Teaching in the Game-Based Classroom

Practical Strategies for Grades 6-12

David Seelow, David Seelow

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000411737
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Didattica
• Categoria: Tecnologia nella didattica

Teaching in the Game-Based Classroom is a hands-on guide to leveraging students' embrace of video games toward successful school performance. Evidence tells us that game-based learning can help teachers design classes, develop transformative learning tools, and assess progress on multiple levels not dependent on one-size-fits-all bubble sheets. Authored by game-savvy teachers in partnership with classroom-experienced academics, the highly varied chapters of this book are concise yet filled with sound pedagogical approaches. Middle and high school educators will find engaging new ways of inspiring students' intrinsic motivation, skill refinement, positive culture-building, autonomy as learners, and more.

1
Improve Student Engagement with Gameful Learning

Barry Fishman, Caitlin Hayward and Rachel Niemer

As educators, we want our students to be deeply engaged. We want them to work hard and take on intellectual challenges. We want them to take risks and try new things. And when things don’t go as planned, we want students to be resilient and learn from their efforts. But the way our education system is designed encourages the opposite of these behaviors. Many chapters in this volume describe the use of games in learning. In this chapter, we describe how games are a metaphor for school itself, and how following principles of good game design can make a tremendous difference in how students engage with school. We introduce gameful learning, an approach to course design intended to enhance learner engagement and support them in feeling more intrinsically motivated. When students are intrinsically motivated, they learn more, are more willing to take risks, and are more resilient.

Roots of the Current System

How did we reach the point where students care more about grades than learning? This situation should not surprise us. As Cathy Davidson put it, our students

were well-taught and learned well the lesson implicit in our society that what matters is not the process or the learning but the end result, the grade…. The message we’re giving our students today is all that really counts is the final score.

(Davidson, 2013)

The dominant, percentage-based approach to grading was intended to make education more scientific, including a purportedly objective way to compare students to each other (Kirschenbaum et al., 1971/2021). Unfortunately, this system provides only the illusion of accuracy and reliability (Brookhart et al., 2016; Guskey, 2013). There is ample evidence that percentage-based grading and grade point averages only serve to obscure information about learning (Rose, 2016) and promulgate bias and inequity (Kendi, 2019).

School Is a Terrible Game

If the current system isn’t working the way we want it to, what should we do instead? We believe that well-designed games provide an excellent frame to think about supporting student motivation. Motivation researchers have been fascinated by the mechanisms that underlie effective games for decades (e.g., Malone & Lepper, 1987). James Paul Gee (2003) arguably kicked off the current movement around games and learning by dissecting popular games and explaining their success in terms of socio-cultural and cognitive theories of learning. The next step in our path towards developing gameful learning was realizing that school itself is a kind of game. Consider this definition of games from eminent game designers Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman: “A game is a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003, p. 80). If you replace the words “game” and “players” in that definition with “school” and “learners,” you get a straightforward description of how school operates. The “quantifiable outcome,” of course, is the grade. Inspired by Gee’s analysis, we realized that the inverse of his observation also applied: If great games (and schools) are motivating and lead to learning, bad games (and schools) discourage engagement and learning.

We call attention to two critical flaws in the way grades are typically used in schools. The first is that when you design a percentage-based grading system, you put students into a losing game. Everyone starts with 100 percent. Suppose you earn 95 percent on an assignment, an A! However, you have lost your perfect score. Games typically do the opposite: you start with zero and build up. The goal of a well-designed game isn’t perfection, it’s progress. Struggling doesn’t remove the possibility of succeeding at the highest level. In percentage-based grading, learners are punished for struggling, even if they end up learning just as much as (or more than!) students who did not struggle. People play well-designed games because they are challenging, not despite that fact. We have difficulty remembering the last time a student asked us for the “hardest thing” they could work on.

The second flaw is that grades reduce information about learning. What does an “A” mean? What does 90 percent mean with respect to how much one has learned? As Alfie Kohn (2019) argues, grades are more about ranking students than about describing what they know and can do. Grades were never about supporting or even accurately reporting students’ learning; they merely make it easier for students to be sorted and selected by colleges and employers. To this end, schools often ration success and expect grades in a class to be distributed along something like a bell curve (Rose, 2016). This makes no sense. If we taught learners successfully, shouldn’t everyone be able to achieve high marks? Instead of celebrating teachers where everyone does well, we stigmatize them as “easy graders.” We need a better game.

Ten Principles to Make Learning in School a Better Game

Drawing from a wide range of scholarship and from our own experiences in designing and teaching gameful courses, we have devised ten principles that guide our thinking about how successful games can inform successful learning experiences.

Clear Learning Goals

Nobody starts playing a game without some clear idea of what they are playing for. If you have ever been told that you are learning something “because it will be on the test,” or “because it is required,” that isn’t good enough. Good education design starts with clear goals, and then works backward to design the elements of learning (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). If you begin a learning process with no idea why you are there or what the point is, you’re most likely playing a bad game.

Balance Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

In discussions of motivation, there is a general sense that doing something out of pure interest (i.e., intrinsic motivation) is better than doing something for a reward or to avoid a penalty (i.e., extrinsic motivation). And in general, this is true, especially for maintaining sustained engagement. However, in an academic context, extrinsic motivation is nearly impossible to avoid entirely, because we are often aiming for larger goals (e.g., get into a good college, become a doctor) that are not expressed clearly in any individual course. And extrinsic motivation can also be useful, helping us stick to deadlines, to follow rules, etcetera. The key is to strike a balance between these two forms of motivation (Roy & Zaman, 2017). We may start off with the extrinsic reward in mind, but as we go, a well-designed play/learning experience will engage us with the activity and learning as its own reward.

Support Autonomy

Good games give players a sense of agency, allowing them to make choices that have consequences (Gee, 2003). This design principle is drawn from Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), a foundational theory of human motivation. In a classroom, why do we insist that everyone proceed in the same order and at the same pace? Learners are diverse, and by respecting those differences, we help them succeed (Guskey, 2010; Rose, 2016). By giving learners a say in the path they follow, we deepen their buy-in to the process.

Create a Sense of Belonging

A second key principle from Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is to create a sense of belonging or relatedness. This means having your contributions or presence recognized by others and feeling supported when you need help. In games, this takes the form of being part of a team, cooperative play, and even in competition against others. Well-designed competition provides a measure of how your skills relate to those around you (Rigby & Ryan, 2011). In school, students sometimes feel misunderstood, isolated, or in the case of large classes, invisible. Grading conventions like the “curve” ration success, and pit learners against one other in unproductive ways. Good games don’t do this.

Create Early Wins and Visible Progress

Good games provide opportunities for early successes, reducing player frustration and translating effort into progress. The “junior version” of baseball—tee ball—allows young players to successfully hit the ball just like the major leaguers. As they improve, there are more “just right” challenges to keep players moving along without getting overly frustrated (Perkins, 2008). This is also a principle of SDT: providing support for competence. In this frame, supporting competency means providing tasks that students are prepared for but may also find challenging (Rigby & Ryan, 2011). The feeling we get from completing easy work isn’t nearly as motivating as the sense of accomplishment we feel after doing something difficult.

Allow for Productive Failure

Ask any entrepreneur: “Productive failures,” where we take away lessons to apply to future attempts, are essential to success (Kapur, 2016). Sports, which are extremely well-designed games, involve a mix of winning and losing across one’s career. In school we put too much emphasis on constant success. Students who are admitted to highly selective colleges have probably never experienced a significant “failure,” which also means they weren’t truly pushed. And as noted earlier, percentage-based grading systems punish learners who don’t succeed right away, by dragging down their average. In good games, it’s how you finish that counts the most.

Encourage Exploration

If you watch a serious gamer play a well-designed game, when they complete a level, they don’t just move on. Instead, they go back, and they poke around to see what elements the game designers included that they missed the first time through. What they are doing is trying to understand the system of the game (Gee, 2003). And isn’t that really the point of learning a subject? We don’t want students to memorize the facts of science. We want them to learn to think about the world the way a scientist would. Understanding the system is more important than getting “right” answers (Collins, 2017).

Foster Identity Play

A corollary to encouraging exploration is to encourage students to explore their identity. In the “magic circle” of game play, you get to be a warrior, an astronaut, a basketball player. In the moment of the game, you aren’t merely experimenting with these identities, you are becoming them in a meaningful, if temporary, way (Gee, 2003). This has strong parallels to education. John Seely Brown has argued that most of school is “learning about” things, mostly in the form of facts. When school works well, it is “learning to do,” in the form of project-based or hands-on learning experiences. But the ultimate goal for education should be helping students “learn to become,” to form images of their future selves and play with different identities (Thomas & Brown, 2011).

Include Opportunities for Practice and Reinforcement

Practice makes perfect. One of the great things about a digital game is that it never gets tired of you trying to get better. That can be hard to achieve in a regular classroom, because neither time nor patience are infinite. But harkening back to several of the principles mentioned earlier, including visible progress and productive failure, good games and good learning experiences let you practice to improve. This concept was one of the motivating factors behind the development of mastery-based learning (Guskey, 2010).

Embed Assessment in Learning

Finally, we note that you will probably never see a championship sports team sitting down to take a test on their sport after hoisting the trophy. Nor will you see a gamer complete a level and be given a quiz on key ideas from that level, at least not in a well-designed game. That’s because the assessment of what these players have learned is embedded in the experience. They could not have completed the challenge of the game without having learned what was needed. We spend a lot of time on summative assessment in education, fostering a culture of measurement, instead of designing for “in game” or formative assessment to foster a culture of learning (Shepard, 2000). Good teaching also emphasizes assessment that is authentic to the task or goals. Standardized tests are a narrow way to measure understanding. Recently, educational researchers have started to focus on this idea literally, in the form of “stealth assessment” of learning in educational games (Shute & Ventura, 2013).

It’s Not Gamification …It’s Gameful

We make a distinction between gameful and the more broadly used term, gamification. Gamification, which has become increasingly prominent in many areas of modern life, primarily leverages superficial elements of games to create extrinsic motivations to take actions. Gamification has the power to be coercive and deceptive (Bogost, 2011), but there are also many good applications of game design for learning that are call...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• About the Author
• Introduction: The Urgency of Innovation
• 1 Improve Student Engagement with Gameful Learning
• 2 Videogames, Feedback Loops, and Classroom Practice
• 3 Minecraft and Socially Situated Student Learning
• 4 Minecraft and Transformative Teaching
• 5 The Whole Enchilada, a Game for Teaching Mathematical Fluency
• 6 Level Up Science: Design Thinking, Games and Project-Based Learning
• 7 Cellverse: Using Virtual Reality to Learn about Cells from the Inside Out
• 8 Living in Media: Why Teach the World’s most Controversial Video Game?
• 9 Engaging History Through Student Authored Text Adventure Games
• 10 An Overview of Live Immersive Social Interactives and Their Educational Value for Grades 6–12
• 11 Don’t Split the Party: Using Games to Enhance Social-Emotional Learning Strategies
• 12 Promoting Student Health and Well-Being with Digital Games
• 13 Using Games for Empathy, Compassion, and Care
• 14 What We Learned: From Games to Make Assessment Playful
• Conclusion: Once We Defeat the COVID-19 Boss Battle, What Then?
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Image Credits
• About the Contributors