This part continues off the Gaming in the Classroom Panel. Due to audience participation and the nature of the panel, the classroom discussion evolved into applying game design skills to teaching skills. These educators discussed their effort to gamify the classroom by adding a game-element to the courses they taught.
One of the speakers explained how they tried to use clickers in the classroom. Clickers of course, act like a controller, and it does make the classroom interactive. And there are quiz video games (You Don’t Know Jack) that exist, so it isn’t too farfetched to imagine this as having game-like qualities. However, he said that the technology came with drawbacks. The system was prone to cheaters, such as having one student take their friends clickers to class and answer all the questions for them. As a whole, he said that it was a failure overall, and clickers aren’t ideal for gamifying his teaching style
Another speaker mentioned how he hid a lot of secrets in the syllabus. We all know that no one reads the syllabus since it’s just rules that we should already know. However, akin to hidden secrets in video games, he hid little segments in the syllabus that if read, gave instructions on how to earn bonus points in the class. This method was successful according to the speaker, although he said it could only be done for one semester because word of mouth would make it not as effective for the next group of students.
My favorite story was of a panelist who utilized game theory when doing quizzes. He set up the class so that quizzes were “random”, in that he didn’t say when they were, but you had to be ready anyways. This meant that students actually made attendance, and studied for every topic just in case of that potential quiz. However, the professor said he spaced out the quizzes in an optimal pattern to make it so that studying every week is the dominant strategy. Any student who found out this meta though could abuse it to a degree, which is the “game” inside the game.
Perhaps most interestingly, was how one of the panelists compared a math textbook to a typical game. The idea is that chapters correlate to levels, and each level is broken into parts. First, you learn a new skill (concept), then put what you just learned to use (example problems). Because concepts build off of each other, it also makes sense the book is structured in the order which you learned things. Like we discussed in class with the importance of flow (balance between boredom and frustration), he mentioned how many textbooks ignore this approach with regards to the example problems. Just by taking a normal textbook and rearranging some of the problems, it will be more engaging for the user.
Join me next week as I talk about another panel I attended on designing games for that incorporate mental health, and also my experience talking to indie game developers at the indie showcase.
Source: Live (Event Page Here: https://guidebook.com/guide/57875/event/13028154/)