"This Game Sucks" - Article Review and thoughts on a Games-Based Learning Environment

Educause Review Jan/Feb 2011

I was recently recommended to read an article in the Educause Review by Sarah 'Intellagirl' Smith-Robbins entitled "This Game Sucks": How to Improve the Gamification of Education. Here I present a summary of the article and my thoughts on it...

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Sarah opens by comparing the points and level aspects of 'gamification' to assessment grades and graduation in education. She shows how the common criticism in games that this is just 'pointsification' is the same mistake made in education:

"Perhaps education could be improved by ditching the points and adding the game; technology can help."

She goes on to talk about the three characteristics of games: A Goal, Obstacles and Collaboration (or Competition). These three characteristics in FourSquare become: Acquiring badges, the logistics of travel and collecting badges or stealing mayorships.

In higher education the goal should be completing a degree course, but students often think the goal is to do with a well-paid job post-graduation. If education is likened to a game, then a mismatch of the goal means students don't understand the way the game works - ie that it's about learning not just passing. This reflects onto perceived obstacles - staff think it is about mastering content, but students without the learning goal in mind would rather cheat, "grade grub" or complain about harsh marking. The final characteristic of competition becomes animosity and demands on the institution rather than classmates working as a team towards intellectual growth.

Given we do need grades and degrees in HE, the solution to this problem is proposed as improving the game and making learning fun: "To me, a quality education and an entertaining experience are one and the same."

Sarah offers three ideas for small steps we can make to achieve this:
1. Ensuring students align on clear goals e.g. including a 'How can you use this in the future' section on assessment descriptions.
2. Making progress transparent and that grades are not the only measure of progress e.g. online checklists, contributor credits or peer voting.
3. Reflection on your own and your students game play e.g. ask students how they learned to play games and which games they like.

Sarah concludes with a reminder about motivation and engagement: "Focusing on the ways that entertainment technology engages us can result in methods that we can transfer to any learning situation"
all above quotes by Sarah Smith-Robbins - Educause Review Jan/Feb 2011 - I've summarised hugely so please read the article for her fully expanded ideas.

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Well I agree that we can learn from games, but I think we might be able to help lecturing staff along a bit by building some game based approaches into the everyday tools we use to support teaching. I'm not going as far as proposing a Games-Based Learning Environment - but after reading this article I started thinking about what games-based features you could add to something like the Blackboard Learning Environment giving Instructors more choice about the approaches they take.

• Blackboard has a feature called 'adaptive release' allowing content to be hidden until some rule (e.g. 75% on a test) is reached. This could be extended and linked to a series of appropriately named levels to visibly show progress and reward each level with new challenges*. Depending on the discipline you could have fun letting the students construct the names of the levels, what roles do you take on your way to being a mathematician for example?

* note to self: never use this as a way of making core content harder to access than it needs to be. Obscuring for no reason is not my aim, unlocking progressively more challenging self-tests however could be highly motivational.

•  Blackboard offers a 'my grades' tool, which I would extend to provide a customisable leaderboard, yes, I mean seeing some of each other's grades to provide competitive motovation. The Instructor can control which grades are displayed, and if only the top 5 scores are shown.

•  I like Sarah's idea of peer-voting and contribution credits. These could be built into discussion boards or blogs and presented via a module on the course homepage and reinforced by a tutor mentioning top contributors in class sessions.

That's what I've got so far - do you think there's mileage in any of that? As a teacher would you welcome the ability to easily integrate these kind of features, or are you a lecturer and NOT a games designer and would you rather we stopped trying to distract the students from getting on with studying?

The Power of the Community and Critical Mass

I'm not a business person, but I'm fascinated by watching the appearance of new, commercial community-engagement models. Firstly, a couple of examples of recent sightings of community power in action commercially to illustrate what I mean by the title of this post:

1. Giff-Gaff (http://giffgaff.com)

Giff-Gaff is a mobile phone network where members support each other, and are rewarded in credit for doing so. They have strong ethics and develop their service based on member feedback. On their website they state:

We believe in the power of the community. When the community succeeds, we succeed - and vice versa.

Community aspects:

• member to member support forums
• reward for contributions (forums feature unanswered questions and voting)
• reliance on members to resolve your issue
• evidence of change due to member input

2. Whipcar (http://www.whipcar.com)

Whipcar is a car rental company where you can offer your own car up for rental or rent other cars from neighbours in your area.



Community aspects:

• allows you to rent your own car to local people
• allows you to rent cars from your neighbours (and you are rewarded for encouraging them to sign up)
• relies on a critical mass of people in your neighbourhood using it in order to work - there are two cars in my town, neither very close to my house...

[if you are interested in WhipCar then please sign up using this affiliate link - we both get £5 credit, the non-affiliate link is at the top of this paragraph]

So what?

If you take it as truth that by working together we can achieve things more quickly and more cheaply, then how does this apply to life at a university? I'm not talking about shared knowledge and social learning - which I wholeheartedly endorse, but ways we can improve the non-academic part of university life by borrowing from these commercial models. [oh yes, and putting to one side the desire of these companies to get my money from me!]  

Here are some starter ideas of how I think we can take the community aspects above and re-use them at an institution like a university: 

1. Encourage students and staff to support each other through online forums.

We are already exploring this for technical support to set up the multitude of mobile devices that exist on the university network as there are too many to provide individual documentation for centrally - however why not extend this to other areas of university life? I've used this model successfully in the past for students to self-support each other through an induction game.

Our in-house social network Community@Brighton can support this kind of open forum, but perhaps should be encouarged much more obviously and although a financial reward system is probably not viable, perhaps a voting recognition reward system might be enough. Something to explore when we build out new staff intranet platform perhaps?


2. Rent stuff from people within your Community

Ok, not cars. But how about electrical kit - scanners, digital cameras etc. The university offer a loan service, but can't always meet demand and sometimes it would be good to just borrow a scanner for the weekend to complete your project - if you can't afford to buy one, then a low price (or better still credit system) to borrow one from someone who lives in the same halls of residence as you would be ideal.

Likewise there are long periods in the summer where students are at home and probably have lots of spare stuff that could be made use of by someone else. Facilitating this requires some kind of brokering service to be set up - which again could be community run.

Critical Mass

All of the above - the commercial stuff and my extrapolations - rely on sufficient take up by the community to be successful. I'll be interested to watch WhipCar and see if they can achieve that. Both of my examples reward existing members (financially) in order to encourage new members to join. I hope to come up with a credit/reward model that doesn't involve money but yet is engaging enough to work within an institution, I'm not convinced recognition will be enough on it's own.

I welcome your thoughts and other examples - we are part of a captive membership at a university, how can we effectively use that huge community to benefit each other more effectively?

University of Brighton Pedagogic Research Conference 2011

Today I attended our annual research into teaching conference, a relaxed event, and a chance to see what colleagues around the university have been doing in the past year. The format of the conference is a keynote, four parallel sessions (with a buffet lunch after the third) and then closing plenary at 3 - a perfect model for a cold day in February as we all get to attend everything and still go home early!

Below I present my visual recordings of the sessions I attended for you to view the ones that interest you - fuller details of the speakers and their talks are linked to on the conference webpage.

1. Professor Sally Fincher gave the keynote, speaking about the characteristics of disciplinary-specific pedagogic research and some challenges for its dissemination. I has interested in Sally's comments about the way we increasingly reward research output for lecturers but fail to reward teaching - as if the researching counts more than the doing. It's important to get your priorities right!



2. Barbara Newland describing the eRes project with case studies and a group exercise to design an e-tivity. The group activity reminded me that in order to make effective use of technology, you need to know what is actually possible - as always it boils down to good communication more than fancy kit.



3. PhD student Jody Boehnert speaking about the the difference between what you believe and what you do, and how transformative learning can close this gap.



4. Bob Hughes showing the results from analysing student submission and grade data across an online module. He looks at the implications, the difficulties and the ethics of using this kind of data. I wonder if I can help produce even more data from inside the Blackboard database and how we can produce value for the student experience from this.



5. Jennie Jones & Stephanie Fleischer introduce their findings on the reasons for International students having higher rates of leaving university courses than UK students. Many of the factors that come through are common to all students, and English language issues seem to be the additional factor that makes the rate so much higher in this group. However, what comes across is how highly motivated for study International students are, they want to excel not just get by.



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For more on the techniques I used to make the videos above, please read this post on Visual Recording on the iPad.

Videos not loading? View this post in it's original location, or watch them on YouTube.

Visual Recording on the iPad

What is Visual Recording? Well, it's like making a mind-map of a talk/event. Best explained by an example, here is my visual recording of a BBC documentary last night called 'Do We Need the Moon?':

I made this drawing in real-time whilst watching the documentary.

I discovered the techniques for Visual Recording on the iPad last year, when I read this blog post by Rachel Smith (aka Ninmah).

Rachel Smith explaining Visual Recording on the iPad

At the time I had a few attempts, but was unable to produce the kinds of results you see done so beautifully by the RSA and forgot about it...

Animated RSA talk by Ken Robinson

...until I listened to Jake Spicer recently at TEDxBrighton, who reminded us about the importance of visual literacy, and that I need to practice my drawings. So with that fresh in my mind I have decided to pursue this technique and practice, practice, practice.

For me, the value of the technique is the animation - I hope that the animation makes the result more understandable and engaging to a viewer. I also find it a really good focussing exercise for me, as you have to stay fully engaged with the content you are watching in order not to miss key points in your drawing.

I am keen to improve my skills at this, so have a few questions about the Moon video at the top.

• If you did watch the documentary, do you think this is a good reminder about the key points presented? If you didn't, does it give you a sense of the programme or is it just confusing?
• Would it benefit from an audio commentary?
• Can you follow it at all? Is it too fast/slow for reading?
• Other than a nice curiosity, do you think this has value as an information resource?
• Honestly, did you even know it was supposed to be a werewolf?
  

I like doing these live, but no doubt they would be better laid out and structured if I watched it first and then drew it on a second viewing with a plan in mind.

If you fancy trying this yourself, they I recommend the software Brushes on the iPad. It's £4.99, but is really simple to use and provides a free desktop tool which allows you to email yourself a final jpg and your brushes file from the iPad, view it animated on your computer and easily convert it to a Quicktime file for upload to YouTube etc. (my Moon film is exported at 15fps).

Finally, if anyone reading this would like to practice with me, then I'm very open to sharing results, constructive criticism and technique sharing. I will attempt to record the keynote talks this way at the University of Brighton Pedagogic Research Conference this friday, so sit next to me if you are there and want to see me try and keep up - and I will share the results with anyone who expresses an interest.

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