Saturday, September 6, 2014

Gamification

            This has been an incredibly crazy first week. Trying to be able to access the text and learn more about gamification. I’m so glad, I was able to receive the text via PDF. What an incredible topic. I have to admit growing up, I didn’t play too many games. My favorite games during my child hood, was racing cars with my dad at the movie theatre, Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong. I thought it was only a fun thing to do and a reward for getting all my chores done.
            It is amazing how games can be designed to help guide and teach about everyday life situations.  I mean, with Donkey Kong, I needed to use my partner to succeed and get to the next level.  Teamwork was extremely important in this game. In life, some scenarios, teamwork is the only option in being successful.
            My students enjoy going to the computer lab. I always thought it was because we get to leave our classroom and go onto computers, but now I understand it’s a huge reward for them and also an incredible learning experience. My favorite class in school was computer lab. I liked the muncher game, where I was given a task to eat all of the prime numbers, or even numbers..etc Afterwards I received a big congratulations display on the screen and went to the next level. While playing the game, I was engaged, having fun, being challenged and learning math concepts. To this day, I would bet a lot of money if my teacher taught me prime numbers, I probably wouldn’t have remembered it like I did from the muncher game.
            I completely agree that educational games need to keep students engaged and be created to have“both easy and hard through the use of different levels of entry into the game” (Kapp, 2012). It’s important to have smaller rewards right away and throughout the game, a time frame for them to complete a task and a story line for the students to follow and be hooked.
            My students who need extra support with reading play a game called “Lexia.” It’s actually a reading intervention program, but the way that it was designed my students’ think of it as a game. It has all the qualities to a game. At the beginning of the program, the students are asked to take a quiz. It’s a bunch of questions with pictures and animals. The students have to listen to the questions and answer them. After the quiz, the students are provided with a screen that takes them on a journey. For instance, there’s a butterfly that starts flying across the world and lands in Paris. There’s not really a story line with this program, but some of my students made up a story. In the homepage (Paris) the students are shown six different columns. The columns are titled with different reading strategies. Every time a student finishes a game, one of the columns is filled with a colorful bar.
            This is what (Kapp, 2012) said about the rewards, “make rewards easy to get as possible early in a game so that players are hooked and want to continue playing”.  My students have this instant reward after finishing a level. Once all of the columns are filled, they move on to the next level and receive a certificate to take home.
Here’s some ways to gamify education into your classroom. I thought these tips were very interesting.  1. Instead of grades make it a point system.  “Activities, participation and assignments” are based off of certain amount of points. “ Students’ letter grades are determined by the amount of points they have accumulated at the end of the course, in other words, by how much they have accomplished” (Holloway, 2014). 2. Encourage camaraderie among students by setting up a rewards system where students achieve something as a team (Holloway, 2014). The design of the reward system would be based on the students grade level. I think the reward and competition idea could be integrated for a percentage of students turning in homework and returning important papers such as, field trip permission slips back to school. 3. Allow Second and Third Chances. In a game, students are allowed to fail. Students should have the opportunity to “move on to a new challenge that succeed right away, or try to raise their score” (Acedo, 2014) to improve and learn from their mistakes. 4. Make Progress Visible. Instead of issuing grades or percentages, teachers can either issue progress bars to students, or allow them to manage their own” (Acedo, 2014). Reading charts with stickers is an example of this. Students can see how many books they have read and how close they are to their goal. Once they get to their goal, they can receive a prize and start working towards their next goal. It also gives them competition and outlines the basics for good work ethic. There are many other ways to gamify education into your classroom. I thought these four were the most important to me and will implement and revamp into my classroom.



Resources

Kapp, K. M. (2012). The Gamification of Learning and Instruction : Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.
Holloway, S. (2013, August 4). 4 Ways To Bring Gamification of Education To Your Classroom | Top Hat. Retrieved September 6, 2014.
Acedo, M. (2014, January 6). 10 Specific Ideas To Gamify Your Classroom -. Retrieved September 5, 2014, from http://www.teachthought.com/teaching/how-to-gamify-your-classroom/
Lexia. (2013, January 1). Retrieved September 6, 2014, from http://www.lexialearning.com


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5 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing the tips! I immediately began thinking of ways to level or stagger the program from the beginning to the end. I work in after school programming so without "grades" we need other ways to help participants know how they are doing and be able to set goals they want to achieve. We use a lot of group motivation which doesn't necessarily go well all the time, but that provides great opportunities for me to invite feedback from participants. We continuously struggle with "rewarding" and incentives so it's helpful for me to think about how it happens in a school environment and what students expectations might be. I really value allowing multiple opportunities to engage with content and build skills; I think it helps our participants to feel like my program is a safe space to try new things and to learn from others. We also don't have too many ways that progress is visible to the rest of the participants or with other programs at our organization, so that is an area that I will be interested to explore. Great food for thought, thanks!

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  2. Great post! When you mention being able to fail, toward the end of the post, it made me think of how overlooked failure is in school. We strive to make sure everyone passes and forget that failing is a necessary part of learning. If our students are afraid to fail they are never really pushing themselves to try new things.

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  3. I love the idea of making grades a point system. I also love using ‘team’ motivation as well as individual rewards. But, alas, I have to play devil’s advocate on something or it wouldn’t be a fun discussion….

    I’m not sure I agree with the second and third chances. This is where gamifying combats the ‘old school’ in me. For example, I think students should have a clear explanation of the expectations - then they should put the effort into meeting those goals and expectations. If we constantly give them second and third chances, where is the incentive to ‘do it right’ the first time? My real-world job means that there are times when I (or students) may get injured if we aren’t putting in the effort to do it right the first time. Employers want employees who are going to achieve goals the first time through hard work and dedication. Yes, there are times when first or second chances are good, but not always. Sometimes I think all the video games with their ‘9’ lives takes the reality out of life for kids who are playing a lot. My daughter has a game where she can play with animals on the xbox. Cute game – but when she forgot to feed it for a week it didn’t die. (Not too realistic..ha ha).
    --Lindsey Blaine #EDGamify

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  4. Hi Lindsey-

    That's a good point...but I know that in order to grow I have to take risks, and when I take risks I don't always "get it right" the first time! We have to I think build in chances for students to try new things and to potentially bomb when they do - but we also have to help them look to external signs of the impact the skill they are trying out has on others. That way they can adjust and perfect the experience so that the whole is not a failure, but where there were opportunities for improvement that they saw, then they adjusted, and the whole project can ultimately be salvaged. If we don't do this, how will we ever be able to try anything new - knowing it could turn out to be less than perfect?

    Does that make sense?

    Lee

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  5. Maybe I misinterpreted your point, but regarding the grading ideas such as the point system, team accomplishments, and charting progress, I sincerely believe this is how traditional grading has been for as long as I’ve been a teacher. These methods are attempts to balance intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to keep students engaged in learning. I disagree that these are gamification techniques.

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