Gamification is something that I go back and forth on a lot. On the one hand, gamification can increase student engagement by making classroom structures more engaging. Cleaning up becomes a way to earn points or levels for your avatar. Turning in homework on time has the added reward of unlocking a badge. Psychologically speaking, adding positive rewards to desired behaviors through gamification of a classroom is a great thing. Adding these rewards hurts no one. Even if a student sees them as a silly gimmick, it does not inherently hurt their learning experience. However, I tend to feel like that student is seeing the truth. A lot of gamification elements I have seen are just that, gimmicks. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Badges, levels, whatever feature you want to add can inspire students and instill pride in their work if (and ONLY if) those rewards are meaningful to them. You can make them look cool with smart graphic design, you can hype them up to your students, but the fact remains that there is no guarantee that 100% of students will latch on to your gamification. I have to quickly say that that is not a bad thing or a reason to not gamify. NOTHING in education is a 100% guarantee, we are working with diverse sets of humans with diverse wants and needs. It is a reality to keep in mind though. A teacher who pours their everything into making their classroom a super hip game might not get resounding success. This brings me to a second caution about gamification. It is a community building tool. An engagement tool. A motivator. A reward system. Not a content delivery system. Not really. A student might be more motivated to do homework to get a badge. A student might also cut corners on homework because they ONLY want the badge, not the content. Gamification can be awesome for class culture when done right. However, gamification will not teach your class for you. Not by itself. I still want to add gamification elements to my classroom. I want to explore badges more to acknowledge the work students put in. I want to explore class dojo more. I want to develop some kind of leaderboard for Khan Academy and Prodigy. It could be a great way to make behavior I want visible and positively reinforce it. However, what I am more interested in is some solid Game Based Learning. Game Based Learning takes technology beyond the digital worksheet and actively delivers content to students in different ways. One system I want to explore more is Lure of the Labrynth. It seems it started out as some educator’s grad school project in Maryland, but is still available and free for any educator to sign onto. It is a full on quest game with a story, choices, minigames, customizable characters, and message boards. It is like a real video game, but every maze, map, puzzle, and challenge weaves in principles of algebra. Students practice factorization without ever seeing the word “factorization.” In fact, most puzzles come with almost no instruction and demand students to either collaborate via message boards for hints or experiment. It pushes them to develop number sense and critical thinking. I want to try and introduce this into my classroom. Let me be clear, it will not replace much content. They will not learn academic vocabulary from it. They will not learn the distributive property name nor will they learn formulas for geometric figures. They will engage the mathematical practices without ever seeing them listed. These are great things and can really engage some students. It will not replace content in the classroom though. Students still need strong mathematics vocabularies, still need to develop proficiency with formulas and procedures. I am excited though. I tested it with my intervention students last year. Some of them really latched on and excelled in puzzles that, according to their data, they did not have the knowledge to solve. They eventually burned out due to increased difficulty and a lack of structure (I literally gave them the url, their password, and said “no class work today, go have fun and try this for half an hour.”). I am excited to see how I can adapt it to my classroom as an extension activity or an optional competition.
4 Comments
James
7/17/2017 11:01:02 am
Patrick,
Reply
I am so intrigued by the game you mentioned because, as previously mentioned, I love games. I agree with all your cautions regarding gamificiation. It is just a gimmick, but I am willing to give it a go. It will be interesting to see if it brings more engagement or because too much for everyone involved.
Reply
Nai Saelee
7/17/2017 02:22:55 pm
Patrick,
Reply
Nancy
7/17/2017 09:21:48 pm
Lure of the Labrynth sounds like a perfect example of the distinction you drew between gamification for classroom management or community development purposes and content learning through games. I'm glad to hear you say that your intervention students saw success with your trial of Lure of the Labrynth. I remember hearing in one of the readings/videos this week that one of the benefits of learning games is that students access and succeed at material that they "shouldn't" - meaning they haven't shown that they know the concepts yet or had struggled with it in the past.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
October 2017
Categories |