Gamifying the curriculum

The intersections between gaming and school as usual are a subject of continual fascination for me. In class this week, we talked about two possible intersections: bringing games into the classroom (my presentation) and using virtual worlds to bring the classroom into a game environment (Gabe's presentation). There is a third alternative as well: bringing the game paradigm into the classroom and allowing it to restructure the academic experience. 

Both parts of the preceding description are important to understand what I mean. The first part, "bringing the game paradigm into the classroom" makes a reference to the millennial practice of allowing cultural practices from the world of gaming to "leak" out into the non-virtual world. The second part of the description implies that we are not simply making reference to these cultural practices, but also enacting them, letting our conventional ideas of what learning "looks like" to be deeply influenced by all that we have learned from the gamer community of practice.

To be get a big-picture view, I've drawn a simple Venn diagram:

It is possible to conceive of virtual classrooms without game elements, video games without pedagogical elements, and gamified classrooms without virtual elements. Further, we can conceive of gamified virtual classrooms that combine all three elements. A project like Edorble (beta signup here) which is currently in the virtual classroom stage - there aren't any gamified elements in it yet - could move into the center of the diagram by adding some elements of the game paradigm.

Naturally, I would be remiss in my academic duties if I didn't complicate this picture a little bit. Because of the strong influence of gamer culture on virtual worlds, there should be quite a bit of purple bleeding into the red circle on the top. Most users of virtual worlds will expect a few of the affordances of video games: a menu may appear when I press "esc", a graphical overlay may give me information about the world, and some of the avatars with whom I interact may be non-player-characters (NPCs). Likewise, video games often engage in pedagogy. Never Alone teaches us about Inupiak culture, Mass Effect is a veritable primer in ethics and sociology, and the Bioshock Infinite is a parable about the confluence of religion, nationalism, and racism in American history. Such high-concept video games, while increasingly common, remain the exception rather than the rule. Finally, while gamified classrooms may offer alternatives to the traditional classroom paradigm, they are still structurally embedded in a system of social promotion, report cards, and killjoy bureaucracies.

In my own experience, gamification of the classroom can produce both positive and negative results, depending on a number of factors, including the rules of the game and the group with whom you play. I have seen team competitions propel performance, but I've also seen them degenerate into petty arguments. Posting public scoreboards seems to motivate everyone at first, before demotivating those who continually find themselves at the bottom of the list. For some tasks, such as rewarding speaking in a foreign-language class through Class-dojo, I found gamification almost universally helpful. More extensive attempts at gamification seem like they necessitate a high level of teacher autonomy and organization in order for the class to really play. For example, take a look at this rule sheet:

More character skill trees can be found here.

While I applaud the design of this rule-sheet, I'd love to talk to the professor who designed it about how s/he keeps track of everyone's progression in the game and their accompanying position on the skill-tree (read: is this what I get to do after tenure?).

If gamifying your curriculum, even in some limited way, interests you, then I encourage you to check out this article from last year's Education Weekly, which lays out eight principles for successful gamification. I like this article because of its emphasis on the fact that on a conceptual level, gamification is just good pedagogy.