Learn 4 Life

Gaming Education - How to create a culture of learning through designing real world games in education

Gaming Education

I have been looking at a lot at “Real World Gaming” and Education recently. This is a subject I have returned to again and again in the course of the last few years. Taking the idea of the culture “around” gaming I outlined in previous blogs, I thought I might explore the natural extension of those ideas into the classroom pulling together various sources and reflect on possible ways forward for teaching and learning.

Real World Gaming

In “real world” gaming the content of the game is contributed by the players, making it simply a set of tools enabling players to interact and compete with one another while on the go. Except it’s a bit more complex than that…

Recently a number of real world games linked to the geo-positions of users’ smart phones have become very popular; things like Flook, Gowalla, FourSquare rely on transparency of information about places and services.

Partly based on serendipity and partly on user input of information to gain points and badges - these “game” (verb not noun) “reality” giving users incentives to share and inform. Of course the trick is that all the heavy lifting is done by the game players who are crowdsourced and who, in effect, build the game resources for each other and, ultimately, the company running the game service. People come back to the game because it has a level of authenticity - it’s what they do in real life anyway as they go about their daily business. So it is turned into a game process whereby they receive awards and status.

Now why can’t we do that in education?

(update: One such app that was brought to my attention today is Mission:Explore and there is also GPS Mission )

Jesse Schell - gaming in education - Learning design and so much more

Look at the videos below by Jesse Schell - he talks specifically about education and how we might design a better way of doing things there with the ethos of gaming behind it - he pulls out specific qualities such as :

Beautiful
Customised
Shared
Real

and to that I would add

transparent
ongoing
iterative
rewarding

another presentation you might like to look at is:

http://e3.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/

where he discusses the “psychological tricks” employed by gaming or virtual world companies to get users to engage and to return to the game again and again.

Learning Design

It was Drew Buddie who first pointed out Jesse Schell’s work at TeachMeet Milton Keynes last month:

http://blip.tv/file/3907169

Drew talks at length on the process of using “learning lenses” adapted from the ideas in Schell’s book.

Negotiated Learning - co-creation of your learning journey

I was also interested to come across Neil Hopkin’s video on Negotiated Learning which reminded me very much of the ideas on Co-Creation that were espoused by Steve Rubel coming from the commercial world back in the middle noughties. There are obvious parallels there for me. I tend to look around at the corporate world and see what innovation is taking place there and how that might have some corollary with education. Certainly quite a few blue chip companies now employ the process of co-creation and extend that into the workplace as well.

Certainly the co-creation of learning using school community is a start but now imagine this in your classroom, school, district overlaying that process as another educational “skin” or “patina”.

How can you “game” the classroom?

Base your learning activities and aquisition of knowledge on collaborative working and transparency of learning. Give points for those students who make transparent their ways of working and sharing their knowledge.

Make sure those “learning” especially, the more dependent learners, that may take some time to “get it” always level up.

Design levels of expertise - so students can Pay Forward to each other knowledge and skills modelled and facilitated at first by the teacher, and then given external inducements by way of points badges and levels for collaborative working.

Of course these ideas are not new to anyone who has been through, or seen a “traditional” education involving “houses” and “teams” will recognise certain common elements as will anyone who have been through the scouting movement. But that’s where the comparison ends…

The difference here could be that the elements of teaching students to teach each other to learn through peer instruction and review could itself be gamed.

It’s not something imposed and mediated from on high but built into the very fabric of the way people could run their classes giving rewards for both the teachers and learners involved but levelling them according to - off the top of my head :

knowledge

expertise

competency

design

application

engagement

reflection

peer review

In effect, through a social gaming mechanism you build a ‘culture of learning’ that allows pupils to collaborate or to self-study in certain instances given enough initial scaffolding and modelling by the faciltator.

Not only would you use a process of learning lenses to design activities as outlined by Drew above - seredipitous triggers to get yourself to reflect in your planning but also you get the students to iterate and reflect on their learning by extrinsic rewards built into the system when they have achieved certain goals. Building in opportunities to both capture the process and use the documentation of the process as a resource would be an ideal use for ICT.

In that way you can build up a portfolio of work and a set of exemplar material to use for revision, starters, explication, modelling. The list is endless. How would you do it?

Game On?