The Learning Game

My career in education, although limited in time, has been quite diverse and has allowed me to experience the educational process from multiple perspectives. I have been a teacher, a lecturer and a faculty developer and during each of these spells I have grown more and more fond of creative pedagogies and their impact on education. Most recently, I have been enamoured by the concept of gamification and have decided to take my first venture into gamifying my syllabus.

I decided to start small and only gamify a part of my syllabus to see how that would go. I was initially apprehensive as I was teaching full time in-service teachers and was not sure if gamification would be too childish for them. I quickly ditched any concerns the minute I started researching the topic, mainly due to the fact that most gamification that has been taking place has been for enterprises and businesses to engage their clients and personnel.

This blog post is my reflection on the experience as a whole with the lessons learnt and future directions.

I teach a course titled ‘Productivity & Professional Practice’ as part of a Teacher development postgraduate diploma. The course focuses on the importance of professional development for teachers and how they can take charge of their own development by utilising technology.

I tried to be clever by incorporating several game dynamics and mechanics to my syllabus. I included several ‘game choices’ for the students, in the learning game section of the syllabus, they had freedom to choose which and how many assignments to do. I also built in a ‘points, levels and badges system’ and included a ‘surprise element’ (any extra points awarded after completing the learning game would count towards a bonus percentage of the final project). I ensured the presence of difficulty cycles, not just because that is a good game design technique but it also allows for a new type of differentiation in the classroom. Several of the assignments were loosely linked, the rationale was to try and get the students to choose their own learning path by trying to establish the connections between the assignments.

For example, the student may realise that an e-portfolio is likely to include a biography and be built on a website, therefore if the student were to complete the biography assignment and the web development tutorial, that should make completing the big task (worth more points) in this case the e-portfolio a lot easier. The idea here was to introduce some game flow to the experience, if the students feel they are learning different things at different times but still reaching the same outcome, it makes for much more interesting classroom discussions.

I also tried to incorporate some ‘action triggers’, although not brilliantly if I may add. The idea was to provide some clues as to when certain assignments would be ‘unlocked’, once unlocked, a new action could be triggered.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and judging by the course evaluations, so did the students. Some of the interesting findings were that the students seemed far more motivated and curious, they were always asking questions and for hints about ‘locked’ assignments. They covered far more workload than previous iterations of the course, I usually have one final project, some of the students completed 3-4 final projects using this approach, based on their own choices. The syllabus, which normally disappears once received by the students on the first day of class and never again to be seen, re-surfaced almost every class. The students frequently brought it over to ask about assignments, or check if they have chosen an ‘appropriate learning path’.

Nonetheless, where there are ups, there are downs. Because I was trying a new teaching strategy, I made a point to be excessively flexible with the students to give them a chance to adapt to this new format. This flexibility was my downfall. Although almost all the students were motivated to work and complete the assignments, they took a while to get used to this approach. This resulted in panic submissions towards the end of the semester (due to my flexibility with deadlines) and obviously a monster task of marking 12 different types of assignments simultaneously. On reflection, you cannot ask ‘Angry birds’ or a person you’re playing at ‘tic-tac-toe’ to “skip the level this time” or “just let me complete it at a different time”. Game rules are game rules and make no exceptions (unless they are planned exceptions, like rewards). This is something that I have to consider for future cycles. I will either be gamifying a larger portion of the course, or place more weight on the current gamified portion. This is because the students contributed and completed far more work than previous classes and than that expected to be honest. If the same levels of motivations are present, I would hate to dilute that with a weak marking ideology.

Overall, this was one of the most enjoyable experiences during my teaching career. I will definitely be looking to gamify more parts of my courses and am interested in trying to use more gamification elements, especially aesthetics, as this is the only cornerstone of gamification I am yet to try and incorporate in my classes.