I took my Twitter Wakelet notes from NCCE 2015 and put together all the notes from the gamification and game-based learning sessions I attended.
– Kids who dropout in HS actually became disengaged in middle school! (It’s our job to stop that from happening so the question becomes, how do we keep our middle school kids engaged in their education?)
– Games match level of challenge to level of skill!
– All games share: “a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.â€
– “What is truly fascinating about games is that they occur in virtually every culture around the globe.†Even animals!
– What if all course where created like a game? Students decide their own path through the curriculum.
– Not really related to gaming but does relate in a way: Equity in STEM access for girls & underrepresented populations. Are we facilitating equity? Collaboration increases capacity for girls in STEM.
– Multiplayer games are PVP (Player vs Player) & PVE (Player vs Environment). PVE = Collaborative.
– “According to census data, even most poverty level families, have at least one gaming console.â€
– Gaming provides immediate assessment data for the learner.
– In video gaming the scaffold of your peer network is important. Real life skills!
– Teamwork skills Leader/Recorder/Reporter/etc is wrong! Instead identify roles, then fill them based on task! (I got to work on a team developing games for education. It was a startup weekend and teams there were formed only when they had an educator, a business person (for marketing and selling), a software developer to program the app, and a designer to make the artwork for the app. We formed teams by filling the roles.)
– Differentiation: Create a single task with multiple “difficulty levels†aka “prompts.†Harder difficulty=easier grading. Blended learning means differentiated instruction. Not ALL kids move at the same pace or come from the same place. Repetition and volume increase does not constitute differentiated instruction.
– Text complexity had gone down in grades 2-12 yet has gone up in colleges in the last 50 years. Lots of text on WoW game screen, very busy! It’s qualitative factors like those that #ccss acknowledges. WoW in game text has a lexile of 890, whereas WoW Wiki has a lexile of 1260. Minecraft game guides and gamepedia range in lexile from 1160 to 1260. WoW, for example, also uses many tier 2 and 3, high utility, vocabulary words and has varied text structures. Whether you use lexiles or not the point is that playing a MMORPG game often includes text that is complex. And while kids skim a lot there does come a time where they will need to read closely either to get out of a level or beat a strong boss.
– When it comes to writing these games provide real life opportunities in game chats. Game chats require brief messaging, digital conferencing, note-making skills!
Games provide a lot of great opportunity for engaging our students in learning. Gamification also provides excellent ways to change the way we teach our curricula so that learners can be engaged, move at their own pace, and choose their own pathway through the curricula. More than that gamification offers solutions to the problems inherent in traditional grading.
