Engagement

Day 2 – Design considerations

Written by Dr Patrick Tran, from the University of New South Wales

In Day 1, we discussed game thinking and its potential in the learning context. Today we will look into specific game elements and their applications.

Game elements in the learning context

A variety of game elements in education have been reported in empirical research papers (see Dicheva et al. 2015):

Work distribution (number of papers) by gamification design principles (Dicheva et al. 2015)

Among these elements, let’s just focus on the elements that directly relate to the principles mentioned in Day 1:

Goals and challenges – most games have well-defined missions that clearly map rewards to certain actions.
Point system – measures success or current standing of a learner. Points are generally awarded for completing a task and could be converted into course credits or simply used as an in-game currency.
Progression – moves learners through a learning journey. This often involves a leveling mechanism or a simple staging system. By completing activities and accumulating points, learners obtain higher status which enables them to unveil new content or unlock new privileges (e.g. the ability to upvote or downvote posts in a forum, assignment extension).
Feedback – informs learners of their status by recognizing their achievements (through points or badges) or ranking them in a leaderboard.
Social connectedness – many players enjoy social interactions within a game such as participating in a competition or cooperative play. Similarly, learners are generally motivated by working with others in a team and sharing content through a social space with people within their circle.
Personalization most games can be customized to some extent. Players can select difficulty levels, visual and audio options. Intelligent games can also adapt themselves to match the players’ gaming styles and strategies. Similarly, an effective learning environment can support multiple learning needs through well-thought strategies (referred to as learning flexibility), provide multiple routes to success (freedom of choice) and encourage learners to experiment new ideas and take risks (freedom to fail).
Storytelling most of the elements listed above are predominantly related to structural gamification. The most commonly utilized element for content gamification is storytelling. By framing the course content inside a narrative, this approach to learning aims to enhance learners’ engagement and their knowledge retention. When implemented correctly, this type of gamification can provide a context for learning as well as illustrating the applicability of the earned knowledge in real world.

Building a successful gamified learning experience

A clear vision for how to succeed

By Merio, sourced from Pixabay, downloaded 27/09/18

A well-designed game always sets a clear and achievable mission for its players to accomplish. Such clarity is promoted by an explicit relationship between objectives and rewards as well as concise and easy-to-understand language.

In the learning context, we can help learners develop their sense of mastery and competence by clarifying learning goals, rules and feedback. This encourages them to follow the rules, make good choices, progress through the learning journey and finally accomplish the set mission.

Simply switching to game-like language can have a powerful effect. For example, academic tasks such as making an oral presentation or writing an assignment can be framed as ‘embarking on a quest to restore long-forgotten lands’ and ‘defeating monsters and saving the world’ respectively. Learners are familiar with this kind of dialogue and hence feel more engaged.

It is also helpful to use a marking guide or a rubric which can answer typical questions the learners may have – what should I do to pass this assessment? How do I earn bonus points? Why did I receive such a high/low mark?

A growth mindset

While achieving a ‘Novice’ level and receiving a ‘Pass’ grade are essentially the same with regards to course credit, they bring different emotions to learners. The first wording promotes a growth mindset that encourages learners to try again and ‘jump’ to the next levels like ‘Wizard’ and ‘Guru’ that sound ‘cooler’.

The second method, however, does not have that ‘jumping’ effect and hence is referred to as a fixed mindset. The two mindset systems are discussed at length by Carol Dweck (2007) in her book; whereby rewarding efforts rather than ability can enhance resilience in learners and improve their self-confidence.

A feeling of continuous progression

By Free-Photos, sourced from Pixabay, downloaded 27/09/18

Careful goalsetting and rapid feedback are the key. In particular, a series of small and achievable goals tend to empower learners more than big goals. Similarly, accurate and regular feedback can inform learners of their current level and make them think about where they want to be in the future.

For instance with learning management systems such as Moodle, we can use peer feedback and rating features in Forum or auto grading in Quiz to provide quick feedback.

Similarly, the Choice module in Moodle serves as a quick poll or the Lesson activity can present its content, question and answer pages to learners dynamically based on their actions.

A good balance of shallow fun and deep emotion

Zicherman et al. (2011) proposed a cascading value model of Status, Access, Power and Stuff (SAPS) – the model framework in which status has higher value than material rewards. In the learning context, educators have been creative in using points and badges to recognize learners’ achievements.

With current technology for instance, you can take badges to the next level with digital resumes that can cross-reference with an online portfolio of evidence. But this recognition system is far more than just that; by emphasizing the meaning and prestige of these badges and being consistent with issuing them, we can bolster a deep feeling of accomplishment.

Gamification for educatorsGamers are attracted to challenges and competitions but are also vulnerable to the negative emotion they bring. When applying this idea in education, we need to make sure our learning activities are both challenging, achievable and “safe-to-try”. Having rigid ‘win-or-lose’ assessments does more harm than good to learners as it prevents them from exploring and experimenting new ideas and hence undermining creativity.

On the other hand, scaffolding high-stake learning activities and implementing a flexible assessment system (e.g. allowing multiple tries with drop-the-lowest-x, minimum or maximum options) can tremendously motivate learners. This approach goes beyond making your classroom fun and enticing, it builds up trust between learners and the system so that they believe that failing a mission is not the end of the world and they can try again until succeed.

Finally, many people enjoy teamwork and socialization, which explains the popularity of multiplayer games and team sports. When applying this to the learning context we have to be mindful of the complexities. For whatever reason, teamwork may not be suitable for your course, but you can still achieve similar goals such as promoting a sense of community or satisfying the needs for social connections through activities such as forum discussion and peer mentoring.

question mark

Learning Activity

Activity 1
Nominate 2 game elements/principles from the below list that you think the most important to gamify learning. Explain your choice.

[1] Goals/Challenges, [2] Personalization, [3] Rapid Feedback, [4] Visible Status, [5] Unlocking Content, [6] Freedom of Choice, [7] Freedom to Fail, [8] Storyline/ New Identities, [9] Onboarding, [10] Time Restriction, [11] Social Engagement (Dicheva et al. (2015))

Learn more

The learning management system (Moodle/Wattle) can work as a gamification platform. We’ve got some optional extra material about how to do this for anyone interested. Check it out.

References

  1. Dicheva, D., Dichev, C., Agre, A. & Angelova, G. (2015) Gamification in education: A systematic mapping study, Educational Technology & Society, 18 (3), 75-88.
  2. Dweck C. S., (2006), Mindset: the New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, New York.
  3. Zichermann G. and Cunningham C. (2011), Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps, O’Reilly Media, Inc.

21 thoughts on “Day 2 – Design considerations

  1. I’m particularly interested in freedom of choice and freedom to fail, as I think these are also elements that can support student inclusion as well. The ability to practice, re-do, and train without consequences of grades as a type of formative assessment or engagement to me is one of the most powerful components of gamification and one that I think might potentially be the first one I would try to implement in any course that I might teach. One of the mottos for these coffee courses is “All carrot, no stick!” – participants are awarded for any contributions that they make but not penalised in any way for NOT doing something. This was really interesting Patrick – thank you!

    1. Hi Katie, you have some good choices there. Let’s consider “freedom to fail”, what are the “carrots” would you use to motivate learners to retry (and fail) until they master a task, apart from grades?

      1. Patrick, in the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system the usual approach is to require students to pass every test. You can try many times, but the incentive is that until you pass every one of hundreds of individual tests you do not receive a qualification.
        The VET terminology used is “not yet competent”/competent, rather than fail/pass. So a student never fails, they are just not yet competent.
        I undertook a certificate in the VET system and the problem I noticed was after a while I tended to submit any old thing in the hope I would get a pass and could move on, with no penalty for poor work.

        1. Hi Tom, Thanks for your VET example. Such competency-based approach to learning is well supported in Moodle. Does anyone know of any competency-based courses offered at university level?

      2. Hi Patrick – this is a great question. I am working on a project with medical students at ANU, and they are extremely motivated to do formative assessment type tasks over and over to prepare for threshold exams at the end of the year. But I think they are the except to the rule. With other types of courses, it’s a bit harder… all the options that come to mind somehow involve grades! Maybe something like collecting points that can be used to win something at the end of the year? Great question – I’d welcome suggestions from others!

        1. This is interesting Katie – and I think you might be right with med students being a little different. I’ve tried the idea once of allowing students multiple attempts on assessment. They did the quiz/test once and for students who failed – they were offered a second attempt to earn a higher mark. But I was surprised as the low number of students who bothered to use this. I only ever attempted this one semester, with such poor pick up, it didn’t seem worth pursuing – but maybe trying it again would be useful.

  2. Goals/Challenges and Rapid Feedback are most important, I suggest. To be a game there must be some goal and feedback on how you are doing, in time to be effective.
    The notes mentioned Moodle has peer feedback and rating features. But this feedback needs to be provided in a timely way. On the one had you want to check that students are not making derogatory remarks about each other and on the other not wait until the end of the semester to give a mark for participation.
    In terms of system features I found the activity completion ticks in Moodle useful. This gives the student a sense of progress, as they see the tick when they complete an activity. It is very easy to set up.

    1. Hi Tom, great suggestion about using activity completion in Moodle as a mechanism for gamification! It works well both for the student to see how they are doing, and gives reports to the teaching staff about overall student progress.

  3. I choose Goal/challenge and Freedom to fail.
    I sometimes received questions from the students like “XX really seems fancy/funny. But what’s the point?” They did enjoy themselves in participation but did not realize the relationship between the activity and the learning objective. So I feel it’s important to clarify the goal of the “game” in the teaching process. I also remembered another coffee course which mentioned that an activity should always serve for the learning goal.
    I choose Freedom to fail because we are having a more diverse group of students. Many students come from a culture with a low tolerance for trial and failure, which becomes the biggest obstacle for their engagement. Allowing for multiple tries and providing constructive feedback may help to build a secure environment in the class.

    1. Hello Sunny, the point you made on Goal/challenge is very good, in my opinion. Let’s consider Quizventure, one of the first Moodle plugins for Gamification (with Virtual reality support!). While this plugin can transform a traditional quiz into a real space shooting game in 3D, I personally dont think it has strong educational/pedagogical value. Some students may even find it distracting, I believe. Here is a quick demo of Quizventure from the Moodle Moot conference which I went to last year. https://youtu.be/cnCqNpWarFI?t=12m31s

    2. I agree with Sunny that it is crucial to clearly articulate the purpose of the game, and how it will then help student improve their skills and performance on assessable items. Otherwise the activity can end up feeling gimmicky or irrelevant. This could cause student participation levels to decline. I remember taking a particular course in my undergraduate degree where the tutorial activities were not clearly connected to the learning objectives or assessment. I often felt that my time would be better spent preparing for the final exam on my own and was very tempted to skip the class altogether!

  4. I think Rapid Feed back and Freedom of Choice are two quite important features (Freedom to fail definitely too, but others have covered that). I teach large courses (600-1000 students) and giving timely and personalised feedback is difficult. In part this has to do with the fact that there are always students who miss a piece of assessment, and thus required ‘deferred’ options, and the whole process of feedback is delayed for everyone. I like the idea then of being able to embed challenges/quizzes etc into the Moodle platform that allows for for more instantaneous (or at least more timely) feedback for students. When students don’t get feedback quickly enough, they aren’t always able to see where they are making mistakes and when content (as in economics) builds on itself, if you miss the first part it can be very difficult to get the rest. Added to this I really really like the idea of using the terms ‘novice’, ‘wizard’, ‘guru’ etc rather than P, C, D etc. Much more motivating and less demotivating.

    I’ve also found Freedom of Choice in topics to be a great motivating tool for students. With economics – sometimes the theory can be dry, but more importantly, it can be applied to so many different questions and fields that when you choose only one there may be many students who aren’t interested in that topic and thus you ‘lose’ them. Over the past few semesters when setting assignments I’ve had 4 or 5 options for students to choose from – they all apply the same theory, but for different countries or questions which allows them to choose something that really interests and motivates them.

  5. Hi Patrick,
    I chose [3] Rapid Feedback and [4] Visible Status because in my experience using Quizlet! the students become most engaged when they can see their scores drop or increase and their group leaderboard status displayed. I haven’t used a wide variety of online games in class but in general students want access to efficient commentary on their work and enjoy ‘winning’ class games or finding out who had the highest score for assessments.

  6. I think it would be possible to cover a few game elements/principals for example using quizzes or activities to give Rapid Feedback but also building into it freedom to fail. I think Social Engagement would also be important and could also be paired with Rapid feedback by using forums as an opportunity for students to share and respond to other learners ideas and give peer feedback.

  7. I thought the difference in terms used such as novice vs pass and growth mindsets were so interesting. However I think there is another difference at play; we know that over the long run students who believe they can change their ability through practice do better than smart students who believe their ability is fixed. I wonder if the mindset that people have varies in different scenarios, people are more likely to presume that gaming involves practice and that they will improve over time, however in a university setting people revert back to concepts of good or bad student, so a pass doesn’t indicate to them they are at the beginning of a journey it just enforces an idea of themselves. It would be interesting to see if giving grades like novice in a university setting actually changed this mindset or if they simply became ‘tainted’ by association and lost their growth mindset benefits.

    I agreed greatly with the need for safe to fail assessments – increasingly I see students not wanting to do anything creative or innovative as they are worried about jeopardising HDs. While this is understandable given increasing competition in the job market etc, it seems to be missing the point of education completely.

    Also as a random comment I am taking this module after completing the video teaching model and this strikes me as an excellent example of where a video would come in handy. When reading about the different elements contained in a game, while I broadly understand the concepts, I suspect that concepts of storytelling in a game are quite different to my understanding of a narrative as a non gamer. Or even if they aren’t strictly different, I feel like a video excerpt of a game would scaffold my learning much better than just reading about it.

  8. Hi Patrick & peers
    I would like to touch upon [3] Rapid Feedback (important in my view) and [5] Unlocking Content (unsure how I feel), because I think they can be used in conjunction.
    Providing timely feedback can be challenging and time-consuming, and that’s where online quizzes provide an answer. I like the idea that students have to obtain a certain score on an online quiz to unlock new content, but haven’t tried it as the LMS at my school didn’t have this feature. I did experience it as a user, when I had to complete online modules for my onboarding at ANU. However, what I really disliked was that I didn’t have a clear picture of how much more time the module was going to take. It did say ‘page 2 of 24’, but some pages took very little time to go through while others took a lot. When a page took longer to complete than I had expected, I felt disengaged and just skimmed the content. I’m curious to find out if anyone has tried out ‘unlocking content’ in their teaching, and what your experience was?

  9. I have found that the combination of Freedom to Fail and Rapid Feedback have influenced much of the leading and teaching I have been involved with. Providing students with the timely encouragement to have another go is something I have found very successful. Too much delay in the feedback diminishes their interest in trying again. They may do it, but the engagement in the task is noticeably lessened. However I have also seen student burn out. Attempting the same task repeatedly without radically different methods of engagement causes some to switch off completely. All seems very obvious but that is just how I see this particular topic.

  10. I think that two important elements would be freedom to fail and visible status (if that means what I think it does, of the student being able to see how they are progressing towards higher achievement). In combination, these features enable the student not to get too stressed or disheartened about their performance but to be encouraged by their progress and motivated to keep going.
    I agree with Melde above that it is frustrating not to know how far you have come through something progressive like an online module. Another problem that is sure to make me turn off or skim through is when there are glitches or repeated, simple (ie boring) content. I think it takes a lot of thought and planning to design this type of tool well.

  11. I really appreciate the freedom to fail. I think an important part of any learning process is the ability to take and accept failure in a safe environment. You’re not always going to be at your best – you might fall sick at the wrong time, or just not be having a good week. That’s why I really like the scaffolding approach mentioned. It’s what we use in physics labs and most physics and math homework assignments. The students complete 12 labs, but only the top 10 counts towards their grade – allowing them to have an off-week or if an experiment doesn’t go right because the oscilloscope was playing up it’s not the end of the world. It allows for some breathing room and just enough leeway particularly at the start of a course when students are not as familiar with the setup/rubric/etc.

    I believe that social engagement is also important for a future in the workplace, or even collaborating in an academic career. Labs are great for teamwork! Everyone has to work in groups of 2-4 allowing you to assign special roles to your adventuring campaign – the planner, the builder, the gadgets girl/guy, and the explosions expert (just kidding… hopefully!).

  12. Day 1

    What is your prior experience with gamification in education?
    I have used Kaggle to gamify a text classification task in order to support

    1) easier entry by novices to the field of natural language processing of health documents and educate them about appropriate evaluation approaches,

    2) establish benchmarks related to the task difficulty, applicability of different methods to its solution, and allow assessing the gap between the novices and masters, and

    3) build a learning community in this field.

    I have included a leaderboard and option to report the findings for the killers; offered a range of options to take and option to report the findings as working notes for the explorers; an online discussion group, chat channel, and social media presence, together with a concluding face-to-face workshop for the socialisers; and achievement and progress awards for the achievers.

    Day 2

    My importance ranking of the gamified learning, from the most to least important is as follows:

    [9] Onboarding: The first experiences matter — a good welcome sets the students for success and establishes a community.

    [1] Goals/Challenges: clear motivation is essential and also without understanding the goal, it is impossible to play a game.

    [3] Rapid Feedback: supports ability to self-regulate and improves ongoing engagement (through stickiness) in learning.

    [7] Freedom to Fail: without failing and reflection, one cannot learn fast. This encourages taking risks and challenging oneself without the fear of marks going down.

    [10] Time Restriction: Makes the offer more attractive as if you do not take it by due date, you miss it. Makes the game more challenging as well [3 & 7].

    [5] Unlocking Content: appeals to both explorers and killers.

    [6] Freedom of Choice: offers autonomy to the learners.

    [8] Storyline/ New Identities and [11] Social Engagement: Essential to sociallise learning and build a networked learning community.

    [4] Visible Status: important to get the killers hooked.

    [2] Personalization: I think this is a nice bonus but if designing for a diverse audience from day one [e.g., through 5 & 6], this good design may make personalisation a bit redundant.

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