Ian Woods's List: gamification in education

• However, a good teacher can design lessons that keep their students motivated to learn. In this capacity, Gamification provides a framework upon which to build a more motivational classroom
• In his 2004 work “Motivating Students to Learn,” Educational Psychologist Jere Brophy defines student motivation as a student’s expectation of success and the value they place on the work: Expectancy x Value = Motivation. In other words if we expect our students to be motivated they must find the work valuable and they must also feel like they have a reasonable chance of succeeding at it. If either of these are lacking, there can be no motivation.
• So how do we increase motivation?
• Brophy provides us with a list of strategies
• Provide opportunities for success:
• Provide opportunities for choice
• Include a variety of novel elements
• Provide opportunities for students to respond actively
• Provide extrinsic rewards: Badges, tokens, stickers, pencils, candy. . . The benefits and detriments of extrinsic rewards are hotly debated. However, if you chose to use them in your class make sure you reserve them for use in activities that students don’t find pleasurable already. If you do you, you may run the risk of decreasing the activity’s intrinsic value for your class as they focus solely on the extrinsic reward.

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• For the first time in the early part of the 1900s, we had an alternative to the old teaching style of “Chalk and Talk” with educational leaders (most notably John Dewey and Maria Montessori) demonstrating the power of interactive student-centered learning.
• Without having an entire school set up to support their efforts, a solitary teacher trying to facilitate a project-based learning experience (rather then a lecture-based one) had their work cut out for them. It’s far easier to demand that your students just “pay attention, sit still, and listen”
• Electronic tools such as i>clicker (or other student response systems that allow a teacher to instantly poll the class) drastically change the lecture paradigm. Teachers can ask the class if they understand the material and get a more honest answer from students who may be embarrassed to publicly say they are confused; or multiple choice questions could be immediately answered by the class permitting every student to participate instead of just the one student who was called upon.
• Unfortunately, our classroom is often filled with technology that only exists to better enable old styles of teaching, the biggest culprit being the smartboard.
• In schools, our students should be using technology to collaborate together on projects, present their ideas to their peers, research information quickly, or to hone the countless other skills that they will need
• Students are already using these skills when they blog, post a video to YouTube, or edit a wiki about their favorite video game. They already have these skills; we have to show them how to use them productively and not just for entertainment.
• Games are an important piece of the puzzle–they are how we get students interested in using these tools in the classroom environment. By structuring lessons in the form of a game we will have given them a reason to use these tools, and in the immortal words of Mary Poppins, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

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• Within the span of only one generation the world’s dominant form of entertainment has shifted from passive (TV, Novels, Comic Books, Theater, etc) to interactive.
• The goal of making the rest of our lives as engaging, interactive, and collaborative as the entertainment our generation consumes is the essence of gamification, and nowhere else is gamification as needed as in the classroom.
• Yet in the classroom setting, the majority of teachers will still expect students to sit there and listen attentively, occasionally answering a question after quietly raising their hand. Is it any wonder that students don’t feel engaged by their classwork?
• students spend their free time contributing to, and feeling engaged by, a larger system.
• A child who is interested in the lesson being taught will be a more productive learner and be less of a discipline problem. As long as lessons are properly planned to meet the core curriculum, gamification can be a great tool to help our students stay engaged and meet these objectives by allowing teachers to creatively differentiate their lesson structure. Much like a good game, students will always be preforming at the edge of their capabilities.
• Secondly, before worrying about student engagement in a gamified classroom a teacher must also convince the school’s administration and the student’s parents that a gamified classroom is beneficial to learning.
• With the current state of school budgets, teachers interested in gamification can’t depend on state funding to provide their class with the technology needed for video games.
• It’s easy to think that merely by adding technology to our classrooms we will be engaging with this generation of Digital Natives, but students do not merely crave more computer use. Students demand to feel as involved in their scholastic lives as they are in their online lives.

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• term invented to describe the application of game mechanics such as points,  badges, and levels to non-game processes
• Accumulating airline miles, earning frequent-shopper discounts, and even  increasing gas mileage through the use of the gas efficiency gauge on a hybrid  car are all, somewhat, games.
• Gamification is an effort to gain points and status for completing tasks. It may  be the new hot thing to marketers, but to those of us in academia, these systems  should seem familiar.
• Education has been a system of status and points since the dawn of the  Industrial Age. Scores on assignments serve as points. Graduation is a level  achieved. A diploma is a badge of confidence from an accredited institution.
• Rather than adding levels of engagement that make something fun, some of these  applications simply add tracking systems, which these critics refer to as  "pointsification."
• Just adding badges won't automatically make people want to earn them. Allowing  one user to accumulate more points than other users won't necessarily motivate  any of the users.
• I would argue that education has made the same mistake. Perhaps education could  be improved by ditching the points and adding the game; technology can help
• understand exactly what a game is
• three basic characteristics:
• A goal:
• Obstacles:
• Collaboration or competition
• How does the typical higher education system match up to games? I would argue  that it can be considered either as a very weak game or as a misunderstood point  system.
• If the goal is to earn a higher salary after graduation, then the game play  will focus on courses that will yield the highest impact on a résumé; in that  case, success would simply be passing the courses, not learning.
• game play
• game play
• game play
• Faculty think of the obstacles in their courses as the intellectual challenges  of mastering the content of the course
• However, students
• may not see it this way
• Getting past a demanding faculty member and earning the desired grade may be  the only obstacles they see
• The results are cheating, grade grubbing, and complaining that faculty aren't  fair or grade too harshly. Again, misunderstanding the game leads to poor play.
• If the goal is intellectual growth, then classmates and faculty are teammates
• Last is the issue of collaboration and competition
• If the goal is to beat the system and earn more money, then classmates are  competition and faculty are obstacles to be overcome
• The result is animosity and demands on higher education institutions to become  degree mills rather than places of learning.
• Of course, many in higher education think of games as frivolous and will say  that the job of faculty and administrators is to deliver a quality education,  not an entertaining experience
• To me, a quality education and an entertaining experience are one and the same.  True intellectual challenge is exhilarating. Lifelong learners become so because  they find learning fun.
• Changing the fundamental nature of higher education is a daunting task, but  there are small steps we can take
• Make goals clear
• Make progress transparent to each learner
• game play. Reflection can reveal insights into innovations that can be leveraged  in education.
• Think about
• Gamification" is about motivation and engagement

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