Game Level Learn Con 3 will be held in 2022 at the campus of Qualia: The School for Deeper Learning in Calabasas, CA. Contributors should email jon@qualiaschool.org to discuss presentations!
Tickets can be acquired here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gamelevellearncon3-tickets-214782388907
Kris Johnson, an educator and friend of the Game Level Learn podcast, shared this link to an amazing database of board games with educational potential/value. We’re sharing it with you now in the hopes that it will prove useful to you.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TyEbg3UjhG5ZChqQ2HtUHGLY506MEDZz?usp=sharing
Withe the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping across the face of the Earth with epic speed, schools everywhere are shutting their physical doors and opening their virtual ones. Teachers and students are confronting the challenges of rapidly transitioning from face-to-face instruction to digitally-mediated instruction in some cases with mere hours of preparation time separating these two wildly different modalities. There are many challenges facing teachers who find themselves working in distance learning contexts, one of the most difficult of which is replicating the feel and experience of an actual face-to-face classroom. There is a tool, however, that can go a long way towards mitigating that challenge - the environment of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMO). There are hundreds of these kinds of games, but as in so many things, the most popular and enduring of MMOs, World of Warcraft, perhaps offers the best opportunity for both teachers and learners to maximize success and take best advantage of the game world to replicate the face-to-face experience.
All MMOs feature a game environment that a player interacts with by means of an avatar, an animated projection of the player as a character in the game’s world. In the game world, the avatar can take actions, solve quests and do many other things the game’s mechanics provide affordances for. For our purposes, what World of Warcraft is particularly good at is offering vast spaces for avatars (both student and teacher versions) to come together in digital space to share questions, discuss, interact and learn. Because World of Warcraft has been live since 2004 and continuously updated, it features a playable environment that is vast by any measure. This is helpful, because teachers and students who wanted to collaborate in World of Warcraft have a huge number of potential locations to select that would allow them to get on with their work with a minimum of interference from other players.
Now, obviously, what a classroom meetup in World of Warcraft is going to offer is going to resemble a chat room or online discussion board. Many teachers have access to these tools already and they are great at what they do. There is something distancing and remote, however, about using these tools as designed. Interacting with them by means of an avatar a player/learner has created, by contrast, offers a humanizing (or Tauren-izing, gnome-izing, etc.) factor that research on game-based learning suggests can stimulate engagement and sustain it, all the while being, essentially, an online discussion board.
Moreover, World of Warcraft has been free to play up to level 20 for years now, and players could easily create characters and meet in any of these locations, all reachable by characters under level 20 with the most rudimentary of skills. You can have your students select to all play any of the playable races in the game (although I do not provide suggestions below for Night Elves, for story reasons that don’t matter here).
So, what follows is an “educator’s atlas” to Azeroth - if you want to visit this extraordinary game world with your students, we judge these places to be among the very best for maximizing the benefits of the world and minimizing potential challenges. And a million thanks to my partner John Mundy for searching out his favorite Horde-faction areas!
ALLIANCE AREAS (those accessible by level 1 characters from the different Alliance races)
Humans
The first two areas here are in the Human start area around Northshire Abbey. Here is the Main Hall of the Abbey itself - nice and big for a good-sized classroom. Be advised that Humans are a popular race and there could be many other players here.
Main Hall - Northshire Abbey
Right across the street from the Abbey and near the main wall is an open area with a shopping stall.
Northshire, near the main wall
Dwarves and Gnomes
The Dwarves and Gnomes start in Coldwind Valley, which is overrun with creatures. Coldwind Valley, because it is the level 1 area for both Dwarves and Gnomes, can also get crowded. The first location is near the exit of the zone, near Coldwind Pass. Visit Hands Springsprocket!
Near the Gate to Coldwind Pass
Inside the small town of Anvilmar, there is a nice open space for a small class near the Shaman Trainer, Teo Hammerstorm.
Say hi to Teo!
Draenei
The Draenei start area is likely to be the least crowded Alliance start area, and there are good places away from the main Crash Site to work. Here are two:
Northeast of the Crash Site
Due north of the Crash Site - you can see it in the background
HORDE AREAS (those accessible to level 1 characters from the different Horde races)
Orc/Troll
The Orcs and Trolls are among the most popular of Horde races so, like with Humans, their areas are likely to be crowded.
For Trolls, the shoreline of Senjin Village is an excellent choice:
Shoreline of Senjin Village
New Orcs will find the Valley of Trials a good place to congregate:
Valley of Trials
Tauren
Tauren are a very popular race as well, but their places are great to look at and there are a lot of places for a group to gather, among them Fargraze Mesa.
Fargraze Mesa
Bloodhoof Village by Lake Stonebull is also a good choice.
The Shores of Lake Stonebull
FORSAKEN
For a certain group of students, generating characters who are the Forsaken Undead might be a particular treat. Their territory is ghoulish, but replete with choices to gather. The Ruins of Lordaeron have dozens of good places to choose.
Within Lordaeron
Inside the Forsaken capital, the Undercity, there are some good places as well. Here’s the Mage Quarter.
The Undercity Mage Quarter
BLOOD ELVES
The Blood Elf start area, Eversong Woods, is among the most beautiful zones in the entire game and where I would bring a team of level 1 characters…just so they could see it. Two places for these characters:
Inside Silvermoon City - the Court of the Sun
The Upper Room of Wayfarer’s Rest
PANDARENS - The WANDERING ISLE
Last of all are the Pandarens, who are neither Alliance nor Horde until they complete the start area. This is a great place to go as it is also beautiful and easy to navigate. Two areas around the central Temple:
And just outside its gates:
An additional suggestion: if you’re going to do this, join a New Player server: Aegwyn, Azgalor, Azshara, Bonechewer, Daggerspine, Destromath, Gurubashi, Hakkar and Thunderlord, as of this writing.
Global Game, presented by Tracy Wazenegger.
Teaching and Practicing Critical Game Studies, presented by Tim Handley.
The Gamification of Ancient Greece, presented by Max Shafer-Landau.
The Role of Character Creation in Roleplaying Gamification, presented by Ben Schillmoeller.
Games of Thought, presented by Shir Geshvindman.
Deeper Games, by Batsheva Frankel.
Pearls and Pitfalls of Developing a Serious Game, presented by Michael Cosimini.
The truth is, I’m not a gamer. I do not have the depth of experience playing games like true gamers do. Yet, over the past few years, I’ve discovered a real love for designing games with my Kindergartners! Making games with young children is a process rich with imagination, challenges, collaboration, connections, and joy. This blog is a personal reflection on my growth as a game designer. It’s only been two years, and I’m excited that I’ve come such a long way!
What games do you play?
At home, I play some games with my family. We enjoy playing Labyrinth, Sleeping Queens, Rat-a-Tat Cat, Sorry, Scrabble, Jenga, Pictionary, and various card games like Crazy 8s, and Go Fish.
How did you decide to make games with kids in the first place?
Two years ago, while getting to know my Kindergartners, I learned a big lesson. There is a massive difference between playing games and making games with children. I had introduced many types of games to my students - mathematical, literacy-based, just-for-fun - yet, no matter the type of game we played, my feisty and strong-willed Kindergartners wanted to triumph over each other. Friendships suffered and competition was at an uncomfortable high. My students needed a reason to come together, to share ideas, and to grow as a community of problem-solvers. Game-design was the answer.
One day, I found inspiration from a student who brought in a beautiful homemade painted display of a jungle swamp to share. As a class, we discussed how much fun it would be to turn his display into a 3D game. Soon after, Chutes, Ladders, Bridges and Bananas was born! Our first game brought my students together. Everyone contributed and everyone’s ideas mattered. Most importantly, it was a lot of fun! The success of this simple game led me to seek more opportunities for my students to design games.
What are the other inspirations behind your games?
After finding inspiration from art, the games I have made with my students over the past two years have been inspired by creative writing, dice, relative size, paleontology, and mapping. Games are also inspired by my hope for students to develop communication literacy tools - listening, sharing, offering and receiving feedback, taking on the perspective of others, and exhibiting their work. In addition, I am interested in connecting my students’ ideas with their growth as mathematicians.
My main inspiration to continue making games with kids is that, in all of my many years as an educator, I have never found a better fit for developing growth mindset than through game-design. There are countless opportunities to make mistakes, reiterate, solve problems, and find comfort in the process, wherever you are.
What were the challenges you had early on and how did you address them?
Initially I asked lots of questions and relied on the advice from experienced game designers. After modding two games, I felt quite unsure I would ever be able to create a game from scratch. I struggled with focusing on specific learning goals for my students...there were so many! Did I want to focus on temporal skills like taking turns? Spatial awareness? Mathematical concepts? I needed to simplify, and I tended to make things too complicated. After designing a super complex game with my students about relative size, I tried addressing my concern in the next game we made. It was still complicated and long, but more organized and much more fun! In designing our most recent game, I knew I wanted my students to use a compass and I wanted them to have opportunities to make strategic choices. Their choices guided the rest of the design! Ultimately, I want the games we make to be just as fun as the learning my students and I do along the way!
What advice would you give someone on their first try?
Start by making observations of your students! Ask yourself questions!
How do they play games?
What types of games do they enjoy?
What skills are they developing?
What do they care about?
Do they seem more interested in collaborative or competitive games?
How can you merge their passions with your understanding of their growth as mathematicians, readers and writers
Once you have a game idea, you might treat it like writers do when beginning a story. My students recently created a mapping game and asked the following questions.
Where might our game take place?
Who would the characters be?
What will they need to do?
How will they do it?
What types of problems might they need to solve?
Sleep on it before making decisions. When I extend the brainstorm phase longer than I am comfortable (and way longer than my students are comfortable), amazing things began to happen. A lot of excitement builds as children anticipate the synthesis of their ideas. Creative juices flow and children think critically about what would make the best game!
When designing game boards, you can expect to make many iterations to your initial idea. My students often playtest different size game boards with fifth graders and make decisions after collecting feedback.
Process is important! It’s not easy to slow down 5 and 6 year olds with boundless energy. Yet it’s completely worth all of the effort. My students’ awareness of their game-design process is the ultimate game-design goal. They need many chances to reflect on where they are in the game-making process and plan for next steps, if they are going to truly own it.
What do you enjoy about making games with kids?
I enjoy letting kids choose and supporting them to discover all of their learning that goes into making a game. When Kindergartners consider each others’ ideas, make decisions, and laugh when they make mistakes, I feel proud. I also enjoy learning how to use the 3D printer to create game pieces, dice, and spinners. This involves lots of problem-solving and iterations - valuable lessons for my students to learn alongside me. Synthesizing my students’ art into a game board or game pieces is another element that I enjoy. Most exciting is watching my students share their games with parents and other students at school!
What are the most notable learning outcomes from making games?
Game design is an excellent way for me to let go of my plans and go with the flow...something I enjoy quite a bit! I see myself as an “out-loud wonderer,” asking open questions that help my students make their own choices. I always observe that the games we develop bring out much deeper learning than the content they originally were meant to explore. Two years ago, I did not know anything about 3D printing and now, a notable learning outcome for me is that I can design with my students and print anything they need...including a spinner that fit into the game board!
For my Kindergartners, the most notable learning outcome is the discovery that they can successfully collaborate as a class through mistakes and challenges. Through game-design, students get relevant experience developing a growth mindset. Students practice thinking critically while playtesting, developing solutions, and reiterating. They can merge their imagination with research and bring it to life in a game! Communications literacy skills grow as students engage in meaningful discussions or debates. They have opportunities to illustrate, write rules, and create labels. While learning about taking turns (temporal awareness) and moving on the game board (spatial awareness), students tune their mathematical reasoning. In game-design, my Kindergartners explore probability, moving on a numberline, skip-counting, visualizing numbers, measuring, deductive reasoning, and making strategic choices.
What has been the most difficult thing to change in your process?
I enjoy working with experts and appreciate the way they have given me the freedom to grow as a game-designer. Since I have less experience as a gamer than most game-designers, the most difficult thing for me to change is developing an intrinsic understanding of game mechanics.
What are your next steps as you continue to grow as a game designer?
I look forward to continuing to dream big with my students, while focusing on to keep our games simple. It’s a tricky balance - managing the endless creativity that comes from Kindergartners with the reality of the game-design process. I’m also looking forward to deepening my knowledge of the tools I can use to create 3D printed game pieces and, of course, to grow as a game designer, I need to play more games...it’s fun research!
Click here for a link to Rahul’s presentation.
Click here for Tim’s presentations.
Click here for a link to this presentation from Game Level Learn Con 18.
Click here for the slidedeck for the FTTC Conference on September 28, 2018.
The slidedeck for my presentation at EdTechTeachers, Palm Springs, on January 31, 2018.
A Deck of Lenses for Learning - by Tim Handley
Given that the products of game design - games and game mechanics - are so useful to classroom curricula, why not go a step further, and use the processes of game design in the process of curriculum design? That is, why don’t we go about designing classes in the same way we go about designing games? The end result couldn’t help but be a usefully gamified learning environment.
When teaching game design, one of my favorite tools is Jesse Schell’s, Deck of Lenses (available as physical cards in a box, or for free as an app). Each card in the Deck of Lenses has a list of questions, and those questions offer a way of looking at an experience. This is important because both games and classes are experiences. This fall, I plan to take this tool for game design, and apply it to my classroom design.
Take Lens #76, The Hero’s Journey. The first question says, “Does my story have elements that qualify it as a heroic story?” As context, think about all the heroic stories that involve learning.
In the Harry Potter books, Harry has to dig into Voldemort’s past in order to figure out where Voldemort would have hidden his horcruxes - the keys to Voldemort’s apparent immortality. Harry needs this historical knowledge in order to move forward on his journey to defeat Voldemort.
In the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke seeks out Yoda for training, because he needs the skills of a Jedi to move forward on his journey to defeat the Empire. A similar thing happens in The Force Awakens, where Rey seeks out Luke for training.
So, does my classroom represent a step on the hero’s journey for my students? This question brings up issues of relevance and agency, and suggests ways to bring more relevance and agency into my classroom.
When heroes fail, it hurts. Maybe they get scarred, but there is always room for redemption. Could I implement some sort of test or assignment revision policy so that students can better recover from mistakes?
The hero’s journey is a journey, not a side-quest. Could I do something to create a stronger sense of progression in the classroom? Points? Levels? Badges? This fall, for my middle school algebra class, I plan to give my students a repeated assessment, and plot their scores on a timeline as a reminder that they really are progressing.
Heroes are transformed by their adventures. Could I add some transformational moments to my class? As an off-the-wall idea, I’ve been thinking about adding a fictitious student to my classroom sometime mid-year. Being a late arrival and an agoraphobe, he’d be behind in his studies, and unable to attend class in person. I could frame this event as a transformative moment, “You are now experts on first term material, which means you have the power to teach!” I would then ask my students to become student/teachers (multiclassing) and begin creating tutorial materials for this friendly figment - notes, feedback on homework and projects, etc.
The rest of the cards in the Deck of Lenses are similarly interesting, asking usefully reflective questions that also suggest strategies for improvement. I think that we, as multiclassed designer / educators, can get a lot of mileage out of this tool.
I had the great pleasure to present at ASCD's annual conference in Anaheim on March 27. A link to the slides to that presentation are below.
Gamification and game-based learning are two terms that are often used interchangeably, but that actually refer to different educational strategies.
Game-based learning: using games in the classroom
Examples: playing a Kahoot review game, playing Pandemic to model the spread of disease
Gamification: using game mechanics to serve your learning objectives
Examples: a tutorial quest designed to introduce students to class expectations and procedures, a chemistry unit where students play as a group of modern scientists and work together to defeat the evil Alchemist by using their stoichiometry skills
Both are valuable strategies for educators, but this series of posts will focus on gamification. (For more on game-based learning check out the Game section of Game, Level, Learn.)
So...Where Do We Start?
Here are some suggestions to get you started on your gamification adventure.
Read.
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal
A great introduction to gamification. McGonigal introduces us to the power of games and gaming communities and shares how we might use games in a variety of endeavours.
Level Up Your Classroom: The Quest to Gamify Your Lessons and Engage Your Students by Jonathan Cassie
A learning guide to using gamification in education - fun and practical!
Play all the games!! (Ok, play some games.)
Need some specific suggestions? Check out this podcast where Jon and I discuss our top ten games for educators!
Board games
Try to play a variety of games that have different game mechanics:
Deck builder (Example: Dominion)
Using the value of cards in a simple starting deck, players buy more advanced cards to level up their deck. Collection, customization and replayability make Dominion a great intro deck builder.
Worker placement (Example: Lords of Waterdeep)
As a Lord of Waterdeep you must use your agents to assemble teams of adventurers. Your teams complete quests that result in treasure and power as you try to gain more control of the city. In order to accomplish game objectives you have to place “workers” at various locations on the board. Often, there is a limit to the number of workers that can occupy a location simultaneously.
Hidden movement (Example: Letters from Whitechapel)
Hidden movement games usually pit one player against another player or against a team of players. One player moves around the board secretly while the others try to determine her location. A colleague and I recently used this mechanism to design a quick educational game about Ebola!
Pattern recognition (Example: Zendo)
The scientific method made easily accessible. Zendo asks players to determine a universal rule by building structures out of different colored plastic pyramids. A rule master identifies whether each structure obeys the universal rule. Pattern recognition is an important skill for learning, especially in the sciences; Zendo lets students explore the skill and may inspire teachers to create their own content-specific version.
Tableau building (Example: 7 Wonders)
To be fair, 7 Wonders is more than just a tableau builder. But it was the first game that I played that had the tableau mechanism and it’s still one of my favorites. Each player controls an ancient wonder (Giza, Rhodes, Alexandria, etc.) and uses cards to build a tableau that represents their empire. Is your empire focused on its military or on scientific endeavours? There are about a million ways to earn victory points and a lot of tough decisions to be made. It can be tricky to get the hang of 7 Wonders; play this one more than once!
The list goes on and on. The more mechanics you have experience with, the more tools you will have for classroom use.
MMO
Massively Multiplayer Online! (If you’re unfamiliar, think: World of Warcraft.) There are a lot of different MMOs out there and a number of them are free to play. Pick something that appeals to you and play long enough to level up a few times. At their heart, MMOs are rich learning communities that encourage players to work together to accomplish challenging, complicated goals. There is an enormous amount of new information to learn and new skills to practice as you level up your character, but it never feels unmanageable or boring. Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) has a good amount of free content. Send me an email; I’d be happy to show you around!
Role Playing
Don’t get me wrong, Dungeons and Dragons is great, but there are a lot of role playing game options out there. Playing in a campaign is rewarding and fun, but also time consuming. Hit up a role playing night at a local game shop or library! Or try a shorter, lighter version like Fiasco if you can’t commit to regular play. My first experience with Fiasco found our group role-playing teenagers at High School High. Shenanigans quickly ensued as we attempted to resolve the crazy situations and relationships that we found ourselves in!
Escape!
I did my first escape room in 2015. We were trapped in a mad scientist’s lab and had 60 minutes to find the secret code to unlock the door. Though filled with wickedly clever puzzles and riddles, at their core, escape rooms challenge players to cooperate. There is much to do in 60 minutes so everyone has to contribute. Poor communication is a recipe for failure, but a team of people listening to each other and working together has an excellent chance to succeed.
A few weeks ago, a colleague (high school Science teacher) sent me the following thought by email: "I'm watching the middle school boys play a ball game incorporating the dirt pile on the green - how much more fun would professional sports be to watch if the fields were non-planar .... and changed randomly from game to game requiring improvisation on arrival ….."
She and I talk a lot about education and most importantly educational practice. Classroom method. Lab practices. What works and what doesn’t? What do students in 2016 really need that makes them different from students in our classrooms ten years ago. That sort of thing.
Now from a gaming perspective, this email was awesome! My response was: "I can't even tell you how much I love this! A quick bit of game-design theory: every game is defined by its own "magic circle." The magic circle is composed of the rules, equipment and physical characteristics of the game...these things separate gamespace from realspace. You could take almost any physical sport and incorporate a non-planar element and you'd change the magic circle and hence the game. Think about the difference between skiing with or without moguls, for instance."
From a teaching practice perspective, it is in some respects even more intriguing. What factors/qualities make up the “magic circle” of your personal practice as a teacher? How does a student know the difference between being in your class and being in a colleague’s class? The students know this. Bet on it. Do you? Perhaps you should investigate this, if only to sharpen your own perception of what you do and why you do it.
What might you do differently with your students tomorrow that would shake up their expectations? How will you make your fields non-planar?
Those of us who remember the old days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (or the even more classic editions predating AD&D) can’t help but marvel at the roleplaying renaissance that’s been going on for at least the last ten years or so. In that time, one of the most innovative of these new independently-published RPGs has to be Numenera. Set in the “Ninth World,” (essentially an Earth so transformed by technology and change as to be unrecognizable…but still fundamentally Earth at the same time…you have to play to see what I mean) Numenera brings a host of innovations to the table that old-school gamers could really appreciate.
This article isn’t about the play experience of Numenera, though. Rather, it’s about one mechanic in the game that could easily be ported into your gamified classroom. Useful in any gamified classroom setting, this particular mechanic is uniquely suited to a classroom where you’re using avatars, skill systems or other forms of mimicry.
In every roleplaying game there is a system by which characters earn experience points (XPs), gain levels (reflecting that increased experience) and generally gain abilities to interact with the game world with greater and greater success. These experience point systems make it possible for characters to defeat challenges that in an earlier stage in the game would have been impossible.
Experience systems always begin and end with the evaluation of the player’s work in that particular game session by the gamemaster. Every game has some rubric, (usually not very sophisticated) that helps the gamemaster make decisions about the awarding of experience. Experience points are a highly valuable commodity as they determine the speed at which characters progress.
Numenera has this kind of experience point system, but it adds a twist…there’s also a way for players to award experience points to the other players. That, from a gaming perspective, is revolutionary. In certain circumstances, the gamemaster in Numenera can offer a player what’s called an “intrusion.” In an intrusion, the gamemaster does something or changes something that alters the course of the game or interferes with players’ decision making in some way. Players don’t have to accept an intrusion, but when they do, they earn an experience point for themselves and an experience point that they have to give away to one of their fellow players. In this way, the players themselves are always part of the process of rewarding excellent play.
Envision a class experience where your students have created avatars to represent themselves. Over the course of the unit/course, the avatars in question are going to gain experience through defeating obstacles and gaining knowledge and skills (sound familiar?). You could create a list of skills that are of interest to you…that you want your students to gain mastery in (like using punctuation correctly, understanding the difference between parts of a cell or synthesizing non-fiction reading) and give your students the capacity to recognize these skills in their peers. Perhaps there are some skills that an avatar can level only by gaining experience from fellow players.
In this way, you help your students understand the particulars of the learning objective. Moreover, you help them see the value of these particulars and to see the value contributed to the class as a whole by different classmates. This can, with thoughtful management by you, help develop a positive classroom culture.
Wise or Otherwise Pieces, from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dharma_for_one/3235061625/in/photolist-5VSx7z-rHFE-5WM12L-pwStB6-fcCSLi-cFUM2y-eDvHC9-xw5LB5-59Nxjk-c1dVzU-4Gtttm-bfZvUP-24CP72-cFVrNQ-2vNrQ-bkaEoA-4jDwjv-cFUG9Q-aGqZ2H-6Yit7c-e4mYUP-6DSVH-7R7ShG-9gLAeH-dhX7FY-9htLHE-orZx3i-7pbSgc-bsAXsX-9CWspY-86iMTZ-dsyiG4-s9ZvLJ-fFtsZV-tTAnFo-9hqGiX-59SEYW-hmU8EG-8vjevX-uaihn-9Zhj8f-NLV8Y-AbDY4-bdFiX-cFVvYw-qxSwhj-dz9p2B-5Xk9NB-bAfABf-35ueu
A great article from a few years back makes a case I’ve been making for years. When thinking about gamification in education, it is a mistake to focus only on the games themselves. As I have begun to argue in the GAME section of this blog, games can and do have a role in your classroom. That role, however, is limited and must be carefully monitored. The game doesn’t serve its own purpose. It has to serve your learning objectives and your deeper goals for your students. Sometimes a game is uniquely suited to those deeper objectives. If it is, by all means use it! As I argued about the game Zendo, it is a particularly powerful tool to have students not just think about critical thinking abstractly but to actually do critical thinking (and to do it in a way that is meant explicitly to be fun…they can then apply the skill learned in the game in contexts that aren’t necessarily meant to be fun).
Rather than focusing on the games, focus on the gamification. What does this mean? A quote from the article gives a direction. “…gamification isn’t about games, but about game mechanics. Users don’t need to win or lose an entire game experience to become involved.” This is where gamified instruction has unique potential benefits. Every great game (and I mean this without exception) is an involvement engine first and foremost. Games want to be played! And great games make playing easy, richly rewarding and highly engaging.
The first rule of gamification in the classroom: it’s not really about the game. It’s about how your learning objectives can be served by one or more game mechanics.
This site is a community for gamers, teachers and students to learn from each other and to make games and game-based methods a bigger part of their learning and their work. This section of the site is devoted to teaching practice, lesson plans, ideas, hacks and debate about the bigger questions that center on game-based teaching and learning - in other words, leveling up your teaching!
What follows is a blog post I wrote a while back in which I gave some thought to competition as a concept. It was based on experience I had teaching a fully gamified class and some of the challenges I and my students experienced.
COMPETITION...or, it's time for a little PVP
One of the core notions in game design is competition. What opposes the player? Is it a fearsome boss at the end of the game like in Diablo? Or is it a mental challenge, like in Portal 2? Perhaps what opposes the player isn't at all clear...like in the game Journey, perhaps the opposition doesn't really exist, or is so abstracted, that it might not exist at all.
In the gamified classroom, a big challenge is setting up the systems of opposition and challenge to motivate learners/players and to sustain their motivation/learning. The literature on game design is frequently focused on theory associated with these questions, because we all know what happens when we play games where there is little opposition or challenge. Candy Land, anyone?
A while ago, I emailed with Mark Hendrickson, a former student of mine, about the question of designing competition into learning (he studied this idea in graduate school). In response to a question I wrote asking for his thoughts on the spirit of competition, he wrote:
"...defining the "spirit of competiton" on a sociological level may help: a rivalry between two or more persons or groups for an object desired in common, usually resulting in a victor and a loser. This, of course leads to more questions. How is "object" defined in the classroom? What do students in grade X desire to achieve in the classroom that could result in a friendly rivalry if subdivided into individuals or groups? What kind of rivalry or competition in the classroom would not result in only one side winning?"
In the fall of 2012 I taught a course on the federal election in the United States. I divided the class into an Obama staff and a Romney staff. This gave me a great opportunity to see how well competitive framing encouraged the work of these teams. It was strongly motivating. They did not want to give one speck of ground to the other team.
He then wrote: one of the examples in gaming within the MMORPGs were the boss battles. These boss battles could be done individually or with a team. I think your spirit of competition ideal could spawn from these battles. In other words, what better way to provide competition than defeating a boss, or seeing what individual or team could beat the boss most effectively.
And this is where it gets interesting. In the MMORPG setting, teams of players are opposed by the game itself - the boss is a construct set up by the game designers. I do not know of an MMO that injects a player-versus-player (PVP) element into this kind of encounter. And this is what Mark is suggesting here. Constructing a boss battle that is clearly defined and static, but which two different teams could approach, struggle with and overcome. As the teacher, I would have the opportunity to measure their successes according to a single rubric, but the students would have the opportunity to explore what "effectiveness" would look like in that encounter. He concluded: also, the "random encounters" idea in the other teacher's classroom would be a good place to start. One random day per week, you could divide the students into any number of individual or group combinations. These groups would compete to answer questions in your "modeling" form, and if you chose, winning these random encounters would have no impact on their level or grade. What is the purpose of a random encounter in an RPG? For me, it has been to fight weaker monsters to be able to beat the stronger bosses through stat increases. What is the purpose of a random encounter in a gamified classroom? To apply my current knowledge to be able to effectively challenge and solve a larger issue or problem through confidence increases.
Take a look at that last sentence again. Application of knowledge...this is at the core of great games, gamified learning and game-designed courses. By structuring the student's experience effectively, this would give the student the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of a skill or a content concept. By structuring it like a random encounter, it generates the "spirit of competition" that most of the game literature suggests is critical for successful game-based instruction. It reminds me of the Food Network program "Sweet Genius," in which the contestants are given a baking/candy making challenge and then part way through the challenge, have an additional obstacle put before them in the form of new ingredients that have to be incorporated into the mix.
So, in thinking about the application of knowledge in a competitive framework, what's one thing you might try?
Game Level Learn is the home of the Game Level Learn podcast and a community for educators interested in classroom gamification and using games in their classrooms to transform learning.
Jon Cassie
joncassie@gmail.com
Tracy Wazenegger
tlwazenegger@gmail.com
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