Gamifying Education - How to Make Your Classroom Truly Engaging - Extra Credits

About a month ago, we did an episode on gamification. In that episode, you may recall that I invited people working in certain fields, including education, to write to us if they wanted to hear James' ideas for how to apply gamification to their work in greater detail. And indeed, they did. A lot of teachers watching the show, apparently. The response was overwhelming. Teachers wrote in from all over the world. In fact, so many of you wrote in that we haven't yet been able to answer all the emails, for which I apologize. Because the response was so huge, and it'll be a while before we can finish replying to all of you, we decided to just go ahead and do an episode on the topic of gamifying education. We could spend many episodes discussing how to gamify classes subject by subject, so we're just going to keep this kind of broad. There are flaws in the way we teach today. Systemic flaws which cover every subject and every age. Today, we'll be looking at just a few of those flaws and how they might be ameliorated by some of the techniques we've learned through making games, in hopes that it sparks a broader discussion about how we can make

education, the foundation of our future, more engaging. Our first topic, grading. Right now, we're using a grading system that is essentially demotivational and sets up a reinforcing feedback loop for failure. Today's students first walk into a classroom or approach new assignments thinking of themselves as having an A plus, at least subconsciously, and from there, with every mistake, there's nowhere to go but down. We need to recontextualize grading. In games, we've learned that progress encourages progress, and the human desire for efficiency is a far stronger motivator than the fear of falling further from one's goal. To this end, if you simply make all assignments worth points, let's call them experience for a lark, have all students start at zero XP, and always gain points as they go, continuously progressing towards clear and tangible levels, each with their own benefits. Each assignment and each test feels rewarding rather than disheartening. It's more fun to gain stuff than to lose it. Additionally, this methodology never leaves a student at a point where they feel like they should just give up. The best part is that you don't even have to change anything about the way you already grade the class to do this. You'd still have the same total number of possible points the class was worth and you divide them in the same manner that we normally

divvy up letter grades. All you're doing is counting upwards instead of down and corresponding the letter grades to levels as you go. Lee Sheldon did a basic version of this for his class at Indiana University and found it to be highly effective. The only thing I felt that he could have done more was to give the kids skills as they leveled. Without them, the different grading was just an arbitrary reward system that didn't provide real value to the students and didn't highlight the inherent value of education. If you were instead to give students pickable powers every level and set up class-wide achievements, you could teach lessons within the game system itself. Say you set up class-wide achievements such as if one student gets 25,000 experience, the whole class gets a free bonus 100 XP. Or say five students get to 15,000 experience, the whole class gets bonus points or maybe a field trip or something, whatever you prefer. With this sort of reward system, you encourage the whole class to be rooting for one another and you encourage the best students to help out their classmates. You encourage your students to function with camaraderie and as a team. The best kids can't get the maximum possible score unless they help their peers pull up their grades and at the same time, the kids who are struggling, rather than resenting their classmates who are doing well, are cheering them on because other kids

succeeding is going to help their own grade. Next, let's talk about agency. One of the biggest hurdles to overcome in education is dealing with kids who have no sense of agency over their lives. Now, what do I mean by students having a sense of agency? It's simply the idea that they feel like they control their own destiny, that their choices matter. A lack of agency can manifest itself in numerous ways. Students feeling like they don't have an option to go to college, the perception that pregnancy is something that just happens or students feeling like they simply have no power over the life path and choices that their parents make for them. Without agency, it's almost impossible to feel motivated. Rather than making decisions for the future, people without a sense of agency simply stumble through life day-to-day without any long-term goals. But a sense of agency isn't a binary thing. It's a scale. The more agency you feel over your life, the better you tend to do and the more ambitious goals you tend to be willing to set for yourself. Surprisingly, I once read a study saying that people who had a high sense of agency were actually more resilient when external forces beyond their control messed up their plans, rather than having the expected ego-shattering realization that they didn't have any control, people with a high sense of agency just started off toward their

goals again, undeterred, because that was the way to control their destinies. So, how do we impart agency? Games. Almost any game can help hammer home the idea that you control the future. In a game, the cycle between choice and result is generally much shorter than that in life and much more clearly indicated. In a game, the player tries something, fails, tries something new, and keeps making new decisions until they succeed. Games teach us that different choices have different outcomes, and we control the choices we make. James has spent some time working with inner-city kids, as well as some high schoolers in suburban Pittsburgh, testing this idea, attempting to draw a connection between the control the kids had in the game they played and the control they had in their own lives. He asked me to stress that he doesn't want to claim expertise here because this was only a brief experiment in an area that needs to be thoroughly tested, but this early test did show a clear impact on at least a portion of the student body, and I wholeheartedly believe that further research will prove this connection. James conducted his tests using Mario, but games could easily be created for any subject that helped to reinforce the idea that life isn't something that just happens to you, while at the same time encouraging other skills. Finally, let's talk a bit about external motivators. I

don't want to speak for everybody, but at least here in the US, there aren't enough teachers and there isn't enough time in the school day to teach everything that kids need to know. We need kids to remain engaged and continue to learn voluntarily once they leave the classroom. In the long run, there are a lot of ways we can use games to do this, but for now, I'll just assume that we're looking for a solution that's implementable right away and has low to zero cost. Now, if you're really ambitious and willing to put in the time, a homemade alternate reality game, or ARG, is the way to go for students in middle school or up. Look up I Love Bees or Year Zero to see the sort of thing I'm talking about. Use the information you want them to learn as the pieces that unlock the next section of the game. In their search for this information, they're bound to stumble upon and learn about lots of other tangentially related topics. Check out deathball.net/notpron for a good example of a more primitive way to do this. I'll put the link down below. Anyway, to do this well, you must integrate it into the classroom and get everyone excited about progressing. The key here is to create mystery and make schooling more magical and wonderful by not really being schooling, but being part of something much larger. You could even pretend to not know about it or to

be on their side by trying to work out a few specific parts of the puzzle yourself. Yeah, your students will know, but you don't want to shatter the fantasy of the other world. ARGs are about communal solutions and information scouring. Your students might even be holding after-school ARG parties to go searching for information if you do it right. On a practical side of things, you should make sure that your unlocks are scattered across the board subject-wise. You don't want the same couple kids figuring out the answers every time. You want the kid who's good at sports to be the star of the class one week and then the kid who's good at history the week after. This will get them sharing ideas and communicating. The very best problems are cross-disciplinary ones that force the solvers to know about two very disparate fields. The tricky part when giving these problems is that you want to make sure that when a student only figures out part of the answer, they still know they're on the right track. Now, obviously, creating something like this involves a pretty big initial time investment, but really it's not substantially higher than creating and grading a few good tests, especially if you already know some basic HTML. Still, not everyone has that kind of time. So, if you're looking for something a little more simple, you can always try what I call the plot your route game. In this game, you choose two arbitrary, but interesting topics. Let's say Sekigahara

and monarch butterflies and have students come back the next day with a series of links that got them from one topic to the other. It's easiest to do this with Wikipedia, but the game still works with most any set of websites. Any student who does the exercise gets some experience, assuming you're using the grading system we talked about, but the winner is the student who can make in the fewest number of links and they get some additional bonus. Maybe their homework that day is worth an additional 10% experience or they get a reward of 50 extra points or they get to choose a question on the next quiz that everybody in the class will get full credit for automatically. If your class is responsible, you can even let them choose the topics. Two different students choosing a random topic each day. This exercise encourages curiosity. It gets students to comb through information that they might otherwise not ever have examined and by incentivizing the shortest path, you have a reason for students to go back over the information and to explore new directions that that information could branch to. Most importantly though, this exercise trains them in understanding the connections between information. It gets them to think about how ideas are linked. In the 21st century, this will be a vital skill for any adult and one that will help them contextualize their education and understand the importance of subjects that they might not

immediately be interested in. And if you want to make sure that they're not just scanning for links, simply have them write a sentence between each link explaining the connection. Man, are we ever out of time. This rabbit hole goes pretty deep, but I hope those suggestions have helped to catalyze some ideas of your own. And if so, share them in the comments. It'd be pretty sweet if this week's comments thread just turned into a giant education improvement think tank. Oh, and uh Battle of Sekigahara to Japan to wildlife in Japan to butterfly to monarch butterfly. Beat that. See you next week.