Gamification 101: Training Camp Part II

Image credit:  http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2012/08/11/cowboy-camp-update-may-have-to-start-center-who-never-snapped/​

When I think back to my process for gamifying my Physics class last year, it felt a little like the journey a coach goes through while preparing for that first game of the season. The planning and execution phases can easily be divided into training camp, designing the playbook, pre-game pep-talk, the season opener, and finally reviewing tape.  In this post I will discuss my approach to training camp. 

I am a die hard Cowboys fan in case you couldn't tell from the picture at the beginning of this post.  While searching for an appropriate image for training camp, I happened upon this headline from CBSlocal.com.

Co​wboys May Use Center Who Never Snapped

This resonated with me as I was by no means a gamer when I decided to explore this option in my class.  I had played my share of Angry Birds, but that was about it unless you counted my brief pre-teen encounters with Space Invaders, Pac Man and the occasional game of Frogger.  Once I discovered boys, I tried to forget that Atari and parachute pants were ever part of my vernacular. 

I wouldn't even consider myself a casual gamer.  Last year, while the idea of gamification was percolating in my brain, I taught across the hall from a true gamer who was completely immersed in gamifying homework practices in his class. I called him Crazy Train as the ride he was on was borderline obsessive and insane (or so I thought at the time).  I frequently caught myself checking to make sure the coast was clear before leaving my room in an effort to avoid interactions with him because every conversation was ultimately dominated by his overwhelming excitement over things like avatars, subeconomies, level-ups, warp zones, and other gamer terms that sounded a lot like Chinese to me.

Fortunately, for me, I soon discovered that you do not need to be a gamer to gamify your content.  That is what training camp is all about.  For the non-gamers out there that are looking for a way to make your classes more engaging and fun, this is a good place to start.  As a bonus, gamification will also help the learning stick. 

Step 1:  ​Play Games...Actively

To get started you simply need to play some games.  Pick something easy and manageable at first, like Angry Birds.  ​Approach your game play with the same strategies that you advise your students to use when "actively" reading an article or chapter in a book.  Be an active, reflective participant in your game play. 

While playing, ask yourself the following questions and take note of your responses:

• What emotions did you feel throughout the game play and how did you respond? ​
• What made you want to continue playing?  
• ​Was there only one way move to the next level, or did you have choice in your journey?  
• ​What happened when you made mistakes and how did you feel?  
• ​Did you feel like you were in control?  
• ​What kind of feedback did you get, and how often?  
• ​How did the feedback affect your play?  
• What elements of the game helped you to maintain your focus? ​
• What was your reaction to failure?  How was this different to other experiences you have had with failure?  ​
• What role did game mechanics play in your experience?  ​What role did the fictional story line play in your experience?  ​(If you are not familiar with these terms, read through the references to these in my previous post.) 
• What learning was required of you to be successful in the game?  ​

Now compare your experience to the experience that your students have while participating in one of your lessons.  How are they similar?  How are they different?  ​

​Step 2: Do a Little Research

There are three books that I have found helpful in designing my game.  

1. The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and   Strategies for Training and Education
2. Designing Games:  A Guide to Engineering Experiences 
3. ​Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps

​There is also great value in reading blogs about gamification.  Once you discover a blogger that has a passion for gamification, check out the bloggers that are linked to his/her blog.  This is a hot topic at the moment, so a simple search should send you in the right direction.  A few that I would highly recommend at the moment are: 

• Michael Matera's awesome series on gamification​
  
• ​Alice Keeler's blog called Gamericulum with tons of great practical tips on gamification
  
• Jason Roy's blog Crispy Math (He has a ton of easily adaptable single lesson games on his site) ​
• Karl Kapp's blog (author of one of the recommended books) ​
• ​Gabe Zichermann's blog (also an author of one of the recommended books)
  
• Gamification Paper.li Daily ​

You should also follow these people on Twitter if you are a Tweep:

@gzicherm  @roybot  @mrmatera  @DanBenoni  ​@alicekeeler

Finally, if you are really keen, Kevin Werbach from U. Penn offers a course on Coursera​ about Gamification.  He doesn't have one going at the moment, but you can add yourself to the watchlist and Coursera will inform about the next start date.  You can also contact him personally on Twitter @kwerb

​Step 3: Discuss Your Ideas with Colleagues

After doing a bit of research, I was ready to jump on the Crazy Train myself (metaphorically speaking).  It was truly great to have him as a resource throughout this process. If there are other teachers interested in gamification at your school or district, form a group to discuss strategies with each other. Two minds (or three or four) are always better than one.  If you are flying solo, revert back to my Twitter suggestion.  There are so many people out there who would love to discuss this topic with you.  Just search using the hashtags #gamification or #gamify, find someone who is tweeting about relevant experiences and then engage them in a dialogue, or reach out to one of the handles posted above.  You can also send questions to me at ‏@roryaileen.

​As we head into summer vacation, this is the perfect time to start exploring gamification while you are not immersed in the day to day grind of being a teacher. Gamifying your content takes time.  Start small and give it a go!  In my next post I will discuss designing your playbook.  Until then, happy training! 

Gamification 101: Why Gamify? Part I

Meet my niece and nephew, Brody and Riley.  They were three and two when these pictures were taken.  That is my iPad.  They are now five and four.  I live in India, so sadly, I only get to see them once or twice a year.  We usually meet up at my parents house while I am home for the summer.  ​I count the days and then hours until I hear the sound of the car in the driveway and catch a glimpse of the excitement on their faces when they first see me on the back patio.  My nephew can hardly contain himself as he desperately tries to break free of the seat belt, scrambling for the car door.  He runs towards my open arms, shouting, "Aunt Rory! Can I play with your iPad?!?!". 

Angry Birds 1:  Aunt Rory 0. 

I take what I can get.

Typically, I don't see my iPad for the duration of their visit.  The lengths that my nephew,  will go to to play games are astounding.  Who knew such small people were capable of such sinister manipulation and deception.  ​One afternoon, we spent about half an hour looking for Brody, only to find him hiding behind the couch in an Angry Birds trance with the sound turned off to avoid detection.  We have all been there, or know someone who has lost all will power and surrendered to the call of the game Sirens.  Just ask my students.  The other day this post from one student to another showed up on my feed.

You know it is bad when they don't respond to Facebook messages!  My response?  STOP PLAYING CRIMINAL CASE AND STUDY FOR YOUR IB EXAMS!  Hmmmm... Maybe if IB exams were more like a game.  Now there is a thought. 

​I decided to give it a try.  About an hour before my seniors went in to take their IB exam for Biology last week, several of them showed up in my classroom in a state of sheer panic.  It was time for the pep talk.  "It's just a game.  Go in there and grab as many points as you can while trying to beat your own high score or better yet, beat Mr. Roy. Exact your revenge for all of those times that he took advantage of your age and inexperience just to add another mark to his win column. Just think of it as a game."  I immediately saw the tension drain from their faces, and a couple of them had gone to their happy place replacing the panic with a confident smirk.  It was obvious that they were about to engage in an epic battle against Mr. Roy for the next three and a half hours and the odds were in their favor. 

24 hours after exams, the teachers are given the exam materials, including the multiple choice booklets that the students mark up before putting the answers on their answer sheet.  While searching for a clean copy to add to my files, I discovered this on the cover of one of the exams.

​Anonymous Student 1: Mr. Roy 0

So what makes games so appealing?  I have been reading a book called Designing Games by Tynan Sylvester.  Tynan does a great job at defining the emotional journey of a game by breaking it down into the elements that make us so vulnerable to those game Sirens.  The first piece of the puzzle is the mechanics of the game.  Mechanics are the elements of games that define how a game works and determine the complexity and level of player interaction.  Things such as risk and rewards, movement, resource management, victory conditions, timing, loss avoidance etc. are all examples of game mechanics.  Mechanics create an arousal state using threats and challenges.

Mechanics are then layered with fictional elements or the story of the game.  This gives the game emotional meaning, which as we know is important for learning (see below). 

When you combine the mechanics and the fictional layer, you create events that provoke emotions and ultimately lead to ​an integrated experience. 

So what does this have to do with education?  Rule #4 from the book Brain Rules by John Medina, is "We don't pay attention to boring things".  Medina goes on to explain, "We pay attention to things like emotions, threats and sex. Regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to these questions: Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me? Have I seen it before?"  A perfect example of this is Apple"s 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh computer.  ​He also talks about the positive effects of stress and emotional memory (check out slide #2).  Games are great at creating emotional experiences with the right combination of mechanics and story elements.

Games also have an element of repetition or grinding built in that enhances the brains ability to retain learning for a longer period of time.    ​

When you compare the elements of games with current brain research on learning enhancement, gamifying learning is theoretically a win-win, a "no brainer" if you will.  The trick is to find a way to make the learning objectives an integral part of the game play so that the only way that a winning condition can be achieved is through the mastery of these objectives. 

Examples of Gamification

The first example is an activity from my 10th grade Physics class called "Save Earth".  See if you can identify the game mechanics in this activity.  Here is a video clip of the students working on saving the world from destruction.  By combining the game mechanics with the fictional elements I was able to successfully design an emotional experience for the students to enhance their learning of Newton's Laws. 

Jason Roy is the review game master.  You can find many examples of gamification on his blog, crispymath.com​.  Two great games of his that are easy to adapt to different disciplines, are Crocodile Dentist and Danger Cards.  They definitely do the job of creating fun, emotionally charged experiences while accomplishing the learning objectives.

If you are just getting started and want to start with something less complicated, check out jeopardylabs.com for a ready-made online jeopardy template, or give technology taboo a try.  ​

If you have gamified content in your class, please share your experiences and suggestions.  I would love to hear about them! 

In my next post, I will discuss a strategy for getting started on designing longer-term classroom games.  

March Madness and How I Learned to Love Physics

It has been a rough week, and it is only Monday.  March Madness has an entirely different connotation for IB teachers.  While basketball fans all over enjoy the frenzy of NCAA fever, IB teachers are similarly overcome with a frenzy of panic.  Will I finish the syllabus before mocks or better yet, exams in May?  Will they manage to submit an internal assessment that will give them the points that they need to achieve their goal?  Have I done all that I can do to combat the senioritis that is invariably picking my students off one by one? This is my March Madness, and it happens every year like clockwork. It is times like these that I need to remind myself why I teach in the first place.

I have been teaching biology for the past 16 years.  It is my first love and my passion.  Naturally, chemistry fits right into my passion, so by default, I love chemistry as well.  If I could spend my days exploring the mysteries of these two disciplines in depth with my students, I would be a happy girl.  However, when you teach in a high school with only 200 students, you need to be a jack of all trades.  This means that physics has to enter into the equation.  For 13 of my 16 years of teaching, physics has been a part of my repertoire.  Every year, I converted countless students to the biology and chemistry fan clubs through my enthusiasm for these two subjects alone...and then I taught them physics.  A large percentage of the population share my former apathy for physics, and an even larger percentage of the population break out into a cold sweat and curl up into the fetal position at the mere mention of kinematics and energy conversions.  Imagine how hard it is to convince students to embrace physics when you yourself are counting the days until the trimester of torture will end.  I realized last year that I had two choices: learn to embrace physics and find my passion for teaching it, or move to a school with 2000 students where I could avoid it altogether.  

I decided that I could no longer let physics control my major life decisions, and I began my search for the magic that was missing from my relationship with Isaac Newton and James Joule.  It just so happened that I was researching games-based learning for my task force with the Research and Development Team.  To borrow from Dr. Strangelove, this is my story about “how I learned to stop hating and love physics” through gamification.

A couple of years ago, Jason Roy, a friend of mine who teaches Math, described a Newton's Law activity that he used to do with his physics students called "Save Kelly".  Essentially he would give the students a survival kit filled with random stuff.  It doesn't matter what you put in it, but you need to include ​materials that could be used to propel a vehicle of coins across the room on a string.  He would give them the period to design a vehicle and then hold a competition at the end.  He then had them write up their lab in a creative way.  One student actually wrote an obituary for Kelly.  You can imagine how that vehicle turned out.

Anyway, I thought the idea was genius, so I shamelessly stole it (with his permission of course) and transformed it into a week long project to introduce my physics game that takes the kids through the concepts of work, energy and power.  ​Since he frequently reads my blog (mostly to find ways to mock me), I am hoping that he will write a counter post (success...check it out) on his blog and share some of the work that the students produced. 

You can find all of the instructions and the rubric for Save Earth! under the Integrated Science Lessons ​tab.  Each year this project gets bigger and more fantastic.  Tomorrow as a faculty we are supposed to share ways that we address the following 21st century skills in our classes:  creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and information fluency.  This activity hits the three c's right out of the park.  I cannot tell you how much I love watching these kids struggle with epic fail after epic fail as they collaborate on creative ways to design their vehicles.  By allowing them three days to create, test, fail, destroy and repeat over and over, the learning that takes place is out of this world (pun intended... you will understand when you check out the assignment). 

Here is a video of my students working on this project this year.  Thanks Jason Roy for planting the seed. There is certainly something to be said for stealing like an artist.  It is hard not to love physics after you see this project in action.

http://bit.ly/14k981K