Everything's a Game: Gamifying My Classroom

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Over the course of this school year, I've learned about a lot of different teaching methods and ideas about which I wasn't previously aware. I've been trying some of them in my own classes (21st century skills, crowdsourced grading, increased prominence of blogging, etc.) but there has been one that has intrigued me quite a bit that I have yet to implement and that's game based learning. Gartner, Inc. has predicted that "by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes." Since the same principles seem to make sense in an educational setting, I've been toying with ideas in my mind about how to make it work within the context of my classes. I've had some ideas but what usually gets in the way is trying make a game that fits the MYP Technology curriculum and adequately addresses each criterion. With this in mind, I eagerly attended John Rinker's session on game based learning.



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John had taken a game based approach to learning about the history of the Neolithic revolution. To investigate the essential question ‘How does WHERE we live affect HOW we live?’, Rinker's class undertook a range of challenges, split into levels of achievement, that blended investigation of the content with investigation and skill development in Google Earth. An advantage to game-based learning is that it can help to keep an appropriate focus on the concept of the unit of work rather than on the tools used to present it. As Rinker points out in his blog, "This project isn’t about using the tool, it’s about creating an authentic experience to demonstrate an understanding of our essential question." This is what can really help me effectively apply game based learning to the MYP Technology Design Cycle.

As is the nature of the Design Cycle, despite the "creating" criterion  being a relatively small component of the curriculum (maybe about a fifth of the criteria), it tends to take up a lot of time with learning specific tools (in the case of most of my classes, that refers to digital tools) and applying those skills. Getting students to complete levels is an interesting way to get them to do more "dry" work like research in order to add some motivation to unlock the next level which may include learning or applying skills in a particular program. As the school year is nearing its end, I have managed to assess my Year 8s on all the required criteria at least once already so this leaves me a little more free to experiment with new ideas with my students. Typically, at this point of the trimester, my Year 8s would be starting a relatively brief 'design and make' project, using Flash animation software to create an eCard. As I was riding a bus recently, I jotted down an outline of how to take what is typically a pretty straightforward little unit and gamified it. I tried to alternate between Flash skills and other design cycle criteria. Here's an outline of what I have come up with so far:

Level 1 - Animate a Bouncing Ball. Students will follow along to a video tutorial I created last year to help animate a bouncing ball.

Level 2 - Type out possible ideas for their eCard and post it to their blog.

Level 3 - Get a star to follow a particular path while continuously changing colour.



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Level 4 - Write Design Specifications for a successful eCard and post it to their blog.

Level 5 - Make your name transform into a shape

Level 6 - Pick one idea for your eCard and draw a simple storyboard to explain the action

Level 7 - Make the eCard

Level 8 - Make your animation file available through your blog

Level 9 - Support others with their eCards

So far, these are just skeletal instructions for each level and more specific instructions and requirements will be added. I am still toying with the idea of how to distribute each level to students who have successfully completed the work. An email containing the next level's instructions is one, simple way but I'm also considering having a password protected blog post for each level as well. Another thing to consider is a tracking sheet so that students can easily (and preferably visually) track their progress.

There are a few challenges to using this approach for student projects. One problem I've already alluded to earlier is that it can be difficult to present adequate/interesting challenges that still address the different bands of achievement on the curriculum rubrics. For this particular unit, I am making sure that students do address the different parts of the rubric but I think it will still be up to my professional judgment as to what level of achievement they've demonstrated for a given criterion. In the planning of future units of work though, I could foresee this as a great way to differentiate a unit of work. The earlier levels represent lower bands on the rubric and as the students succeed to high levels, they will begin to demonstrate evidence of criteria from the upper mark bands. Some students may not actually complete all the levels but for the more keen or capable students, this gives them the opportunity to take their work to a higher level without being held back by other students that do not progress as quickly.



Probably the biggest challenge involved in setting up a unit like this is the planning required for it to work successfully. Thankfully, for this first attempt at a game based learning unit, I already have a number of resources to build upon which makes it a more manageable task at this time of the year. Also, on the plus side, initiating such careful planning early on also means that once the unit is underway, I should, in theory, have a fair bit of time to manage the game and support students in their attempt to complete each level.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this works out and am certain that I will run into challenges along the way but I'm sure that things will work out on the whole and any problems that arise will simply help me to make improvements to units of work for next school year.

Crowdsourcing Makes the Grade

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This was the first EARCOS conference that I have attended and, going in, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Having been to the Learning2 conferences that tend to be exploding with technology like a bottle of Pepsi at 30,000 feet, I wondered if this conference would feel a little dull and sterile in comparison. As I checked through the list of presenters, I noticed familiar names like Kim Cofino and Jeff Utecht so I knew there would at least be some useful or edutaining presentations. As I delved a little deeper, I noticed that there were a number of other presenters that had a technology focus to their topics too so, superficially, it seemed promising enough. When the first morning kicked off with Cathy Davidson and her thoughts on the evolution of technology and my mental sparks started to fly.

Cathy's keynote presentation began with an outline of the different information ages. Moving from speech to writing to printing and onward to the recent evolution into things like mass sharing of information (internet). As she points out, we've reached a point where students cannot remember a time when there was no internet. They don't remember the joy (!?) of listening to their dial up modem connect to the internet so that you could open a webpage before going to make your breakfast, wash some dishes, feed the cat, take the dog for a walk, iron your shirt for work, and finish a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle before returning to see if it had loaded yet.

The idea of sharing thoughts with anyone, anywhere, anytime, seems like an intrinsic right that these students have never lived without. If they want to know how something works in another part of the world, there are millions of webpages full of text and video and other content to help explain it but, better yet, there are also millions of people that are just as free to express their knowledge and opinions. These people, once days', if not weeks' journeys away, are now available for interaction instantly. That is an amazing power that most of our students probably take for granted. All of these insights, and many others that I haven't mentioned here, were enough for me to convince me to check out some of her other presentations/workshops.

I actually took away a number of ideas from Cathy's presentations but the one that excited me most had to do with crowdsourcing grading. I love teaching. I love challenging my students to push themselves and to continually improve what they are capable of accomplishing. I love thinking ahead and planning lessons and assignments that will give students that opportunity. I love seeing the end results of their learning. What I don't love is marking students' work. I don't imagine many teachers do. The thought of sitting down and reading through 20 students' assignments and assigning each a numeric level of performance is, for me, by far the least inspiring part of teaching. I do it because it's prescribed by curriculum but I can't just give a number and leave it at that. To actually add some kind of meaning to the numeric value, I always make sure to include feedback with the level awarded. Marking a whole class, to be blunt, sucks. My displeasure with marking seven classes' worth of assignments cannot be politely described so I will leave you to fill in the colourful language here at your own discretion. This is why crowdsourcing of grading piqued my interest.

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Essentially, in Cathy's course, "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," she had students sign a contract with targeted marks and she prescribed corresponding expectations for students based on their expectations. For example, if a student wanted an 'A,' they would need to complete all of the assignments to a satisfactory standard. If they wanted a 'B,' they would need to do, say, five of seven assignments to a satisfactory standard. The definition of satisfactory standard needed to be clearly explained to each student because, in the end, they were the people assessing the work. And, as it turned out, this was a successful strategy for Cathy's course.

This course was a university course with mature thinkers that should be able to handle the requirements of peer assessment from both an assessing and a being assessed point of view but I wondered if it could translate to a middle years classroom; so this week, since returning from the conference, I've jumped head first into this idea. I have explicitly gone through the rubrics for assignments for six different classes in years 7, 8, and 9. As a practice exercise, I gave the students work from previous classes to assess against the rubrics to see how well they would do and I had some very interesting results.

The first thing that stands out is that the students are probably more harsh as markers than I am. The marks that they gave were generally either the same or slightly less than marks I had awarded to the students previously. I think one thing that may help to explain this has to do with the fact that students were assessing Evaluating assignments (from MYP Technology) without having read or seen the preceding assignments upon which the students were reflecting. I, on the other hand, had seen and assessed the project all the way through so sometimes I could infer more from having an understanding from the preceding assignments.

Another thing that I noticed which should be more surprising than it is, was that the Year 7s were probably better assessors than the year 8s and 9s. There does truly seem to be a bit of a trend that as students leave the PYP program, where they're constantly inquiring and thinking critically, and proceed through the MYP program, despite intuition to the contrary, the students seem to lose their critical thinking and inquiry skills. Perhaps lose them is an overstatement but they seem to ignore them, preferring instead to be told how/what to do their work. (This, of course, is based purely on personal observations and has absolutely no scientific merit).

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On that note though, I could see that a lot of students were initially challenged to accurately interpret a rubric so the crowdsourcing of marking, while it certainly has the advantage of lessening my marking load, also has the added advantage of helping the students to better understand what exactly they are being assessed on by carefully considering the criteria before jumping into the assignment. As another added bonus, when I informally polled the classes about how many of them would take more care in with their work (including the presentation of it on their blogs) because their peers would be looking at it and over two thirds said they would be more concerned about the quality of their work.

One (almost) clever Year 8 student was quick to mention, "If you just got the other Year 8 class to mark our work and we marked theirs, you wouldn't have to do any marking at all." We'll see how this round of crowdsourced marking goes (due a few weeks from now, after Thailand's New year holiday break) but, fingers crossed, that Year 8s student's quip actually becomes a more regular reality - for the benefit of all involved.