Gamification provides an approachable model for open pedagogy. We will describe three different gamified systems that draw on familiar concepts like choose your own adventure narratives and dungeon-crawling role play to promote student autonomy, growth mindset, and safe-zones for experimentation and failure.
Gamification provides an approachable model for open pedagogy. We will describe three different gamified systems that draw on familiar concepts like choose your own adventure narratives and dungeon-crawling role play to promote student autonomy, growth mindset, and safe-zones for experimentation and failure.
The first part of this session will focus on an effort to use gamification to increase student motivation during the redesign of a traditionally face-to-face course into an online course. The course’s professor will explain how she implemented a gamification system called 3DGameLab in a novel way to provide a variety of possible learning paths. Rather than using the same three units of content that she traditionally used in the face-to-face humanities course, the instructor developed more than a dozen units and allowed each student to choose the content that most interested them and to work at their own pace. The modular design of the units also afforded the opportunity to implement micro-assessments, shortening the feedback loop. Each student started the course with zero points and earned her grade through these micro-assessments and an optional final-boss challenge. After it’s initial redesign, this course has also been taught as a hybrid course with both in-person meetings and online components.
Building on the instructor’s perspective in implementing gamified course systems, the second portion of this session will shift to the developer’s approach and explain the evolution of a gamified learning management system called GradeCraft. Earned grades, freedom to fail, increased autonomy, and transparent progression are all concepts that work well in both games and the classroom. The researchers behind GradeCraft will discuss the pedagogical principles behind their design and relay the feedback they have received from early adopters.
The third part of this session will describe a five-hour professional development workshop intended to help University faculty learn how to develop text-based video games for their courses. The designers of the eXperience Play workshop series will explain how, by introducing the faculty to educational video game design, they used this technology as a vehicle to teach educational principles like scaffolding, assessment design, and peer-to-peer discussions. While faculty were using design thinking to prototype their games, they were also challenged to think about how to transfer their experience with open pedagogy back into their own classrooms. This eXperience Play professional development workshop was developed as an open educational resource and is now being adapted and implemented at other universities. The original developers of eXperience Play will be joined by a colleague currently adapting the workshops for his University to discuss instructional adaptation within the open educational ecosystem.
Games, like classes, require instructions for getting started, mechanisms for progression and motivation, and clear goals that feel authentic for participants. Gamification affords the opportunity to redesign assessments and shorten the feedback loop. Students can help to develop their own personalized experience by choosing the content and schedule that best suit them. Instructors can act as facilitators to encourage learning through fun. This session presents gamification not as a narrow application of badges, leaderboards, and competition but rather as a model for pedagogical innovation.