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Engage-ification

Using Gamification to Engage Your Students

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Today’s Goals

  • Demystify “Gamification”

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  • Equip attendees to use Gamification to engage their students

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Introduction(s)

  • Your facilitator today: Rob Cook
    • Assistant Professor in Quantitative Management in CBT
    • Lifelong Gamer (eww)
  • Gamer Resume Highlights
    • Student Chapter President of the University of Alabama League of Legends Club
    • Coach (in name) and player (in practice) on the UALoL Team
    • Kami-con 2015* League of Legends tournament winner
  • Casual Student of video game/gaming theory

*I tried to verify which year this was but was unsuccessful

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Audience Participation – Warm Up

  • What does the phrase “Gamification in Education” make you think? Limit your response to one word (No wrong answers)

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  • Word Cloud Generator

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Introduction(s)

  • Your facilitator today: Rob Cook
    • Assistant Professor in Quantitative Management in CBT
    • Lifelong Gamer (eww)
  • Gamer Resume Highlights
    • Student Chapter President of the University of Alabama League of Legends Club
    • Coach (in name) and player (in practice) on the UALoL Team
    • Kami-con 2015(ish) League of Legends tournament winner
  • Casual Student of video game/gaming theory

*I tried to verify which year this was but was unsuccessful

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Introduction(s)

  • Your facilitator today: Rob Cook
    • I like to have fun!

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  • Gamification is all about making learning fun through engagement

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Example of Gamification

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Introduction(s)

  • Your facilitator today: Rob Cook
    • I like to have fun!

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  • Gamification is all about making learning fun through engagement
    • Doesn’t have to be complicated
    • Use what you got

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  • Working Definition:
    • “Taking what we have learned about interactive media (games) and using them to make real-world activities more engaging.”

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Benefits of Gamification

  • Lowering the stakes of learning –> lowering the stress of learning
  • Empower students by
    • Learning to overcome obstacles
    • Showing that they have agency in their lives
  • Improved (shortened) feedback loop –> less grading for the instructor, faster learning for students
    • Feedback loop can be dynamic –> learning/assessments can be customized for each student (UDL)
    • More and/or more specific opportunities to see where students are
  • Climb Bloom’s Taxonomy by replacing rote memory with creative interaction

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Benefits of Gamification, cont.

  • Equip students with the 21st Century Skills
    • Critical Thinking
    • Communication
    • Collaboration
    • Creativity
  • Build community in the classroom by tying incentives across students
    • Highest-scoring student reaches a certain milestone –> everyone gets extra credit

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Gamification ≠ Computer Games, Video Games, or Simulation Games

  • Technology integration has obvious overlap w/ these types of games, BUT
    • This is too narrow!
  • What other types of games can you think of? (A.P.)
    • Board Games
    • Game Shows
      • Jeopardy Review Game (Example)
      • Wheel of Fortune (free creator)
    • Word Games/Puzzles
      • Vocab Quiz -> Crossword Puzzle (free creator, try Chrome)
    • Sports

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Games Can Teach Us, Too

  • Consider the first 3:04* of this video by Mark Brown (GMTK): Can We Improve Tutorials for Complex Games?
    • The three advantages of splitting up tutorials are:
      • Delaying tutorials for players (students) to become more invested
      • Experience the real content sooner
      • Deliver instructions when they’re relevant
    • How can we improve our class “tutorials”?

*The whole video is great, but beyond the scope of today’s discussion

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Hands-on Practice!

  • Consider your online course
    • What bits do your students struggle to understand or recall?
    • How can you help them with this?
  • Remember:
    • Delay tutorials for students until they become more invested
    • Allow students to experience the real content sooner
    • Deliver instructions when they’re relevant (and no sooner)
  • 5 Minute Challenge
    • Find one way to improve your class “tutorial”

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Improving Tutorials Video, cont.

  • Other lessons from this video
    • Shorten the Feedback Loop (Fail Early and Fail Often)
    • Leverage players’ intuition
    • Playtest your tutorials. Like, a lot
    • Show, Don’t Tell
    • Provide options for tutorial structure (UDL)

*The whole video is great, but beyond the scope of today’s discussion

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Competitive Games

  • Remember when I said Gamification can make learning less stressful? (slide 9)

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  • The opposite can also be true – and be good!

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Competitive Leaderboards

  • Leaderboards are a very common – arguably overused – tool in gamified classrooms
  • Pros
    • Inspires students to reach higher and achieve more
    • Presents information in a different way
    • It’s fun!
  • Cons (especially when designed poorly)
    • It rewards a few and punishes the rest
    • Can illustrate the separation between the “have’s” from the “have not’s”

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Competitive Games, cont.

  • One unbreakable rule: don’t show the bottom of the leaderboard, unless maybe it’s anonymous, and even then…no

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  • “Losing hurts worse than winning feels good” – Jim Furyk, Professional Golfer

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Zooming Out

  • We’ve spent half an hour zoomed in on one piece of gamification.

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  • What is it? Let’s play Spellbinder!

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Spellbinder

  • I’ll reveal a letter every 4 seconds
  • Shout out the answer once you know the solution!

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Engagement is Just the Beginning

Source: https://retailedge.intel.com/50/blogs/2019/05/20/The-Positive-Impact-of-Gamification-on-E

  • Help students set and achieve goals
  • Reward learning
  • Measure skill acquisition
  • Celebrate Achievement
  • Define challenges to push students
  • Reward positive behavior / good habits
  • Use Competition to motivate students

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Strategies for Asynchronous Classes

  • UDL helps all students ≈ Asynchronous strategies work for all classes

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  • Brightspace is a bit limited, but a great place to start is Awards + Intelligent Agents

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Award Examples

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Award Examples

  • One I want to add:
    • Award for watching all Tutorial Videos (Completed Checklist Items)

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Intelligent Agent Examples

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Other Common “Gamified” Tools

  • Kahoot – synchronous quizlet tool that awards points to learners based on answer speed and accuracy

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  • Simulation software – Application-specific tools that allow learners to interact directly with course topics

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Audience Participation – Warm Down

  • What does the phrase “Gamification in Education” make you think? Limit your response to one word (No wrong answers)

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  • Word Cloud Generator

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Summary

  • Gamification is NOT
    • Putting “gamified” labels on top of an existing classroom system, or awarding Experience Points for no reason
  • Gamification IS
    • Thinking of a classroom experience as an interactive experience, and understanding the implications of that
  • The Sky is the Limit!

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Crazy Idea #1 – Classroom ARG

  • ARG – Alternate Reality Game
    • A game wherein the game world spills over into the real world
    • Examples of successful ones in real life:
      • I Love Bees (promoted launch of Halo 2 in 2004)
      • UChicago’s A Labyrinth
  • ARG in Brightspace
    • Example premise: an experimental Super-Intelligent Agent (designed to dynamically customize the learner’s experience as the semester progresses)
    • Sprinkle in clues, voice lines, easter eggs, etc throughout classes, videos, resources, etc
    • By building in an interesting hook, and maybe pointing out clues that were hidden previously, can get students to pay

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Crazy Idea #1 – Classroom ARG

  • ARG in Brightspace
    • Want to help me design, build, and test one?
    • I want to build a one-week “pilot” episode / trial run / proof of concept, and I’d love to have a team brainstorm ideas!
    • Interested? Email me at R-Cook2@neiu.edu

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Crazy Idea #2 – Interactive Software in a Video Game Engine

  • What if instead of grading Excel workbooks, students got feedback from Excel directly?
  • This isn’t possible…or is it?
  • Using a tool like Unity, which we can get for free with a University email address, we could build a replica of Excel that could interact with students

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Thank you for coming!

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Contact me:

Rob Cook, R-Cook2@neiu.edu

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