Starting out

So, I first heard about gamification through the fine folks at Extra Credits who also dedicated an entire episode to the concept of gamifying education. As a gamer, with many other gamers in my classroom, I was immediately fascinated with this idea. I looked into the research behind it, and there was a lot there that I liked.

I have always wondered about the students I have who are so willing to keep trying a repetitive task over and over and over again, until they succeeded - as long as it was in a video game. But try to get them to do the same thing for a science experiment, or a writing piece, or ANYTHING in school, and it's like pulling teeth. The concept of gaming being a "low-risk, immediate reward" scenario, while the tasks we are asking them to do at school are "high-risk, distant-reward" tasks caught my attention and really held it. Why should the tasks we ask them to do be so high risk? Well, we have them do SO much preparation before they get to the point of trial that they feel they are risking starting all over again if they fail. It's why video games have save points right before the final boss - if you fail, you can just start over again from the point at which you failed. You don't have to do all that prep work over again. However, when we ask our students to go back and review a piece, it has all that preparation work attached to it again. I noticed that when we did a science experiment in which students were asked to keep making modifications to a model aircraft they built until it glided, they were constantly in and out of the room, making modification after modification. They had to document their changes, but just by jotting down what they were. They weren't required to analyse each step; they did the analysis only of the final design - what worked, what didn't, and why. Even the students who never got their glider to meet the criteria for a successful glide were satisfied with their work. Each time they made a change, they could immediately see the results - immediate reward.

So, to sum up:

• If students are required to wait until an entire project is complete before receiving feedback, they won't be sure where to go or really be interested in the results by the time they get them; if students can see immediately what they have done successfully and what they have to improve upon, they can better make the connection between what they did and the results thereof, and they will care about it more. this ties into basic behavioural psychology.
• If students have a lot invested in each trial, they don't want to risk failure; if they fail without losing much other than time, they will be more willing to fail. This also ties into their sense of agency - control over their lives.

My concern with gamification is that it relies quite heavily on extrinsic rewards, rather than intrinsic. However, promoting intrinsic rewards is a big part of how I assess and I don't intend to change my assessment practises; just adapt them to a new system. I am hoping this will give students who connect with extrinsic rewards a way to relate more with their work. It is a concern I will keep in mind, and I hope to address it in a later post.

Another a big part of gamification was a sense of accomplishment and a sense of where to go next. This isn't any different from what we do as teachers every day; just the way we do it can be more transparent and relatable to the gaming student if we couch it in gaming terms. So, grades become levels. Marks become experience points. Rewards become random drops.

Next time: How I wrote my game.
(Hopefully it works easily - fingers crossed!)