Gamification

In my experience as a middle school and high school teacher, I feel that students learn best when they are entertained in a friendly and sometimes competitive environment. Also, in my experience, I feel that student engagement cures most classroom behavior problems and also helps students learn more. Instead of answering questions from readings and tests, unconventional models, such as student presentations or doing projects and getting students involved in the material has helped me, not just with improving the learning, but also improving on student engagement and limiting behavior problems. 

In the video, James Paul Gee on Learning with Video Games, James Gee talks about how we can level the playing field in education if we “bring the games.” In this case he is not just referring to video games, he is referring to activities and problem solving that we can add to the content.

These ideas on gamification interest me because over the last couple of years I have been toying with the idea of making my class a student-paced format using a video game theme. I would use a model much like Summit Learning (see link below) and some of the other student-paced models we have discussed in class, except with a twist. My class would be set up into different levels or challenges based on the unit we need to cover. 

My challenge is to design a program that gets them to also work as teams and be interactive, similar to what James Gee was talking about in his video. If I give them a situation similar to the dungeon he mentioned in World of Warcraft, then they can work together as well as pace themselves. 

Another challenge is to get them to stay with it if they struggle and have trouble moving on to the next level. A solution to this would be that they could still move on, but you have earned fewer points, much like we do now with different letter grades now.  

I originally got the idea from a YouTube channel, Bozeman Biology, I followed for science content. Check out his video/Ted talk on Classroom Game Design. 

Bozeman Biology – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qlYGX0H6Ec 

Summit Learning – https://www.summitlearning.org/