What is Gamification?
Okay so what exactly is gamification? Well, it's nothing all that new actually. It's the process of taking something that already exists, and improving it by integrating common game elements, such as rewarding players points for accomplishing desired tasks and challenges, thereby motivating participation, engagement, and learning. To clarify, digital games don’t do the teaching, but rather reinforce the concepts that have already been taught. Teachers should really think of digital games as classroom management tools. Strategically implemented digital games can provide students with engaging practice, while providing teachers the time and opportunity to work with other students, one on one. By incorporating gaming, teachers can provide more personalized, face-to-face instruction while making differentiated instruction easier and more efficient. Resources: Kahoot: Kahoot! Is one popular digital platform that turns learning into gaming. Kahoot is free for teachers and students. It allows teachers to create fun surveys and quizzes that students can play in order to study and review material. Teachers can create original quizzes and them share them with one another to create a library of resources. I know that my students really enjoy playing, and evening creating Kahoots. Class Dojo: ClassDojo is another great digital resource. ClassDojo is a management and communication app for the classroom. It connects teachers, parents, and students who use it to share photos, videos, and messages through the school day. Teachers can utilize ClassDojo to encourage students to work together as a team. As a teacher, I have relied heavily on ClassDojo in each of my classes. It is a great tool for rewarding desired behaviors and addressing undesired ones. Class Craft: Class Craft is a new game based approach to teaching. Class Craft is very similar to Class Dojo but with some serious upgrades. While ClasDojo allows each student to have their own avatar, they are not customizable. However, in Class Craft, students not only get to completely design their own avatars, but the avatars come with unique benefits for the students. Students are able to earn and use special “powers” to support their own academic learning, as well as help their teammates when they need it. They get some other cool perks, too, for their hard work. I have not personally implemented this resource yet, but I am very excited to try it out with students! Rewards: Interactivity: Genuine learning requires students to think for themselves and to generate their own answers. Similarly, most games require players to find solutions in order to progress. Games also require players to think critically and collaborate with others, allowing them to truly own their learning and growth. Informative feedback: Students are more likely to excel when they are provided informative feedback. More specifically, students can do even better when they are provided explanations about why an answer is right or wrong. Many gaming applications will show a player why their attempts are incorrect and require new approaches. Especially educational gaming applications such as ST Math, Class Dojo and Class Craft. There is transparency in order to help students quickly learn what works and what does not. Intrinsic motivation: Finding ways to motivate each and every student can be a challenge at times. The real goal of course is for students to become intrinsically motivated to learn. Gaming techniques are very effective at motivating players to persist over and over, despite failure. Players receive digital rewards such as new titles, badges, changes to their avatars. The sensation of success and reward becomes its own motivation for the student. Remove Fear of Failure: When students become players, they become comfortable with failing. In many games, players must fail repeatedly before they can move forward. As a player, students must learn, through trial and error, which responses are most effective, efficient, and most likely to provide the desired result. In this process, students becomes increasingly familiar with the system, until they understand it comprehensively, mastering various skills along the way. Content in Context: Game-based learning is a great classroom tool because it allows for interdisciplinary learning through contextualized critical thinking and problem solving. Gaming allows for teaching content in context, playing the game involves systems literacy. That is to say, students learn the relations between the things, and removes the question, “Why am I learning this?” Flexibility: “Sandbox Gaming” is a style of gaming in which there is more than one way to win. Players can make choices that affect the outcome of the game. Educational gaming allows for multiple paths to success. By gamifying a class, teachers can offer a "main quest" or storyline that leads students through a class’s main content, while also offering plenty of "side-quests" so students can choose to investigate other paths more deeply on their own. Think of it as how universities and high schools allow students to take electives as they progress through school. While not every graduate has taken the same courses, yet they have mastered enough of the skills to earn a degree. Scaffolded Progression: Most modern games have tutorial levels in order to scaffold the gamer's progress, usually by setting up a series of simple levels, each designed to teach one new skill, and each building on previous levels. This allows gamers to build new skills within the context of game levels. This should sound very universal to the idea of learning in general. Students can and should learn in a series of steps and lessons, working their way to more difficult tasks at their own pace.
2 Comments
Nai Saelee
7/17/2017 02:46:34 pm
Jimmy,
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Patrick
7/17/2017 06:27:21 pm
I think my favorite point is your breakdown of content in context and this, to me, is the biggest strength of game based learning. The value of game based learning is that it is a content delivery system AS WELL AS a motivator. Not only that, but like you said, students are not questioning the why because the why is obvious (to them). They need to learn it to beat the game! When I think of the patterns or tricks I learned in puzzle games as a kid, or even the patterns for a Rubric's cube, they are ultimately useless. No real world value EXCEPT for beating that particular game. As a kid though, that did not matter. I feel like students ask "why does this matter?" not because they care so much about their future career but because they are looking for an immediate escape to the current situation. They don't actually care about why the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, they care about tripping up the teacher and getting away from the content. In an engaging game, however, the why is apparent. If I don't figure this out, I can't move forward! Funnily enough, as a teacher, that is my same motivation for wanting students to learn. Why do they need to learn the distributive property? Not because the distributive property is vital to their undetermined careers, but because they can't move forward to math that could actually matter on a larger scale without that foundational skill! Games figured this out a long time ago. It's almost like the entertainment industry understand the brain better than education does!
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