What game mechanics belong in courses?

I’ve been gamifying my courses for 5 years now. That’s been enough time for me to try and fail and try again to separate the gamification hype from solid pedagogy. I don’t know if all courses could be successfully gamified or if a particular game method is applicable in a particular course. I do know that for my large undergraduate introductory course, the gaming mechanics I present below have more than proved their value.

In a previous article, I overviewed the structure of my gClass (gamified class) system. In this article, I will present what gClass has taught me about the pedagogical value of game mechanics.

Game terminology and concepts

Three of the central gaming concepts - experience points (XP), challenges and leveling-up - serve me well to frame the course in a way that is immediately understandable and interesting to young students. These words are in common parlance among my students and bring with them a world of connotations that mark the course as different but known.

The course gets some panache from simply using cool words, which is helpful in wooing students who are cynical about education. But much more importantly, gaming vocabulary has shared and tangible meaning that define the structure and mechanics of the course.

XP

The concept of XP implies that you begin at 0, then gather points as you progress. XP is additive. You can’t lose experience, even a bad experience counts as experience. Using the term XP communicates that each evaluation will add to your grade or leave it the same, but never lower it. This contrasts sharply with a traditional grading scheme where any evaluation can raise or lower your grade.

The traditional idea that students should always be at risk of lowering their grade is deeply engrained in education. It is the way we were all taught. In gClass, we strive to create a learning environment where failure is not terminal. We motivate students to learn using the carrot of progress without the stick of failure. The fact that more than half our students get 10-30% more XP than they need to get an A, provides evidence that this methodology is working.

Figure 1: XP in gClass. The upper progress bar indicates XP gained, XP attempted and total XP to an A (4.0). The student is always advised of their position relative to a grade of A. Bonuses are given in XP for keeping up the expected levels week-by-week.

Challenges and Leveling-up

The massively multiplayer online role-playing (MMORPG) and first person shooter (FPS) games that my students play at home (and sometimes in class) are framed as a journey. You begin as a newbie and by confronting a series of challenges progress to a master. Your progress overall is expressed by XP, but the milestones in your progress are expressed in levels. You are a level 10 while another player is level 20. Levels imply that you are in the process of gradual improvement toward mastery. They also provide a quantitative measure of your position relative to mastery and to other players. That is the concept of levels that gClass uses as well.

Challenges are roadblocks to be overcome on the journey. You try, fail and try again to master the challenge. Contrast this with the traditional model of a course, not as a journey but as a one-time consumption and production of a body of knowledge. As you move through the material of a traditional course, a challenge (a test, paper, or performance) can kill you (make you fail). In games, you die too, but you resurrect to try again until you are exhausted or prevail.  

It’s not that you can’t fail in gClass. Every term, one or two of my students fail the course due to a lack of effort. The difference is that in the traditional model there is no redemption, in the gamified course there is always a way to redeem yourself until the clock runs out.

Figure 2: Levels gClass. The course material is broken into 5 accomplishments. In each accomplishment, the student’s level is reported along with a message (falling behind, on target, class leader, etc.). The progress bar indicates XP gained, XP attempted and total XP expected for the accomplishment.

Unlocking

In many games, the player does not get to do task B until they have finished task A. In fact, in some games, the player does not even know what task B is until A is finished. This unlocking of game content creates a sense of anticipation and drives the player forward with a desire to see what’s next. The gClass system uses unlocking as well and my observations suggest that the same sort of anticipation happens in my students.

In a traditional course, student have to do the assignment. In gClass, the students don’t get to do the assignment until they meet the prerequisites.

For example, students don’t get to do:

·      Speaker, Thinker and Writer tasks until the corresponding Learner task is completed.

·      Level-up activities until all the precursors are done.

Figure 3: Unlocking and leveling-up in gClass. In the Learner accomplishment, each module of content is unlocked when the previous one is completed.

Do-overs

In the traditional educational model, you get one chance (one test, one submission, one presentation) to get credit for an assignment. In gaming, as in many aspects of life, you keep trying until you get it right. The traditional method focuses on evaluation and advancement gate-keeping. The gaming method focuses on practice and continual improvement. You get as many tries as you need to get through the gate. In gClass there are still instances of one-try evaluations, but most are multi-try. For example:

·      Students can submit answers to fill-in questions until they are all correct.

·      Students get three or more chances to master vocabulary words and two or more chances to master multiple-choice questions.

·      Students get three drafts before they receive a final score on essays.

As a specific example, to learn vocabulary, the student:

1.   First sees the words while doing fill-ins for a lecture

2.   Then sees the same vocabulary words in a quiz

3.   Then sees them at least once again (or more if they lose) in a face-off

4.   Only then are they asked to create original definitions in a story that uses all the words they have seen

Figure 4: Do-overs in gClass Vocabulary. In the Speaker accomplishment, students see a set of vocabulary words 3 or more times before they are asked to apply them in a new way.

The process is designed to give students the best chance of truly mastering vocabulary by giving them the maximum exposure to it. The assumption behind do-overs is that it may require many times of practice to obtain mastery.

Competition and cooperation among students

There are arguments in favor of and opposed to competition in the class. I have tried many variations on competition and cooperation with these results:

·      Competition is motivating to many students. It creates a striving I see in few other activities.

·      Competition is motivating in relation to the chances of winning. When the chances are too low, motivation dies. When the chances of winning are too high, it is not competition. So there is a sweet spot when the competition is a challenge but not too much of one.

·      Competition works in conjunction with cooperation. Most of my competitions pit teams against each other. That way, esprit de corps can compensate for the stress of competition.

For example, in face-offs, one student competes directly with another to see who can complete a quiz faster. I have tried at least 7 different ways to structure these one-on-one competitions. A successful competition, I have found over time, has these aspects:

·      If you lose, you can play again. Since my aim is to train students, not to rank them against each other, the more times they play, the better it is for me.

·      The more times you play, the easier it should be to win. In general, students who lose play against each other so each time the competition becomes easier.

·      Competitions do not need to be synchronous. Asynchronous competitions where the two students are not simultaneously playing, allow each student to play when they are ready.

Figure 5: Competition in gClass Face-offs. In a Face-off, students compete against each other on the same questions they have already answered. If they lose, they play again until they can answer the questions very quickly. In this way, students practice the answers until they are solidified in their minds.

Literal games

In addition to game metaphors, gClass uses actual games. On the assumption that games themselves teach, we included a variety of games in Info 101:

·      Bingo, where “Pioneers of Information Age” are squares on an online Bingo card that each student has on their computer or phone.

·      Students create their own learning games for each other to play.

·      Most of the class activities take the form of games with rules of play and team competitions.

Figure 6: Literal games in gClass. The entire class of 150 plays Bingo at the same time. Winners jump up, yell “Bongo!” and come to the front of the lecture hall to claim a prize.

Badges as forms of recognition and status

Badges are small recognitions of accomplishments within the system. I have implemented and removed badges from gClass a number of times. I have felt that they can be gratuitous and superfluous. In the current system, I do include badges; I have found that they are minor motivators and add to a student’s presence when they are presented to other students.

Figure 7: A student’s badges appear to other students in a popup tied to their picture in the application.

I have yet to see badges make a big difference, but they do add to the game ambiance and grant status to badge-holders.

Leaderboards

Before I implemented the idea of a leaderboard, it was the most frequently requested new feature. Distinct from badges whose value is not immediately apparent, the gClass leaderboard has shown significant effects.

Figure 8: The leaderboard in gClass.

The leaderboard most impacts the internally motivated students. They pride themselves on their position on the leaderboard and strive based on their position there. Twice per quarter, I have an award ceremony in the class for the top scorers in each of the 5 accomplishments and for the overall XP leader.

According to one of my TAs, a student in the current cohort is taking the class for a second time just to get to the top of the leaderboard.

I provide an opt-out for any student who does not want their information to be visible. In the current course, 19 out of150 students (about 13%) have opted out.

Based on the limited research I have done, there are precedents for leaderboards in courses and having student scores visible to other students.

Fun

What would games be without fun? On the assumption that if students laugh and have fun during a learning experience, they will be more committed to the experience and learning in general, I have tried to build fun into as many parts of the class as possible.

·      During big class, the students are asked to shout out a cheer for their sections. During the carnival event, there is all sorts of raucous laughter mixed with students trying to answer questions from the course.

·      Many of the small-class activities are interactive and fun. For example, in one activity, students go on an Internet scavenger hunt. In another, they leave the classroom to find a random student to interview.

Figure 9: Fun in gClass. Here students are playing one of over 20 learning game during our carnival activity.

Conclusion

When I began development of gClass, gamification was all the rage in education. It was proclaimed to be the “next phase” and to be the answer to all the problems with the traditional system. I have found that gaming itself is not necessarily the answer. Rather, the game mechanics reveal key assumptions about education that are often too deep to even see. By applying gaming to education, I have been forced to unearth and examine why we seem to believe that:

·      Students should all follow the same path in the same way through course materials.

·      Each student begins a class at the same knowledge level and leaves a class with the same amount more knowledge.

·      The fear of a lower grade is the main motivator of student progress.

·      Students should get one chance only to succeed.

·      Communication should be hub-and-spoke, with the instructor always at the center.

·      Students should not evaluate and teach each other and their scores should be invisible to each other.

·      Yelling and laughing have no place in the classroom.

In the systems I have built since gClass, I have come to focus less on explicit gamification and more on exploring and experimenting with these and other assumptions to try to find the best way to educate the most students most effectively and efficiently. In future articles, I will describe more of the methods that gClass and other systems have allowed me to explore in pursuit of this goal.