Going Gameful: Level Up Your Learners' Motivation

If you watch someone play a video game or a group of people playing a board game you get to see people who have learned (or are learning) a new language, a new set of social norms and behaviors and how to interact with a custom interface despite the challenges that accompany that kind of deep learning. When learners come into our classroom, we don’t often see such intense engagement. How might we adopt the principles that go into designing games to build learning environments that foster that level of engagement?

One key factor to understanding an individual’s engagement with an environment (how the individual interacts) is the motivation of the individual (the why of the interaction). Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (Deci and Ryan, 2000) is a model for human motivation that identifies a spectrum of loci for motivation, ranging from extrinsic to the individual, such as receiving a reward for a completing a task, to intrinsic to the individual, where the person acts because they are inherently interested in the task. The model also articulates three factors, that when present, can foster more intrinsic motivation: a sense of autonomy, a sense of competence, and a sense of belonging.

Scholars from a range of disciplines (Gee, 2003; McGonigal, 2012, Aguilar et al, 2013) have considered how game design principles can inspire and inform design in other contexts. Interestingly, well-designed games generally provide for the basic psychological needs articulated in SDT.

• There are multiple pathways to winning a game (autonomy);
• Players start on equal footing and build toward the final goal (competence);
• There is an appropriate balance of cooperation & competition in multi-player games, and even in single-player games, affinity groups and communities develop to play of the game (belonging).

Traditional learning environments are often designed, at best, ignoring these needs. Gameful learning environments, though, build off our current understanding of motivation, take inspiration from games, and employ teaching practices derived from the learning sciences. A gameful course supports learners’ agency, giving them options for how to demonstrate their learning, does not ration success, i.e. does not curve the final grade and allows learners to make mistakes and recover from those mistakes, either through resubmission or providing additional assessment options.

This session will explore the philosophy behind gameful pedagogy, the principles, derived from that philosophy, which can guide your course designs, and the teaching practices that can further support the intrinsic motivation of your learners. Participants will brainstorm ways they might use gameful pedagogy in their own course design, understand the difference between gameful learning and gamification, and develop a plan for giving students choices in how to demonstrate their learning.

References:

Aguilar, S., Fishman, B., Holman, C. Leveling-Up: Evolving Game-Inspired University Course Design. Paper for Games+Learning+Society Conference 9.0. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Madison, WI, 2013.

Gee, James Paul. What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Palgrave Macmillan., 2003.

McGonigal, Jane. Reality is broken: why games make us better and how they can change the world. Vintage, 2012.