succeed.
Games teach us that different choices have different outcomes,
and we control the choices we make.
James has spent some time working with inner city kids as well as
some high schoolers in suburban Pittsburgh
testing this idea,
attempting to draw a connection between the control the kids
had in the game they played
and the control they had in their own lives.
I don't want to claim expertise here, because this was only a brief experiment
in an area that needs to be thoroughly tested,
but this early test did show a clear impact on a least a portion of the student body,
and I whole heartedly believe further research will prove this connection.
James conducted his tests using Mario,
but games could easily be created for any subject that helped reinforce the idea that life
isn't something that just happens to you,
while at the same time encouraging other skills.
Finally, let's talk a bit about External Motivators.
I don't want to speak for everybody, but at least here in the US,
there aren't enough teachers and there isn't enough time in the school day
to teach everything that children need to know.
We need kids to remain engaged and continue to learn voluntarily
once they leave the classroom.
In the long run there are a lot of ways we can use games to do this,
but for now I'll just assume that we're looking for a solution
that's implementable right away and has a low to zero cost...
Now if you're really ambitious and willing to put in the time,
a home made Alternate Reality Game (or ARG)
is the way to go for students in middle school or up
(look up I <3 Bees or Year Zero to see the sort of thing I'm talking about).
Use the information that you want them to learn
as the pieces that unlock the next section of the game
- in their search for this information they're bound to stumble on
and learn about lots of other tangentially related topics.
To do this well you MUST integrate it into the classroom
and get everyone excited about progressing.
The key here is to create mystery
and make schooling more magical and wonderful by not really being schooling,
but being part of something much larger.
You can even pretend to not know about it
or be on their side by trying to work out a few specific parts of the puzzle yourself
(yeah, your students will know,
but you don't want to shatter the fantasy of this other world).
ARGs are about communal solutions and information scouring;
your students might even be holding after school ARG parties to go searching
for information if you do it right.
On a practical side of things,
you should make sure that your unlocks are scattered
across the board subject-wise,
you don't want the same couple kids figuring out the answers every time.
You want the kid who is good at sports to be the star of the class one week,
then the kid who is good at history the week after.
This will get them sharing ideas and communicating.
The very best problems are cross disciplinary ones that force the solvers to know
about two very disparate fields.
The tricky part when giving these problems is that you want to make sure
that when a student only figures out part of the answer,
they still know they're on the right track.
Obviously, creating something like this involves
a pretty big initial time investment,
but really it's not substantially higher than creating and grading a few good tests,
especially if you already know some basic HTML.
Still, not everyone has that kind of time,
so if you're looking for something a little more simple,
you can always try what I call the "Plot Your Route" game.
In this game you choose two arbitrary but interesting topics,
let's say "Sekigahara" and "monarch butterflies",
and have students come back the next day with the series of links that got them from one to the other.
It's easiest to do this with Wikipedia, but the game still works with most any set of websites.
Any student who does the exercise gets some EXP
(let's assume you're using the grading system we talked about)
but the 'winner' is the student who can make the connection
in the fewest number of links,
and they get some additional bonus
(maybe their homework that day is worth an additional 10% xp
or they get a reward of 50 extra points
or they get to choose a question on the next quiz that everyone in the class
will get full credit for automatically).
If your class is responsible, you can even let them choose the topics,
two different students choosing a random topic each day.
This exercise encourages curiosity,
gets students to comb through information that they might otherwise
not have ever examined,
and, by incentivizing the shortest path,
you have a reason for students to go back over the information
and explore new directions that that information could branch to.
Most importantly though,
this exercise trains them in understanding the connections between information.
It gets them to think about how ideas are linked.
In the 21st century this will be vital skill for any adult
and one that will help them contextualize their education and understand
the importance of subjects that they might not immediately be interested in.
And, if you want to make sure they're not just scanning for links,
simply have them write a sentence between each link explaining the connection.
Man, are we ever out of time.
This rabbit hole goes deep. But I hope those suggestions have helped
catalyze some ideas of your own.
And if so, share it in the comments!
It'd be pretty awesome if this week's comments thread just turned into a giant education improvement think tank.
Oh, and...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sekigahara
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly
Beat that. See ya next week!
See ya next week!
Subtitles by X-Raym extremraym.com