Several months ago, I was asked by the
Division of Online and Strategic Learning if I would be interested in leading a faculty workshop on gamification of higher education. They buttered me up by telling me that "several people" had suggested to have me give a workshop on this topic. I am dubious that such people exist, but I decided that this would be a good and appropriate form of professional service for me. I took some issue with the intended title, given that "gamification" has a negative connotation in many academic circles. However, I decided that if this is what people asked for, then this would be an appropriate title to use, and I could wrap whatever I really wanted to share within that heading.
I reached out to a few friends in person and online who have done similar work, and I was able to get some good ideas and feedback. I was hoping to share a draft on my blog and get some constructive criticism from these folks, but actually designing the workshop ended up taking priority over writing about it. The workshop was offered in two one-hour sessions at noon on October 29 and November 5. There is a third workshop in the series run by somebody else; that session will focus on how to do some gameful practices in
Canvas, but I have really nothing to do with that part.
What I would like to do here is share the outline of what I covered, describe the activities I led, and share a bit about what worked. This way, if I am ever asked to do such a thing again, I can always come back and check my notes. Also, who knows, maybe this will even be useful to you, dear reader.
After spending a lot of time writing ideas on index cards and shuffling them into different stacks, I decided on an overall structure that would have Day 1 focused on the questions: What is play? What is a game? Why do people play games? Day 2 then focused on these questions: How do we design games? How do learners experience gameful designs? Finally, should we gamify higher education?
I created a deck of slides to help keep myself on track, and I've made them
publicly viewable. In text, I will walk through the main points and activities that we engaged in.
We opened with introductions, in which I asked everyone to share their name, department, and—reusing a technique I use in my game design classes—a summary of their last great play experiences. As with students, many faculty conflated "play" and "game", but not all of them did. One participant explicitly drew upon the question to talk about renovating his bathroom, describing the visceral feeling of slamming a hammer through the wall, and he spoke of "playing" with the materials.
I briefly explained how "gamification," "playful learning," and other terms are used differently by different communities of practice, as I alluded to in the introduction of this post. I pointed out that higher education is already a game: there's a clear start and end, and we assign points and celebrate victory. This helped to establish that I was looking at games, play, and design as ideas that integrate into what we already do.
We got into the slides, and I started with the question, "What is play?" I drew upon Huizinga's
Homo Ludens and then Caillois'
Man, Play, and Games here. For the latter, I described the four categories of play he defined (being agôn, alea, mimicry, and ilinx) as well as the ludus-paidia spectrum. I put up a table of the four categories and the ludus-paidia axis, and I asked the participants to name activities we already use and to place them into this table. This activity had good participation. The biggest surprise to me was when a participant brought up public speaking requirements as an example of ilinx (vertigo). So many students are afraid of public speaking that our making them speak in front of the class is tantamount to our putting them in a state of vertigo.
From here, I moved on to the question, "What is a game?" I always like to invoke Wittgenstein here and his description of "game" as a word that we cannot define—but that hasn't stopped game design theorists from doing their best. I walked through a curated list of some of my favorite thought-provoking definitions, including those from Chris Crawford, Sid Meier, and Bernard Suits, before landing on my personal favorite from Raph Koster, "Games are just exceptionally tasty patterns to eat up." This allowed me to go on a brief aside about Koster's seminal
Theory of Fun for Game Design and its observation that the "fun" in games is often because of learning.
The next question to cover was, "Why play games?" I explained that to a game designer, "fun" is too broad a term compared to other, more specific concepts such as
fiero,
schadenfreude,
naches, and
kvell. With those terms on the board, I asked the group to think of activities we do in class that invoke these different kinds of fun. This also led to a positive discussion, with examples mentioned of all four. One of the more interesting was sharing or discussing bad student work as something that invokes
schadenfreude: if a professor mentions that many students made a particular mistake, it can give a bit of coldblooded "better you than me."
I brought up Bartle's Player Types: Acting-Interacting against Players-World, to get the quadrants of Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers. I made sure to point out that Bartle wrote
an excellent chapter about how people have misused his taxonomy, but that I was pretty sure we were OK to move forward with our exercise. I asked the participants to consider the kinds of activities we use in class that favor different kinds of "players." My recollection is that they generally agreed that most of our work focused on Achiever types, and we talked briefly about what it might mean to explore other areas of this domain.
This wrapped up the first day, although I had originally planned to talk about Flow on the first day. I had just enough time to give them
a handout with homework, which drew predictable groans. The handout lays out five different learning paths a participant could choose for next time:
- Explorer: Play a new board game.
- Reader: Read Paul Darvasi's exemplary chapter, "The Ward Game" (from Teacher Pioneers), in which he describes transforming his high school English class into an insane asylum to teach lessons from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
- Maker: Design your own game.
- Analyzer: Analyze an activity you use in class using one of the lenses introduced in the first day of the workshop.
- Sustainer: Bring delicious snacks for Day 2 of the workshop.
As we started Day 2, after brief introductions, I asked them to share their work along the learning paths. Two or three had played new games and shared that experience. Unfortunately, the Ward Game chapter had not been mailed out until that morning, so no one had even seen it yet. It gave me an opportunity to give a summary of the chapter, but it really deserves a thorough reading. One participant has been working on his own game for some time, and he was happy to say a little about it when I asked if anyone had done the Maker exercise. One person shared what they admitted was a shallow analysis of their in-class activities from a games perspective. Tragically, no one took up the Sustainer, although this gave me an opportunity to explain how I use compulsory treat-bringing as a punishment for being late to my studio courses. I think of all the stories that I told over the two hours of the workshop, this may have been the one where I had their attention most clearly.
All told, maybe half the participants shared anything during this period, so I think it's fair to say that the exercise was not taken seriously. However, I don't regret it, because the handout and discussion provided a concrete example of how one can design multiple, different, equally-valid paths to understanding an idea. We came back to this later on.
We jumped back into the slides with my giving an overview of Flow. Only 25-30% of the participants had heard of Flow before, and I shared with them some quick bullet points about the properties of a Flow state and the conditions for getting into one. I showed the diagram that I tend to see come up in discussions of game design, which plots Skill against Challenge. I explained that my understanding of the psychological literature was that this wasn't actually quite right: it's not Skill against Challenge, it's Perceived Skill against Perceived Challenge. From a teaching point of view, there's an enormous difference between these two, particularly considering that there's essentially no correlation between students' self-efficacy and actual ability.
Then we did a little exercise that I thought would be more interesting than it turned out. The idea was to trace the path of a student (or a student persona) through the flow diagram. I had tried it myself and found it to be an interesting challenge. Here's the relevant example:
I explained that when I teach CS222, I frequently get a category of student who did well in the prerequisite courses because of their high school experience, and this gives them an inflated sense of their programming abilities—that is, high Perceived Skill. As the course continues, the challenge goes up and they start to see their skill as being lower (shown in green above), moving rapidly up into anxiety. I believe that with the right interventions in the course, I can help these students have the blue line experience instead, where their sense of their own skill "catches up" with the challenge to put them into a Flow experience. Note that the blue line starts and ends at about the same value of perceived skill, but by the end of the course, it's actually aligned more with their actual skill.
I wondered if this exercise would be interesting to the participants, and so I tested a variation on it in my game design class. I had them draw their own path in the diagram, considering the "game" of designing their final game project. I showed the students my path through a project, and then I asked them to share their stories. As they shared, we started looking for different kinds of shapes that they had drawn, looking for patterns and similarities in their stories. It was a great exercise for them I think. For the faculty in the workshop, though, I think only one person shared what they saw in their diagram. In his case, he observed that there was high anxiety but not because of what he had designed: it came from external factors, specifically the fact that he was teaching education majors the semester before their student teaching.
We moved on to another kind of analysis, this one inspired by one of my heroes, Dan Cook of
Spry Fox. He wrote an essay a few years ago about
arcs and loops as fundamental components of game design. I came across it when preparing for the workshop, and it inspired me to think about the loops and arcs in my course design. I drew up two examples, the first is from my
CS222 Advanced Programming class.
The course has three arcs, which are the first three weeks of the class. It then goes into a series of loops, whose relative importance is depicted by their size. The two-week project is followed by three three-week iterations of the final project, each one with more weight and importance than the last. At the end, there's a little arc to represent the final exam.
The other example I gave was of my current semester
CS315 Game Programming class. It is composed of a series of arcs of increasing weight, these comprising the two-week mini-projects that are designed to teach concepts of increasing complexity. At the end of the semester, students work in teams on a project in two iterations. The two iterations are the same size, so there's only one visible loop.
I pointed out that the loops were where students had the most opportunity to learn. I acknowledged that the nature of my material lends itself to loops, but that teaching programming is a bit like teaching writing: good work is done by iteration and feedback. I asked them to consider the loops and arcs in their own classes and to share their stories. One participant described how he has his students work in a portfolio, where each assignment is done once but the portfolio writing process is covered each time; we agreed that this might be a multidimensional drawing, with a loop spiraling up out of arcs. Another participant said that she teaches solely in arcs, but she was interested in considering how she might use loops to enhance students' learning.
I had one slide on Self-Determination Theory, but I neglected to ask how many were already familiar with it. For each of the categories of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, I called back to examples we had discussed before or shared new examples from my own work. I showed them how in CS222 I use achievements in order to foster different aspects of Self-Determination Theory, and they seemed interested in this approach. I also showed the specifications grading that I am trying in Game Programming this semester and explained this as an approach that helps with a sense of competence since it eliminates black-box grading. Unfortunately, I missed the opportunity here to gauge how many were already familiar with specifications grading. It would have been interesting to know for how many people this was an introduction to new ground vs. showing an application and contextualization of something they have encountered before.
We only had a few minutes left, so I had to make a judgement call between finishing up or opening the floor for questions and discussion. I decided to move forward, because this is something that's been on my mind—not to mention being in a half-written, still unpublished blog post. The last question to address, then, is the dangers of gamification.
I mentioned briefly that much of game design is based on extrinsic motivation: we give the player points, eye candy, and social experiences so that they will enjoy our games. However, we know that extrinsic rewards diminish intrinsic motivation. Is it worth adding extrinsic rewards to courses if it reduces students' desire to engage in these activities themselves? As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out. There are not enough longitudinal studies on the effect of higher education. (This is one of the reasons we should abolish the core curriculum: we have no evidence that it meets its design goals. But I digress.)
The final point I made is the one that I've really been struggling with in my quiet moments the last few weeks. A friend recommended I read
Make it Stick, and I don't want to spoil my future post, but there was something in that book that really rattled me: Immediate feedback is better for short-term retention and worse for long-term retention, but delayed feedback is worse for short-term retention and better for long-term retention. I think game-based learning takes it for granted that immediate feedback is
good, but the research cited in the book doesn't match that. It seems to me that we, designers of educational experiences, can choose whether we want students to get a good grade now and forget the material later, or get a worse grade now and remember the material later. What, exactly, is the goal of higher education?
With that uplifting challenge, I thanked them for coming, reminded them about the third session that I was not involved with, and wished them a good day.
Overall, I am happy with the workshop. Some of the activities didn't go quite as well as I hoped, but it was hard to tell the difference between quiet contemplation, confusion, self-consciousness, and apathy. No one complained or threw rotten vegetables, so that's something anyway. Thanks again to my colleagues who shared their ideas and feedback with me, especially
Scott Reinke, who kindly shared his experience and helped with a few ideas over email.
