Gamifying Education. Edufying Gamification.

I’m a teacher of mostly young adults, at the college level.  So education is on my mind a lot.

So here’s a thing to watch.

(The web site he’s talking about that is a riddle sequence is Notpron. With an embed, you’re bereft of the link as promised, so, there ya go. Odd name for a game, but pretty cool if you like that sort of thing.)

I will say that I came in to this video preparing to largely disagree. Skeptic on ARGs, Skeptic on Gamification (at least in its current method of largely ‘pointification’).

But maybe it’s the term “gamification” I have a problem with, rather than the idea of injecting some fun, which is the real point of the exercise.

When I was in Junior High there was an advanced program for gifted students, which was called Gateway. Gateway took the place of your normal English and Writing periods, and basically was an advanced English class with additional writing, spelling, and other lessons tacked on. It was for the smart kids only, so, in order to get in you needed to be above a certain reading threshold in prior classes.

You wanted to be in Gateway because it was the most funnest class. (I was, as you can tell by my scholarly use of the phrase “most funnest.”) Here is a short list of some of the amazing stuff done in Gateway:

• Japanese Lessons, mostly done via a series of kooky videos called “Yan San and the Japanese People.” This also included getting to eat Japanese food like seaweed crackers and little dried fish with the eyeballs still on.  And writing haiku.
• A unit on Ancient Greece, where every group table was a different Grecian city, and we all got points as a city for different activities we did. Sparta, as the “aggressive” city, was like Slytherin and encouraged to cheat for points. We also had to wear togas to class for a month (bedsheets over our regular clothes).  (I should probably note that the points had nothing to do with our grade.  And in fact Sparta regularly rewrote the points board and at one point “traded” points with Athens.)
• The book The Westing Game, only each student in the class played one character, and any part of the story they wouldn’t know because they weren’t present then was covered in black tape. We read parts in class and acted them out and tried to piece together the mystery during class hours.
• Field trips – big ones, weekend trips – every year.

In other words it was the most “gamified” class ever.

Of course that was before we had the idea of “gamifying” things… it was just a cool creative class about the different ways that learning something new can be fun. I sort of remember feeling bad for the middle schoolers that had to take the boring regular English class. The upper level kids were going to learn that much more, that much faster, while they didn’t even get a chance to catch up.

But I think I understand why only the “gifted kids” got Gateway. The barrier to entry was because the class structure assumed, a) that you had a certain baseline level of ability to read and understand more difficult books, and b) that you were bought in. Even at the young and impressionable age of 12, there are going to be some students that aren’t bought in to the idea of dressing up in togas every day.

I think one of the biggest problems facing teachers today is buy-in on behalf of the students. Maybe it’s the biggest problem facing teachers since the beginning of time; I’m not sure, having not done this since then. But it’s definitely a problem when you’re working with adult learners, and a problem in today’s distractable world.

Do you know what is possibly the biggest factor is in a child’s ability to read?  The amount of books in the home that child grew up in.  It doesn’t even matter too much if the child was read to; just the idea that books are normal, and likely to be present, makes a child more likely to be a reader as he/she grows up, and continue a lifelong habit of reading. An interest in reading leads to natural curiosity. Natural curiosity is what leads to learning.  Learning is not something that can be forced or spoonfed.

That’s why the “Wikipedia Game” as mentioned in the video is a great idea… for a student who is already intrinsically interested in reading stuff. Puzzle-solving mysteries and ARGs are a great idea for that student too. The mere presence of a mystery is going to engage a naturally curious person to try and find the solution.  But as we get older a mystery becomes somewhat less of a motivational factor, much of the time.  We become busier and more impatient, and it’s more difficult for us to buy in to a fantasy that’s attempting to actively engage us (too much effort, to go through a process to be fooled). That’s why, if you’re going to input the idea of mystery learning or different “houses” or other cool tricks it works better on kids than adults.  If you don’t catch them while they’re young – real young – you may never get the buy-in that you’re looking for.  It’s too late for any kind of fun game activity to save someone who aggressively does not care about what you’re trying to teach them.

I’m more skeptical about the idea of “experience points instead of grades” and other hacks that are very commonly proposed.  In fact, I feel the video was weaker for leading with that idea, because it doesn’t really add anything new to the conversation.  This isn’t really adding a game: just reframing assessment in a completely ungame-like way.

The real trick – the thing that nobody is going to do, ever, but which would be an amazing fix – is to get rid of assessment altogether.  This is a crazy, hippie, radical notion that is totally implausible, and I understand why we’re trying to hack assessment rather than remove it.  But think about it this way.  In the days of the arcade coin-crunchers, games had scores in them, and the score was how well you did, and at the end you always inevitably lost and left behind a score.  Now in the days of longer home games, it’s possible to win them, so gradually we started to do away with games requiring something like a score.  The victory was in getting to the end of the game at all.  Maybe you might get an Achievement along the way, but maybe that doesn’t even motivate you.  Playing the game and progressing in it is its own thing.

And that’s what learning should be.  People should want to learn, because, deep down, learning is already fun.  In fact some people like Raph Koster would argue that what we call fun happens because you are learning.

And there are so many things to learn.  What I want for everyone is to figure out what that one thing that excites them is, that thing that they would learn on their own, without anyone forcing it or gamifying it, and just give them the resources and instruction to learn that thing and help them along the way.  If we are treating learning like a boring activity which requires extrinsic motivation, we lose.