Today during our Ed. Tech course, one of our instructors challenged us to think about how we might be able to structure a class like a video game in order to entice students who might otherwise remain disengaged. I am going to happily accept that challenge. What follows are my thoughts on how a classroom might be able to resemble a video game.
- On an Xbox 360, a player is prompted to make a profile before they start playing games. They pick a gamer photo, a gamertag, enter a bit of information about themselves if they would like to, and are then ready to play. At the beginning of the school year (or of the timeframe you are looking to use this strategy) a student could be asked to do the same. Pick a username they would like to be referred to as (obviously staying appropriate), bring in a photo they would like to put up on their profile and write a bit about themselves. These "profiles" could be put onto poster boards and hung up around the classroom. These will provide a location for them to post their "achievements" which I will describe below. The students could also decorate their profiles to be representative of who they are and their interests.
- The next thing that Xbox 360 has done with their games to make them a bit more rewarding is to introduce the idea of "achievements". Each game comes with a list of accomplishments (the aforementioned achievements) that when reached, reward the player a certain number of gamer points. Each game is usually made up of 1000 gamer points divided into different achievements based on difficulty of the task. For example beating the first level of a particular game might be worth 10 points while beating the entire game might be worth 100. In a classroom setting, particularly an English class, each project or book that you assign could come with achievements. Let's take The Great Gatsby as an example. If you finish the book, you get 75 points. For each chapter you finish, you get 10 points. If you can name and describe one character from the book, you get 10 points. If you can name and describe 3 characters form the book, you get 40 points. If you can explain the significance of the green light at the end of the dock, you get 30 points. These achievements would be determined prior to the assignment, and then the students would work to get the highest "gamerscore" possible for that book. To determine whether or not they have reached these achievements, the teacher could ask them to write paragraphs, talk to them about the topic, or some other means of assessment. For each achievement, the student could get a little notecard with the achievement and the point value (often times achievements have clever names i.e. in Tiger Woods 2012, if you land a shot 5 inches or closer to the cup you get the achievement "Scared of the Dark"). They could then take these note cards and post them on their profiles. For the sake of discretion, you could have the achievements be posted under the name of the particular assignment or novel so that kids don't feel bad if they don't have many achievements for that task. And the idea of achievements extends beyond books; you could do it for research papers (30 points for three sources, 40 points for a rough draft) or any other idea. The key here is to be creative and emphasize the important information.
- Next we can move onto what the gamerscore could mean. The easiest answer for me here, and the one that makes the most sense in the classroom I think, is that you could offer kids rewards for reaching certain milestones within projects or within the class as a whole. For example, if a kid gets 500 points on the Great Gatsby, he might be exempt from one upcoming homework assignment. If he gets 750 points, perhaps his final paper on the novel can be 2-3 pages shorter than the requirement for other students. If they reach a score of that level, clearly they are grasping the novel quite well. Another option could be basing the students grade off of the gamerscore. If they get 750 points for a particular project, that get be a C. If they get 850 a B, 950 an A, and so on. This could be a neat way to get kids energized about their projects and their grades.
As a parting thought, this could even be offered as an alternative to the normal classroom curriculum and structure. That way, if kids are interested in relating it to video games they can and if students feel like they would learn better the traditional way, they can choose that instead. And these are simply some thoughts about how a classroom might operate like a video game. I'm sure there are other options for blending the two into one desirable product.
Casey,
ReplyDeleteWow. Really thought-provoking stuff. I really like your ideas. No doubt, the kids would really get into creating profiles and working toward beating levels. That is definitely speaking their language. A couple things I would ask you to consider:
How could I track all of these points/achievements and still have a life? Is there a way to empower them to do all the tracking?
I currently have a classroom set of Chromebooks. How might I utilize those in this process?
For the tasks, how/can I tie them to the Common Core standards in a way that forces students to continue refining the skill? So, for example, if a kid can use a semicolon correctly on one performance task, does he/she get all the points and we never revisit that skill? In other words, how can we address the recursive nature of English? Embedded in this is the very tricky issue of assessment.
Terrific stuff. I really appreciate your input.
As far as tracking the points, perhaps you could have a grade-book of sorts (maybe even an accessible Google doc or an excel sheet) where you could quickly enter points as the students reached certain achievements. Depending on how comfortable you are with the students being honest about their reporting, you could even have them utilize the Chromebooks that they have to enter in their own achievements on a class-wide Google doc. A pretty big reservation I would have about that though, is that the results would be public and all of the students could see if a particular student was struggling. Maybe there is a way to hide the other entries from an individual. As an alternative, you could set up a filing system and as you hand out achievements to students you could file one copy away. In doing so, you could task the students with keeping track of their score, and at the end of a marking period or semester you could quickly check their reported score against the file that you have on them. Perhaps accurately tracking their own score could be an achievement in and of itself that they could earn at the end of the marking period/semester/year.
DeleteAs far as the Chromebooks go, I've mentioned the one possible utilization for them, but that's pretty limited as far as the depth and power of these books. I'll have to continue to think about this question. There must be something here considering that we are talking about a technology.
Finally, addressing your last question, specifically the example that you give, perhaps "correct usage of a semicolon" if that is an important part of your course, or even broader "correct use of (advanced?) punctuation" could be an achievement worth 50 points and every correct usage is a point. You could potentially limit them to 10 points per assignment or paper, that way they have a chance to develop the skill over time and show you that they have learned it by reproducing it on a later papers for points.
One of my good friends suggested that you could consider changing "gamer" to "student" in all terms so that the focus is still on school. I'll definitely keep considering ways that this might be able to actually work.
I really like your idea of starting the year off by creating usernames for the game. I think this is an important part of every video game we play where we chose an identity to complete the game under. That character might have certain traits or skills that we hope will benefit us once we enter the gaming world. It should be the same for this classroom game structure, the students don't even have to play themselves if they don't want to and it could help them strive to be the best player (or student in this case). I also really like the posting of the profiles to highlight achievements! I think there could end up being a lot of these so I don't know how the space would allow for them, but again I think it gives the students a chance to be creative about their character they want to embody throughout the length of the video game. I guess something else to think about is what if certain students fall behind their classmates in achievements and this is displayed on the boards? I'm not quite sure what I would do in that case, but I'd like to think that the game itself might motivate those students do try their hardest anyways! Really nifty thoughts you have going on here!
ReplyDeleteI didn't think about the size issue as far as wall space! If you had 90 kids over three classes in a semester, you might be hard pressed to post them all. I really like the idea of kids getting to choose a profile that might not be entirely like them. I think that certain types of children (i.e. those who are very shy) might really benefit from a chance to be "something else." As far as issues with students who fall behind, in the blog I mentioned something about creating a "flipbook" of achievements where the related achievements would be posted under a photo of the particular assignment such as a photo of the cover of the book. That way students wouldn't have to have their results easily viewed if they didn't want them. Perhaps the students could choose to post only particular assignments on their profile; that way if they didn't do as well as they would have liked on a particular assignment then they could not have that one on the board. Definitely things to consider, thanks for the feedback!
DeleteGreat ideas! I tried to come up with a creative video game classroom but you came with completely different stuff. I like the ideas of the gamer profiles and poster boards. I think this would inspire creativity in kids and get them excited about the year. I also like the idea of the more points they get they can earn special exemptions from certain assignments. Very creative stuff and I think kids would love it!
ReplyDeleteI really like this idea. As a fellow advocate for incorporating gaming into the classroom, I thought you raised a few key components of how video games really could have components that can relate to teaching. The visual aspect you mentioned with the gamer profile is something I think the students would really get into and allow them to take ownership of. I also enjoyed the structured outline you gave with mention of the point system and achievements that they would be receiving for completing certain stages of a subject. Really great ideas!
ReplyDeleteShoot, this post makes me wish that we could team-teach an English/History class (c-c-c-COMBO!) I think our thoughts align on a few really key aspects, especially those of identity and a rethinking of grading practices. I really like how you've flushed out a system of establishing this identity-by-choice in the classroom by way of asking/allowing students to create gamer profiles. Likewise, I like very much that you've exerted effort in rethinking how grades (and the points they represent) can be employed for the purpose of increasing motivation.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I keep running up against, though, is that games, by their very nature, often focus on the use of extrinsic motivators (such as "achievements") to spur players on toward completion. These have their place, but how could we make the gameplay itself fun? In other words, how could we design lessons so that they might be intrinsically fun and even have that holy grail that game designers strive for, that of high replay value?
Keep killin' it,
Matt