Translator: Proma Banerjee Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
What do students dream of?
Students have three dreams.
The first is they want to change the world.
The second is that to change the world,
they first need to understand who they are.
And then the third is much more practical,
they'd really like to get a job.
That brings us back to a question,
what do recruiters and businesses want?
Studies and experience evaluation
tell us that they look for three things
in students' profiles when they recruit them.
They want them to have knowledge,
and master it,
but they also want the applicants to have skills,
and be capable of making things.
And then, for some time,
they ask us, teachers,
to train our students with a certain number of social skills.
Social skills or behaviors.
For example, showing empathy;
for example, respecting your collaborator;
for example, having a generous attitude.
It's kind of like peace on Earth,
I think that we pretty much all agree on that.
But at the same time, that's what our daily life is sometimes about.
And when you are teaching in a lecture hall,
a bit like now,
and you have a slightly paradoxical injunction, which is:
"Today I will train you to ethics."
For the teacher, that's a real challenge.
because the teacher has dreams too.
A teacher's first dream
is to motivate students
and a teacher wants the students to be happy to be here,
and if possible, that they come back.
Teachers want them to learn something.
They want that, theoretically, after the class, they are better
and then if possible, ideally,
that they are capable of using
what they have learnt, in their professional
and personal situations,
However, there is a gap between what we can learn in class,
and what we are capable of putting to use.
One way to noticeably reduce
the gap in behaviors,
is to work with role playing,
which may be to work in protected environments.
So we need to find other ways of experimenting.
I think I have identified
the missing link between the student's and the teacher's dream.
This is Garrelle.
Garrelle is a Parthenaise cow.
She lives in a sort of specific world,
which is a "serious game,"
and I adopted it during my research,
or more specifically, at the end of my thesis,
because like all abandoned PhD students in their labs,
during the month of August, we go on with our various activities.
Garrelle lives in a world called "Vacheland" ("Cowland").
It's a serious game which was produced
by the Council of Poitou-Charentes,
once the Mad Cow disease crisis was over,
the region, which has a strong beef industry,
wondered how it could rehabilitate the industry's image.
And so they looked for a way to motivate people
to address this issue.
So they created a game, saying: "well, here,
let's make
a communication plan about it for the agricultural trade fair.
The thing is that after 6 months,
there were still 500,000 of us and we still there.
We were 500,000 French players
going to harvest the fields, buy tractors,
find out from the forums if it was preferable
to put such and such type of protection against wild boar attacks,
well, we were still there.
As for me, I started to ask myself,
why we were still there,
since August was over.
And, in fact, I personally looked into it
as a researcher, saying:
well, who are these people,
and what do they look for in this?
Because in fact there aren't
just researchers lacking inspiration there,
there are not just marginalised male teenagers,
and in fact there are people of all socio-professional categories,
of all ages, of both genders,
and these people come to look for several things.
They come to look for competition,
they come to look for a personal challenge,
they come to do something different,
to have a strange moment,
they come to look for a community
and exchange about practices.
And I asked myself how we could mobilize
all of this energy, all of this ability that the game deploys,
so that people treat rather specific information
such as anti wild boar attacks for the fields
in situations of training.
And so I started, because as you know,
students are the second population in the world
that is being studied after white mice,
so I started with my own students, in class,
thinking, "I will teach serious games
and I will use them to train students
to 'behaviors and skills.' "
So I started to take certain games,
and use them in class, etc.
What does a serious game allow us to do?
It's a game that is built with a serious intention,
that is to say, at the end of this game,
we should have acquired skills
that we can use in the situation in a specific behavior,
but this has been thought of in a serious manner.
So, for example, in class,
with undergraduate students,
we used games to adapting oneself to the needs of a client.
Every client has specific needs.
So how can I detect
what they want from their behavior?
And how can I adapt to it?
So, as a teacher, that's happiness.
That's happiness because, all of a sudden, you have a lecture hall
which strangely is ... a lecture hall or classrooms,
which strangely become focused, interested, etc.,
and they start to spend hours
playing, training, going back to it and doing it again.
Students are thrilled.
We set up experiment protocols,
we see that their theoretical level has gone up,
we see that their selling technique has improved,
and moreover, they are more easily recruited during their internship.
In the end, that's happiness.
Yes, it's happiness except that as a teacher, you come to doubt:
what am I here for?
Since, in the end, at that point, my big ability
is to distribute the wifi codes, the login codes,
and to make sure that the wifi is working.
So, after a while, I thought,
the games, the way they are designed,
the scenarios,
couldn't I make something
similar myself?
Because I have knowledge too,
I've spent time doing some research,
I could perhaps share it.
And so I started a project.
I thought, I'm going to make a game, a fantastic game,
a game that will be big, beautiful, and will explain to my students
how to get my models across.
I took an authoring tool,
that's a tool that allows you to design
your own games.
So, I should specify at this stage
that I have no IT skills whatsoever.
That is, for example, in the institution, I alone
justify the need for an IT job.
So I started to experiment with devices.
After a few weeks, months,
I was closer to this.
I had lowered my ambitions,
but the fact is that I had come up with a game anyway,
let's say 15 minutes long or so, a role play of
two avatars around one issue, which was taking place in a field,
that could be taught in the institution,
where finally, as a teacher,
I would have something to add.
So I was legit again, I could contextualise,
and explain why it was interesting, etc.
Fantastic.
Contrary to what I thought,
the home-made side of it didn't put students off,
on the contrary, they were... how shall I put it... moved.
(Laughter)
But it was made for them,
by their teacher, with a true expertise behind it.
I must to specify that the game had a certain number of bugs.
More precisely, one of the bugs
is for example, in the two characters
who argue at a point in time
because they have to manage a crisis situation,
but I couldn't get them
to argue standing up.
So every time they were about to argue,
one would go and sit down
and from there would start to harangue the other.
It seemed a bit strange,
but, in context, it was ok.
And then, one day, a student
who was feeling sorry for the character,
told me: "Say, do you want me to have a look at it?"
Ok, trustingly, I gave him the codes.
He logged in.
The next day, everything worked marvelously,
meaning that the character could stand upright
while angry without any problem. Good...
The second thing he told me,
"While I was at it, because there was a situation
which I felt was not evoked,
I added a scenario."
And in fact that was a real shock.
Meaning that, all of a sudden, I realized two things.
The firstone, I knew that already,
is that their technological skills
are largely better than mine.
The second is that they have something to say.
And that's in fact, from the start,
every time that I consider the tool or the media, etc.,
I consider it in a top to bottom way
to pass on all my knowledge, my skills, my expertise, etc.
And now, all of a sudden,
I think we need to revisit things differently
So stemming from this principle,
the principle of this game, the Foldit game,
and this is a molecule
for all those who like to fold molecules in the evening.
You can join all the Foldit players on this online game and fold.
There are several dozens of thousands of people
who fold in the evening, in the morning, during the day...
Indeed, the fact is that this game,
which "gamifies" a complex scientific problem,
has allowed to make a major scientific discovery.
So much so that today the Foldit players
are considered co-authors of scientific publications,
for example in Nature Magazine.
So the game enables to manage knowledge and create it.
As a result, coming back to my favorite white mice
and to my students,
since it was the essay period,
and since all the teachers follow
a certain number of students in their essays,
I took the opportunity of having a student who volunteered,
so Mathieu, not to mention his name,
Mathieu, I was supervising him on a rather complex essay:
the innovation and development strategies, in the offer/product service
of nanotechnology companies in of the Grenoble area...
He was working on this subject:
his goal was on the one hand to get his diploma,
but at the same time to produce something interesting.
So, like any student, he was working on modeling his thoughts
through theories, through cases, etc.
So that can correspond to his model of thought
of how a trajectory of innovation occurs in this offer.
What Mathieu's work could have become is exactly that,
an oral, a reading by a certain number of people.
I'd like to specify that an essay is read between
on average by 4 people: the student who writes it,
the spell checker in Word,
the student's mother, who does not trust
Word's spell checker,
(Laughter)
and the jury who are commissioned for it.
And then, it will, according to the periods planned by the accreditations
get lost in the essay graveyard.
All this knowledge, this expertise, stocked up but little used.
What did Mathieu do? Instead of doing that,
Mathieu modeled all his knowledge in the form of a game.
Mathieu completed a game,
which is not virtual, but a board game,
in innovation management, where all these concepts that he built
were gamified, where he had to to explain his theoretical model
create rules,
where he had to lay out concepts and define them to create cards,
to create a whole principle, he created instructions.
Today Mathieu's work is a work that can be mobilised,
and by the way his oral wasn't presented by Mathieu,
Mathieu got the jury to play.
It's quite amazing. And today,
his work leads to the fact that his game,
which was accompanied by a certain number of actors,
will be published under the form of a game.
And maybe unlike an essay,
this game will be shared and passed on,
and by the way, when you leave it on the desk,
everybody wants to take it, to seize it and to do something with it.
And my proposition today,
and that's what I am aiming at this year,
it is in fact, finally,
instead of asking them to produce essays,
I'm asking them to produce games.
And producing a game requires
an extremely high level of conceptualization
and at the same time, a concern about popularization and communication,
that allows to move forward and share with others.
Thank you.
(Applause)