May 31, 2024 • 51 mins
Professor Scott Nicholson from Laurier’s Game Design and Development program shares his passion for creating unique and inspiring learning experiences through games. Not only does Scott teach about games, he also weaves meaningful gamification principles throughout his teaching, igniting students’ interest in both the subject matter, and their own learning. Scott discusses his student-centred approach to motivating students with customized learning paths that foster intrinsic motivation and empower students to learn through exploration and play.
He shares his experiences with integrating AI tools into teaching, helping students navigate these new technologies in their work, and how he uses gamification to help students build confidence. He offers advice for other instructors on incorporating meaningful gamification principles into their courses to make learning more engaging and effective.
Resources and Articles
- A RECIPE for Meaningful Gamification http://s
- Exploring Gamification Techniques for Classroom Management
- Completing the Experience: Debriefing in Experiential Educational Games
- EscapeIF: Educational Storytelling Games for Low-Resource Classrooms
Find Scott on the web at scottnicholson.com
Discover more from the Teaching Excellence and Innovation Team
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to this episode of the Laurier Teaching Podcast.
I'm your host, Alisha Moffat, from the Teaching Excellence and Innovation team at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Today I'll be talking to Professor Scott Nicholson from Laurier's game design and development program.
Scott has been teaching at Laurier since 2015, developing courses like gamification and game design, and escape room and puzzle design.
(00:24):
He emphasizes student choice assessment, flexibility, and incorporates universal design for learning principles across his teaching.
I'm excited to talk with him about meaningful gamification, as well as incorporating play, choice, and reflection into his assessments.
I'm also curious about how he taps into student motivation and builds excitement for learning.
(00:46):
It's my pleasure to welcome Scott Nicholson to the Laurier Teaching Podcast.
I once heard you say that in your work, you teach students how to create games and how to create experiences.
(01:08):
And so I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit more about that process.
Sure. So a game, you know, is a series of challenges that you're choosing to take on when you want to play a game.
You're like, I'd like to make my life a little more difficult, please. And so game designers are about creating those challenges,
something that will make your life a little more difficult, but that you should be able to overcome.
(01:31):
And through that overcome, you get some happy brain chemicals. You get some sense of achievement.
You might engage with a story, uh, and so a game is that kind of thing.
And I try to help students figure out, well, how do I create a challenge?
And a lot of ways, it's a lot like teaching a good teacher is doing the exact same thing.
You're creating challenges for students to overcome. And as they overcome those challenges, they learn something about the world.
(01:53):
They learn something about themselves. So there's a lot of similarities between game design and creating, uh, educational, uh, concepts and teaching.
Um, and tying that all in is this larger concept of experience design.
So experience design is where you're focused not only on like that physical form of the game or in the teaching world, the content of the lesson.
(02:15):
But the classroom environment, where are you
How are you setting up the space so that the students will be in a learning mindset so that they will feel like they're engaged,
so that they may have some intrinsic reasons for what they're doing, going beyond just here's the worksheet, go fill it out.
But this worksheet is in a context of other students, of me, of an environment.
And the same thing is true of game design. So thinking about the game in this larger space, in this larger experience.
(02:40):
And so that's I looked a lot to to theme parks, for example, as models.
Um, so Disney I'm a big fan of Disney for example, the Disney parks. What they do really well is experience design.
And it's that difference between like,
if you go and ride a roller coaster or you ride a roller coaster that's inside of a mountain that's designed to be,
you're traveling to another planet and there's this whole narrative that's going on both before and after the ride.
(03:04):
The roller coaster activity is just a small portion of it, and the same is true with creating a game or creating a learning activity.
It's that larger context that makes the experience. That's really interesting, that's really interesting.
And I think that notion of experience design and thinking about the, the learning environment and, and, um,
and the ways in which a lot of instructors are thinking about how to make learning fun,
(03:31):
how to engage students, how to build in those pieces for motivation, to to motivate students.
What what got you into this? What got you interested in game design?
So I've been engaged with games all of my life.
I grew up in Oklahoma on a horse farm, and of everyone in the family, I was the only one interested in games,
(03:54):
so I would ask for board games for my various holidays, birthday, and Christmas.
But I didn't have anyone that wanted to play them with me.
So what I would do is actually set them up and play set up for players and play all four players myself.
And when you do that, then you really start to think about the game and what is going on in the game and what are the different strategies.
(04:14):
And then that leads to, well, what if I made some changes? Because that's a nice thing about a board game, is anyone can change a board game.
You can try out different rules. You can try out make your own cards.
It's a much easier entry point than, say, if you go and buy a video game.
Many video games, you can't really make changes to it easily.
Uh, but with a tabletop game or roleplaying game, which I also got involved, the tabletop role playing game.
(04:37):
So you're creating stories.
So even as a child, I was involved in game design, and then that led into the university where I got involved in live action roleplaying,
where you would wear funny costumes and take padded weapons and go out in the forest and have grand adventures.
And what I got involved with with that was designing the adventures.
I really enjoyed creating these series of challenges that people would go through and overcome, um, which is a lot like creating.
(05:02):
It's a lot like teaching. It's a lot like any of this experience design,
creating these activities where people choose to take on a challenge and they want to make their life a little bit more interesting.
And then I got involved with board games and have been and involved with those for for decades.
I was the first person to talk about board games on YouTube with a series called Board Games with Scott, which I started in 2005.
(05:23):
I was a YouTuber in 2005, which is now before when many of my students were born.
Uh, but that got me engaged in social media. That helped me get some games published.
And so I was involved with board games. And then I visited my first escape room in Singapore in 2014, and I said, oh, this is interesting.
They've taken live action roleplaying and monetized it and made it easy for anyone to get involved with.
(05:48):
And that's when I started doing research. So I wrote the first academic paper about escape rooms, and I pulled every one
could find through the internet back in 2015, and that led to what I've been doing now,
which is creating these escape room concepts for classrooms and museums and learning.
It sounds like it's had a significant influence in your life and career from from a young age.
(06:08):
And, um, as a child in Oklahoma. I think before we even go further, uh, I'm aware of the terms like game based learning, game design.
You talked about experience design. Um, I'm familiar with the term gamification.
I'm wondering if we can take a moment to clarify some of those terms for listeners.
(06:29):
Sure. And I will focus on two of them that tend to be, uh, confused.
And there is debate among scholars, surprise, surprise about what the definition of these terms are.
And that's gamification and game based learning. And so many people mix these two up.
They use these terms interchangeably. Um, but I use them two very different types of activities.
(06:50):
So gamification is where you take some elements of games and you create an overlay on top of something that you're using.
You're doing, say, in the classroom environment. But this overlay of the game isn't integrated with the activity.
A great example of gamification in the classroom are grades.
Grading systems are games that you're earning points,
(07:14):
but the whole grading system has nothing to do with the actual learning activity that you do in the class.
Instead, it's an extrinsic motivator that we're using to get you to do stuff,
to get you to learn by giving you these points and these levels, which we call grades.
So we've been using gamification for a very long time, uh, in this grade based system.
(07:36):
Game based learning is where you integrate the game activities and the learning activities so that they're together.
You can't pull them apart. So as you're playing the game, you're learning something.
A good example that might be an escape room that's designed to teach a concept.
So for example, an escape room designed to teach electronics.
If you wanted to learn some basics of wiring electronics, and in order to succeed at the escape room,
(07:57):
you had to wire and change the wiring and understand how circuits worked and all that stuff.
Those two activities are integrated. You're not earning points by connecting the wires, you're actually doing stuff.
And so game based learning is where the learning and the games are integrated.
Gamification is where there's this layer. And what it comes down to is the difference in the type of motivation it's creating.
(08:21):
Gamification is using this extrinsic motivation.
It's stuff from the outside trying to get you to do stuff because you want to earn a reward.
While game based learning is based more on intrinsic motivation, getting you to learn the stuff because you want to succeed at the game.
Because the learning and the game are integrated, you can combine those as well.
So you can have game based learning in the classroom with a grade attached.
(08:44):
But I wouldn't recommend it, uh, because as soon as you bring a reward into it, people's interest in why they're doing it gets crushed.
Um, a good example of that.
If I gave you an online game to play, a story based game and you could choose your own adventure, and I said, do you want to do A or do you want to do B?
And you're like, I don't know, what do I want to do? If I said there's a grade attached?
(09:07):
Based on how fast you get through this. Well, then guess what you're going to do.
You're not going to bother to think about what's going on. You're just going to try to find the right answer.
It would be like if I gave you a grade based on how fast you can get out of an escape room.
Well, you're not going to enjoy the escape room experience.
You're going to be focused on how fast can I get things done so that I can get the biggest grade.
(09:27):
So when we add those extrinsic rewards to learning, for example, it has detrimental effects.
Grading has had the most damage on people's interest in learning of anything that we do.
Because people do stuff just for the grade and they don't do it because learning.
We see that when when students ... as they go through, before they go to school, they want to learn about everything in the world.
(09:49):
If you ever talk to a four year old, you know, they want to learn about everything and then they start getting grades for learning.
And then it's like, is this going to be on the test? Well, if not, they don't want to learn it.
And so we've done damage by having these heavy grade based systems that we force people to go through year after year.
So when they get to the end of that process, they're like, well, I don't want to learn anything anymore.
Thinking about those different types of motivation,
(10:10):
can game based learning offer alternative ways for instructors to think about assessments in their courses?
So and again, this is where as soon as you bring in assessment,
as soon as you bring a summative assessment into it where there is a grade involved, then the play goes away.
You're no longer playing. If I say you're going to get a grade for how you do in this game, you're going to make choices to earn the grade.
(10:37):
You're no longer going to be playing the concept of play is the freedom to explore boundary and space.
That's the pocket definition I use for it. So by definition, play needs, you would need to have that freedom to fail.
And we don't have that freedom to fail if we're using it for
You're going to earn a grade based on this game you're playing. Now,
you can use it for formative assessment. You can use it when the goal is to play and learn as you play.
(11:02):
I'm not going to give you a grade for this, but you're going to try things.
You're going to learn from these things.
And that's where like the like the electronics escape room example, if I said you take as long as you want, try stuff out, figure it out.
You're going to learn a lot more than if, hey, you're only going to get points if you do the right thing,
because then you're going to be so focused on doing the right thing, you're not going to allow yourself to explore it.
(11:23):
And we learn a lot more through failure than we do through success.
We learn through trying and failing. Yet we have this educational system that punishes failure so heavily that students will choose
to do a less challenging assignment because they know they'll get a better grade on it,
rather than take on something that's riskier with a greater chance that they're going to fail because of our system,
(11:49):
because of the damage that we've done with our system by putting grades on everything.
So I'd say you need to give your your students the freedom to fail, the freedom to take on hard challenges, to say, well, it's okay if you screw up.
We do this for faculty. Faculty are trying to get tenure. One of the concerns that people have as they're going for tenure.
It's like, oh, well, I applied for these grants and I didn't get any of them.
(12:10):
And when they're going for tenure, what we say is, well, that's okay, because you're learning.
You're learning from what you're trying and failing.
And we need to give our students that same space to try stuff, to reflect upon why they failed and actually put more weight on
the reflection. That's actually where you learn, is stepping back and reflecting upon what's going on.
I'm trying again on improving. That's the process we want our learners to because that's what life is. In life,
(12:35):
you try stuff. If you fail, it's okay.
If you then reflect on it and then improve as compared to I tried once I got my C, a C is a degree, I'm out of here.
That's the current. I've heard my students say that a C is a degree and I'm like, well, I really don't want that mindset in my class.
That notion of of play is really interesting, as well as, in some ways, giving students permission to or the freedom, as you said, the freedom to fail.
(13:02):
Um, and then reflecting on on that learning this is really interesting.
So how then can some of those elements, reflection, play,
how can they impact how students perceive learning as a process and something that is iterative and ongoing. By building into classes,
that ability to iterate, that ability to try something, to fail, to reflect, to improve, then the students can accept.
(13:28):
This is part of how I learn as compared to you. Get one try.
Here's your test. That's the score you got. We move on. That's not good because students then they achieve at a certain level.
They move on. They never, ever go back and try to try to make things better.
I did an experiment when I was starting to explore gamification in the classroom,
and there were some pushes on how to bring in gamification and the suggestion of
(13:50):
you start students with zero points and you tell them you all now have enough,
and then everything you do in the class gives you points.
And as you get more, as you do more stuff, you earn more points and you can earn your way up to a D,
then you earn your way up to a C and etc. so the concept is like a game that you have a lot of stuff you can choose to do,
and everything you do earns you points. And at the end of the class, based on how many points you earned that determines the grade you got.
(14:16):
And this was presented as, oh, it's this great way to gamify your classroom.
Well, the first thing I do is I look at that and say, you know, it's the same thing.
You've just flipped around the grading scale. You haven't really done anything to address the motivation, but I said, I'm going to give it a try.
We'll see how this goes. So I put ... I set this up in the class.
I gave my students a menu of things they could do every week, a cap on how many things they could do and how many points they could earn.
(14:39):
And then in the class, one of the things you do with this sort of system is you have a leaderboard.
Now, I gave each student an anonymized name so that they only knew their own position on the leaderboard,
and they knew where everyone else was, but they didn't know who anyone else was.
They just knew where they were in conjunction with other people.
And what I saw is the first few weeks, about two thirds of the students really participated.
(15:00):
They got involved. They got to see where they were on the leaderboard. And then in week four and five, I began to see a disturbing trend.
And that was 2 or 3 students doing everything they could to fight each other up the leaderboard.
And then that group of two thirds of students who did a lot of stuff stopped doing anything.
And I saw a few students going up and then a whole bunch of students doing nothing.
(15:23):
And then some students had never, never did anything, which is pretty typical for a class.
You usually have a chunk of students that don't really engage in what's going on.
And I said, well, this is a problem. So I let this experiment run for about six weeks.
And then I came in a class and said, all right,
this experiment has failed because what that it did and what that did is that motivated the students who were already strong.
(15:43):
Those top students didn't need the game based system and it demotivated.
The students that needed the motivation. And that's the problem with leaderboards.
Leaderboards turn the whole world into two kinds of people. The people that hate you and the people that you hate.
So that's the problem with using a leaderboard, is that it creates this situation that only the people that are already at the top are inspired,
(16:07):
and everyone else just kind of like, well, I can't, I can't catch up.
So I'm just not going to try anymore. So I had a class now that was falling apart.
So I call this a halt to the experiment. I said, all right, now we're going to look at using meaningful gamification.
And that's been one of my research areas. That's something that I've done.
And it's the idea of how do you take gamification elements that are building meaning that are building intrinsic motivation.
(16:29):
And we really looked at the class and we said, all right, how do we do this?
Um, and that's where I then explored a number of models of things with meaningful gamification.
One of the things that I explored was the ability for students to redo assignments.
That freedom to fail. Let's say you submit the assignment by its due date, and then you can redo the assignment.
(16:49):
And I will regrade the assignment. And this will allow you to have that iterative process that and I say I want you to take
on something that's challenging because you will then get a chance to try it again.
It's not once and done. You can do it again. Now that takes more time.
But it was also taking more time to count all these scores and to create all these charts and do all this kind of stuff.
The other thing I did that was different is I gave the students the ability to propose how they wanted to demonstrate their learning.
(17:15):
So whether students wanted to do a paper, whether they wanted to do a presentation where they wanted to make a game, they would.
Then I gave them a list of things. Here are some ideas, and I said, if you have your own ideas, tell me.
Tell me what you want to do and we will create a learning contract.
And that was the third element I did was I made a learning contract with each student where they said, here is the grade I want to get.
(17:37):
I want a B in the class. Here are the things that I will do in order to earn a B in the class.
And then I went back and forth with the student to make sure that was a fair contract.
And then the students. So the students didn't all have the same requirements in the class.
It was customized to the students interests and the grade they wanted to achieve.
And they knew if they did everything on their contract at a reasonable level, they would earn the grade that they set out to achieve.
(18:02):
So they weren't just always like, well, I'll just do whatever. It's like, no, I know what I'm doing, and all I want is a C in the class.
I'm like, all right, if all you want is a C in the class, here are the things you do and you'll get your C.
And so the students end up being more intrinsically motivated because they got to set their space.
They got to set their types of assignments they were doing. They knew if it didn't and if they struggled, they'd have a chance to redo it.
(18:25):
And that allowed me to fix the first six weeks of class because I said, all right,
given what you did in the first six weeks, that's your starting point.
In the next six weeks, you will need to now achieve this to earn the grade.
So there's people that did nothing in the first few weeks.
It's still worked out for them because I said, all right, you didn't do anything here, but now you need to do this, this and this.
(18:45):
If your goal is to get a C, you need to do these things. If they say if you want an A, okay, then you need to do these things.
So it didn't ... at the end the end goal worked.
We got everyone to where they wanted to be with their grades. And I find when I do that, when I set a learning contract,
a greater percentage of students come out of that group of people that never do
anything because the students had a say in what they were going to do for the class.
(19:08):
And when you get that buy in, when you get the students feeling some sense of empowerment as to what's going on,
they're a lot more likely to be involved with the class.
I think that's a really important point. You know that buy in from students, um, I'm keen to know more about the learning contract.
What's involved in that? What does that look like?
What's the ... can you tell us more about the process of developing a learning contract with with students in your classes?
(19:30):
So I found what works best. And I've used this in a number of classes, is I like to give the students a template.
So I give I have like an A template, a B template, a C template.
So the students have an idea of what my expectation is to earn certain grades in the class, and then they can choose.
I'll give them some choices, you know, do you can do this, this, this. You need to do two of these things.
So it might be for an A you have to do a paper.
(19:54):
You have to take an exam. You have to participate in all ten weeks of the discussion board for a B, you have to do two of those three things.
Maybe for a C, you have to do the exam and get a score of blah or however you set it up.
Um, but then you always have in there I am open to negotiation.
So if and I'll give the students some suggestions, I say, do you want to make a video rather than, uh, give a presentation?
(20:19):
Uh, would you or do you want to make a video instead of writing a paper?
Does that fit better? And what are my expectations around that?
But trying to help the students be able to convey their learning through a method that connects with their skills and abilities,
and that creates a more equitable classroom, uh,
that creates a space where people are able to demonstrate their abilities through a way that they said set forth.
(20:43):
And then I help negotiate to say, all right, you're good at art.
All right, let's figure out an art based project that will help you demonstrate what we've learned in this class.
So game design, for example, I could take any class and say, all right, you want to make a game that demonstrates you understand Romeo and Juliet.
Great. Here's, here's and you could see how you could see how that could be done as a student could create a game demonstrating that knowledge.
(21:07):
And a lot of times when I do that, I help them think about how would you teach this concept to your sibling?
Can you make a game that would teach the important concepts of Romeo and Juliet to your family?
That, and I find that really helps the students get in their mind.
Okay, what I'm needing to do, and to do that, you have to understand the content better than just generating a paper, better than just taking a test.
(21:30):
You have to understand it to understand how would I teach it? That's really what's going on.
While I say you're making a game that ... what's actually going on?
is I'm saying, you're going to be teaching it to other people and to teach it, you really have to understand it.
Absolutely. You mentioned the importance of of choice, right?
That, um, student, uh, assignments, connecting with their own skills, their abilities,
(21:51):
giving students choice in what types of activities or assignments they like to do, um, and developing uh, systems that empower participants.
And of course, this has resonances with universal design for learning.
And I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about that. Sure.
Yeah. UDL Universal Design for learning is something that is it's it's one of the
(22:11):
pieces that I quote when I'm talking about these different ways of forming it.
And it's this it's this idea of creating both methods of conveying material and also methods of demonstrating
learning that align with the students abilities and skills and that idea that it helps the students,
whatever their abilities and skills, they have a way to convey that learning back to you.
(22:32):
If you make everyone take a test. People that test well will do well.
People that don't test well won't do well. Now. The reality is, very rarely in life do you need to take a test.
Are you? It's like, here's your close book test. That's not usually not like when I went for citizenship, Canadian citizenship.
I had to take a 20 question test, um, which I believe what it actually was, was just 20 people.
(22:54):
I'd have to identify as Canadian or not Canadian. And so that I'm practiced so that I can always say in the world, oh, they're Canadian.
So that was actually ... to become a citizen, that's what you have to do, is you have to be able to tell people when someone's Canadian.
Anyway, sorry. Oh, that was another trick there. I see I had to learn how to apologize for things.
That's another another piece on the test.
Um, but so the idea of universal design for learning is you try to create these ways for students to learn based on their interests.
(23:22):
And the nice thing about having students create games or other forms of videos or things like that is that then the best ones,
I reach out to those students and say, hey, can I show your content to people taking this class in the future?
Because that now starts to give me a catalog of other ways to explore content that other
(23:43):
students created using their frame of reference and using their mindset about the world.
So this allows me to then hand those out and say,
here are some examples of games that other students have made in previous versions of the class or videos that they've made.
And that's really useful for a student to see what another student has done.
It helps them understand something and then also gives them a model to say, oh, I could do something like that.
(24:06):
So I always look to create the body of learning, um, resources for UDL type concepts.
You've talked a lot about motivation extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
And we know that intrinsic motivation is a is a key part of successful learning.
So I'm curious about meaningful gamification and how that can help other instructors um, better tap into student motivation.
(24:34):
So with intrinsic motivation I use, um, Deci and
Ryan's self-motivation theory is at the heart of what I,
I that's at the baseline of all the research I've done in this which which explores three things that are important to create intrinsic motivation.
And that's autonomy, competence, and relatedness. So autonomy means that you want students to have choice.
(24:55):
You want them to feel like they have some choice. And we've talked about UDL concept.
We talked about how to give students that choice. Competence is you want students to feel like they're getting better at stuff.
And that's where that iterative process comes into play,
where the idea that you try something and then I will give you feedback and then you can improve and that's going to make you feel better about it.
And relatedness helps you think about how you're doing stuff in relationship
(25:19):
to the world around you and in relationship to other students in the class.
And that's where when we get students to talk with each other, to share what they're doing and to share what they're doing with their family.
So when I have someone make content with that concept of do something that your family could use to understand it,
I then suggest, why don't you show it to your family? Why don't you help?
Help them playtest it? Because in games, playtesting is a huge thing.
(25:42):
Having people see stuff. So creating something that people can share with others helps to build those concepts of of relatedness.
And the goal of meaningful gamification is trying to figure out ways to integrate playful elements that build on this.
So whether it be ... we talked early on about creating experiences and creating that external environment around what you're learning,
(26:06):
that's where you're going to bring storytelling and narrative into the class,
where you're going to connect the things you're learning to stuff out there in the real world.
I have ... one of my research projects right now is something called Escape If.
Which is a low resource tool to allow teachers to use a branching narrative game for a classroom.
So we've been designing it where it's it's a script that a teacher reads all in the open source,
(26:30):
and it's a story based activity that explores ... Right now,
we've been building it around math concepts. So the most recent game we've made is for an audience in Rowanda.
It's going to be going out through the telephone systems later this year. And so the idea is to teach concepts of probability and chance.
And we're doing it through a series of scenarios around the weather and planning
(26:51):
a lunch for people and using things like weather forecast to make decisions.
And so using that story to help people understand what's going on.
Down the road. What I'd like to do with Escape If, is get some funding to create tools to allow learners to now write their own Escape If games,
their own stories, using their own cultural, uh, space that they're in,
(27:12):
but applying what they're learning in classroom to their own spaces,
because that helps then the learners to create stories and to create the stories they can share,
which is where you tie in that relatedness is what's going on.
So giving people context for why they're learning what they're learning, allowing them to try stuff and to fail,
allowing them to have some control over what it is they're trying to do.
(27:33):
These are all ways to build intrinsic motivation. Trying to get away from your just doing it so that you can get a grade.
But looking for any way, whether it be you're doing it because it helps you in the real world in this way,
or you're doing it because it's going to help your little brother learn this thing,
or you're doing it because you get to explore this new form of making content.
So anything we can do to get the students out of I'm doing it for grade and into
(27:57):
I'm doing it because I want to do it. It's going to help them be more interested in what they're doing in the classroom.
And that notion, I mean, we know that that narrative,
we know about the powers of story, in creating story in the classroom, and for opportunities, creating opportunities for students to apply
their learning. What they're learning in the class certainly gets at those higher order thinking skills.
(28:21):
Switching gears a little bit, um, I was thinking about, um, generative AI, of course, as you know, has been a very hot topic this year.
And I'm curious about the ways in which game design intersects with AI technologies.
Perhaps you've incorporated AI to your teaching this year.
Um, or maybe you can tell us a little bit, how, about how the, you know, what role AI may take in your work?
(28:45):
So I start by saying that I've the way I am using it is not the same as the way other faculty are using it, as the way it's used everywhere.
Um, each of us is having to think about how are we going to use these tools and integrate them.
For me, I'm looking at what's going on in the industry and how are these tools being used.
Um, and it is not ... in the industry, it's not we're not touching them at all.
(29:10):
There are some ways in which the tools are being used and I try to help students understand that.
So here are the times when it's useful, and here are the times when it is detrimental.
And so in assignments, I address this with the students and help them understand.
Here's when you can use it and here's when it might cause problems for you.
So I talk about AI as a brainstorming buddy.
AI tools are very useful in the early brainstorming of a project or a game that you say, here's a hey, do you have any ideas around this?
(29:38):
They're really useful for, say, uh, creating a narrative or a story, getting ideas to build your story out of.
Kind of like if you just went into a public place and said, hey, anyone want to talk about dwarves in space?
What would that be like? And you should take the results.
You get as strong as going into a public space and asking the question, because that's exactly what you're getting with these AI tools.
(30:02):
The AI tool is just a single voice that's combining a bunch of random voices,
and it'd be just like you go into a public place and say, hey, what do you guys think about this?
People can give you ideas, but you have to then pick through all those ideas and identify the ones that are interesting and validate ones.
If you're doing something factual, that are true.
(30:22):
Um, if I go in and ask AI about tell me what articles I've written, it gives me a list of articles and very few of them I've actually written.
It makes up all sorts of interesting articles that that I've never written.
It sounds like I could, and that's so I actually use some examples in class and show the students that to say,
look, you can't just ask it to give you citations because it's going to make them up.
(30:43):
Just like if you went to the went out into the tavern and said, hey, anyone want to tell me about this?
You've got to take that stuff with a big grain of salt. So as a brainstorming buddy, it's a useful tool to get started.
It's a useful tool to help you refine your writing, so if you've written stuff, it can be very useful.
And and we've we've been using this for decades through word has had AI built into it for a very long time,
(31:08):
giving you a little squiggles under words that you could do something better with and stuff like Grammarly.
So there's tools we've been using with AI to help you refine your writing,
but you still have to look at it when it's done to make sure it's conveying your message.
It's just like, if I were to give someone something I wrote and I said, rewrite that, make that clearer for me.
And then I reread it and I'm like, this isn't saying what I think it should say.
(31:28):
So you can't stop with the AI, but it can help guide you to doing a better job.
Now, in this case, with game design classes, we're usually not focused on, uh, teaching people how to write.
I want to understand their designs and their ideas. And so the AI tools are used to help them demonstrate what they're doing.
Another place that we do use it, or I use it in my classrooms, is I let students use it for prototype artwork to demonstrate a concept.
(31:55):
So we might be making ... it's something in game design called the Design Document,
which is a early document you make with your big ideas where you might have something you're going to show to say,
this is the kind of world I'm looking to create. An AI tool is really useful to generate an image,
in the same way that you might go to Google Image Search and look for, uh, you might create what's called a mood board, which is a set of images.
(32:17):
You can use AI tools to do those kind of things. But again, as I tell the students, this is not where you stop.
This is used as a communication tool. It's used as something to look at.
And then you hire an artist to say, all right, here's the sort of thing we want to do.
Here's some ideas. Again, our program and game design isn't an art program, so I'm not testing students skills.
And many of the students have no skill in making artwork.
(32:40):
Some of them do, and they love to make their own artwork. Some of them don't, and they're not here to learn that.
So being able to use an AI tool to help them demonstrate their thoughts and their concepts is something that I do.
Now, where it fails miserably, is I teach, for example, a board game design class.
AI is horrible at making a game.
(33:00):
It can make something that looks like a board game.
It can make something that feels like a board game, and then you actually try to play it and it's ... it falls apart.
Uh, it doesn't work. And so I tell the students, you may use it in that brainstorming tool,
but then you've got to actually test this out and fix it because it's not going to be good.
This is the same thing with anything AI creates, is you then have to look at it.
(33:24):
And the reality is in the workplace, this is what students are going to have to do.
They're going to have to understand art, understand game design, understand writing well enough to assess what they're being handed,
look at it, adjust it, and make it fit whatever environment they're putting it into.
So that's the way I've been using AI in my classes.
(33:45):
I ask students to cite any time they do use it, to list what tools they use, to list what prompts they used.
Um, so that there and that that ties us into talking about citations.
Um, but to make sure that whatever they're turning into me ends up being stuff they have worked through.
Uh, because AI is not trustworthy in creating content that they can just put their name behind.
(34:05):
And that's the same attitude I want them to take into workplace, that they're not just going to put something together and slap it out,
but they're actually going to be looking at it and understanding the art, the design,
the writing well enough to be able to make adjustments and make assessments.
I appreciate the analogy of engaging with AI tools is like walking into a public place and shouting out a question and gathering, uh, other input.
(34:27):
Um, but I, I think you make some really good points there with regard to, um, AI outputs and the need to review carefully, the need to verify accuracy,
Correct. Evaluate the outputs and critique it.
Um, and thinking of AI as a, as a brainstorming body.
Useful for ideas, useful for perhaps starting points of designs.
(34:50):
But the importance of being critical with regard to the outputs, I think is a key point that you raise.
So thinking about that, then, we've talked about engagement. We've talked about motivation.
What are some ways in which, uh, game based learning might foster critical thinking and deeper understanding?
So the nice thing that game based learning does is it's going to take the stuff you're learning in classroom and attach it to some context.
(35:16):
Now, I could make a fantasy game where you're going out and you're going to be, uh, you know, going through dealing with mountains and dealing with,
uh, traversing the wilds and exploring caves that you'd never been to before and doing that by solving math equations.
Well, that's really bad game based learning.
We've been actually very ... we've been making bad game based learning for decades, you know, welcome to the Hall of the Math Minotaur.
(35:42):
And you're walking around the maze and all of a sudden there's a wall that appears with a math equation to solve.
And then that's how you defeat the Minotaur. That's bad game based learning.
And we've gotten very used to making these kind of, uh, trivia based games.
So in my classes, I don't allow students to make any games where you're asking trivia questions off cards,
because that's a that's a lazy way of basically turning worksheets into games.
(36:05):
Um, when I critique escape rooms in classrooms, I critique the worksheets and padlocks approach, where you take a worksheet that you'd normally use,
and you just use a padlock to assess the answer, and you're using the padlock to grade the worksheet results.
That's not good escape room design. Instead, what you want to think about is where in the real world would we use something like this?
(36:28):
Now with my Escape If games for example, we have the students.
Many of our games are set in a dinosaur safari, so a dinosaur safari isn't a real place, but it's playful.
And so I always try to think about playful concepts that are easily analogous to the real world.
And that brings me to one of the most important parts of any kind of game based learning.
(36:49):
And that's reflection.
Whenever you're going to run any sort of a game in your class, you want to reserve a third of your time for reflection about what you just did.
You don't just do it. And because learning doesn't come from just doing as Dewey says, learning comes from doing and reflecting.
So when you play a game, you then need time to reflect upon what you just did.
(37:12):
Even if you use a bad game, if you have a good reflection at the end you will learn stuff because the reflection
is where you make the connection between what you've just learned and the real world.
It's where you're building that relatedness that we talked about for intrinsic motivation.
And you and you don't tell the students what they learned.
You let them tell you what they learned.
(37:32):
Because many times when you do something, the students will tell you stuff that you never thought that you were teaching with that activity.
And the student has some aha that you're like, oh yes, that's, that's great.
And if the student has the reflection, then other students are more likely to learn from that reflection because it's their peers that are saying,
(37:53):
hey, here's what I got out of it as compared to me saying, well, what you should have learned from this thing is blah blah blah, blah blah.
As compared to the students actually saying blah blah blah, blah blah and then, but they're more likely to engage.
So that reflection is something that many people miss when they're doing games.
I think we just do the game and end class it's like, no, no, you do the game, but you need to reserve time to change the stage on what's going on.
(38:17):
No longer are you just a player, but now you are stepping back to reflect upon what did you do?
Why did you do it? How does it connect to the real world? And then how are you going to use this going forward?
That's an essential part of any kind of game based learning. Yes, absolutely.
I think that that reflection piece is really key.
That idea of, um, as you said, you know, quoting Dewey, um, we're not going to find meaning in what we do unless we reflect on on that action.
(38:43):
So what does that look like in your classroom? You talked about, um,
students all sharing their reflections and other students learning from the insights that are shared rather than you as the professor,
uh, talking to students about what they should have learned or how they should have responded.
What does the reflection component look like in your classroom?
So there's a few ways to do it. And some of it's based upon how large the class is.
(39:06):
Um, what I like to do, if I have enough time and I've put aside a third of my time for this, I like to start with first individual reflection.
So I have the students. I'll give them a couple minutes. I said, I want you to think about what you did, and I'll have them write something down.
Write down what you learned from these activities, or write down how you would apply what you've learned in the real world,
(39:26):
or write down how you would connect what you've learned in this game to things you've learned in other classes.
Because first, you wanted them to think themselves.
Then I will connect them with other students, so I'll put them in small groups where they will share what they wrote.
So this eliminates the dominant student approach.
If you just put them in groups right away, then usually one student will talk, everyone else will listen, and some people won't say anything.
(39:50):
I much prefer to give everyone a chance to write down some notes, and then everyone shares what they had to say.
What I ... the way I like to do it is single person, and then you put them in 2 or 3 person groups,
and then you have those groups come together and you have each group share what was the most interesting of everything their group shared.
So it could be whatever they said, or it could be what someone else said. And then you bubble that up to then sharing across the class.
(40:16):
Okay. Of everything you've heard, what was the most impactful? Um, you can do it where you've just finished.
And now what did everyone think about this? Um, the problem with that is, again, you have the dominant student effect.
And that can, that can fail.
If you have an online service, you're doing this as an online class that actually can work better for these kind of reflections,
(40:36):
because you can create those spaces where more people, you can have everyone.
I want everyone to type in the chat, but don't press enter what they got out of this or whatever specific reflection question you're looking for.
Then you have everyone hit enter at once so that you get a lot more input.
Everyone thinks about it, people can see what's going on.
So in some ways, teaching in a virtual environment is better for this kind of helping people reflect.
(40:58):
And it won't be dominated by people who typically will dominate an in-person classroom environment.
That notion of of context is really important too.
And connecting, connecting to the learning, but also connecting to, uh, real world, right?
Those those, uh, authentic moments. I'm wondering if there are misconceptions, uh,
(41:19):
or assumptions. Do students come to your class with certain assumptions about, uh, game based learning or game design,
um, or misconceptions that, you know, they,
they arrive in the class thinking one thing and it perhaps is different than what they encounter in your class.
One of the challenges in teaching game design is that you get students in the class who come in believing they are already an expert,
(41:43):
uh, because they have been playing games for 15 years.
They come into the class thinking, well, this will be easy because I've been playing games for a long time.
And so that's ... that is a challenge right away that many professors don't have in topics where students I've,
you know, they haven't been doing algebra for fun for 15 years.
So that's the first challenge that you have. Um, now I do like to help students.
(42:06):
Our first class, we teach in our game design program is called Critical Play,
where we have students look at these things that they've been doing for years and take a critical look at what they've been doing.
When you've been playing Pokemon for all those years and you're really good at the Pokemon games, what are you really doing in the games?
What's really going on in that game when when you're capturing these animals and forcing them to fight the death ... what's
(42:32):
actually going on there and getting them to be critical about what they've been doing and think about it with a different light.
And that's one of our early challenges in game design,
is helping students to step back from being immersed a player and thinking about being a designer,
because making that shift from engaging with something as a consumer to engaging with something as a creator,
(42:52):
um, the biggest thing is getting students to realize you're going to be making stuff that you might not like.
Especially if you go ahead and get a job. You're working for a company, you might be making games that you don't like to play,
and it's fine because you're making things for a specific audience. So that's one of the biggest challenges.
Um, the other challenge is getting people to explore instead of just pushing for the win.
(43:16):
So if I set up, say, when I've done these Escape If games, I've also created versions of them that are digital.
And in the digital game, it's basically a series of multiple choice questions.
And what I find when someone plays those, they are just banging as fast as they can.
A wrong B wrong, C right move on A wrong B ... and they just start pushing their way through.
Not actually even reading the scenario, just trying to bang out the answers as compared to when I run it in a classroom.
(43:42):
And I force people in that small groups to talk about which choice they'd like to make,
and then they raise their hand to vote on a choice, it forces that reflection.
So many times when I do a game, that's a problem I see ... it
And as an example, anytime I use a board game in class, I like to pair students up and have them play as a team to take moves in the board game,
because when they do that, they have to talk about what they're doing. They can't just take a move.
(44:04):
They actually have to engage about here's what we want to do and why it slows the game down, but it makes it a much more reflective activity.
And so that idea of being a reflective player of your game,
no matter if you're making, if you're making the games or you're using the games for learning,
but taking the time to play, to explore, not just taking the time to win,
(44:25):
but taking the time to explore, and that's what I like to create, are those experiences where people have that space to explore,
where maybe there is no right answer at the end, maybe it's just a conclusion, and then you reflect upon what happened and why.
So one of the escape rooms, the learning escape rooms, I did, um, the during the game there's called Ballot Box Bumble,
and the idea was to teach people about Canadian electoral systems.
(44:48):
I just moved to Canada. I'm like, I want to learn more about it. I'm going to make a game about it.
So the students are told that you are volunteering for a poll.
The poll is just closed. Elections Canada will be calling in 30 minutes and would like to get the results,
but they're in this locked ballot box and the poll director is gone and you don't know where she is.
So you start following through, looking through her office for some help to be able to unlock this.
(45:11):
And you end up going through a series of election scandals that has gone,
have gone on in Canada over time, and how this person has been involved in trying to bring these to bear.
So stuff like robo calling, where you have computers that call people and tell them their polling place has changed, that actually happened in Canada.
And so the goal of the game is students are exploring these different election scandals,
and they get to the end of the game and whether they've unlocked the box or not.
(45:35):
There's a phone call from Elections Canada that says, hey, this is Elections Canada.
We're wondering if you have your poll results. The game is won or lost at this moment.
Based on what the players say, it doesn't matter if they open the box or not.
What matters is do they report what they found? So players that just like I got the box unlocked, I counted the ballots.
Here's the numbers. They then lose the game.
(45:57):
They actually I don't say you lose and said I had three newspapers that had different stories based on the ending.
So if they just reported the results, then they have all this video surveillance of these poll workers working with robo
calling data and all of these things that they had to engage with to unlock it,
but they didn't report it.
So they are now looked at as the bad guys, as the ones that did all this as compared to where we found these problems and reported it.
(46:21):
And the lesson is a civics lesson to say if you are involved as a poll worker, part of your job is to observe what's going on.
If there's something suspicious, you should say something because that's what's going on there.
And that's ... but that's unlocked in the reflection. If we didn't have the reflection at the end, then people would just unlock the box and be done with it.
So I like to use those kind of twists to get people to think about what it is they're doing on a larger space than just, I did it for the grade.
(46:47):
I did it to unlock the box. It's like, well, why? How does this connect into the real world?
Yeah, that that point about taking time to explore instead of pushing for the win, I think has a lot of resonances,
as you mentioned earlier, with teaching and what a lot of us are trying to do in,
in our classroom is, is building in those opportunities for students to, um, to fail, as you mentioned,
(47:10):
to to learn to reflect on where they went wrong in order to improve, in order to, to learn.
You've mentioned a lot of really important pieces here, Scott, with regard to reflection and the importance of context and making connections,
giving students choice and encouraging students or giving students the freedom to fail as well.
(47:30):
I'm wondering for for an instructor who is new to this, who doesn't work in in game design,
what is one small, or two, small but impactful changes they could implement to start using some of these principles in their own courses?
Of everything I've tried and everything I've explored,
the thing that has made the single greatest difference is giving the students the ability to resubmit an assignment.
(47:57):
Taking that play model of you can try something I'll give you.
And the way I structure it is, if you turn on your assignment by the due date and you've made an attempt at the assignment,
then I will provide you feedback from the feedback. You have one week to resubmit the assignment and I'll grade it.
And that's the structure that I use. Now, the reality is most students don't.
(48:19):
Most students don't take advantage of this and don't resubmit it, but some do.
And the difference I see ... now you have some students that already got an A.
And they just want a better A. So some students do and resubmit it.
That's fine. That doesn't take a lot of time to grade that. I let students know if you've already got an A, there's really no room for you to move.
Um, but it's those students that end up either if they misunderstood the assignment or they really just want to improve what they've done.
(48:45):
Those students that may end up with like a C, and they want to move that up to a B or, and A.
That's where I see these shifts really happen, are in those students that really take advantage of that ability to have that chance to redo things.
I also think some students push themselves a little bit further because they know I've had students tell me it's like, yeah, I didn't think,
I didn't know if it'll work out, but I gave it a shot because I knew I'd get your feedback and I knew that I'd have a chance to try it again.
(49:08):
And that's the single thing that's made a difference.
The other place that that really helps with is at the end of the semester, students have a lot less space to beg for points to get a higher grade.
When you've given them the ability all semester to redo their work and get some points back, it's like, you know, you had that chance.
(49:30):
So I find when I started doing that, the number of students that came to me at the end and asked for points or asked
for something greatly plummeted because they knew they'd had their chance.
They knew they'd had that opportunity to redo it.
So it really helps from a that sort of post class, um, assessment moment when whenever you post those grades to your local class,
(49:50):
but you haven't submitted them to the university because,
you know, as soon as you post it, you're going to have some emails from people that want to know how can they earn a few more points?
The number of those kind of requests went way down when they'd had that chance along the way.
The other thing I do try to do after they receive their final assessment in that week,
I try to give them the say, here's the grade you will earn if you do not redo this assignment.
(50:13):
So I say, here's your final. So what I do is I post those final grades and then post internally.
Here's the grade you'll earn if you stop now. And then people can decide, am I going to redo it or not?
Again, that greatly reduces the number of people that come to you and say, oh,
I wanted a few more points because it's like you knew, you know, we I said, I set it up, you knew what you were going to get.
And so the students, it also takes away a lot of that stress because now the students know, it's like, okay,
(50:37):
this is what I'm going to get if I stop now, if I don't like this grade, I can redo it and try to try to do better.
So that's something that I've used. So that's the one thing that I would say is to try putting a redo's in your class on that.
They don't work so well on exams, but they work on written projects and things like that where the student can come back.
That's made the biggest difference in my teaching, and I try to always use that whenever I can.
(51:00):
Good advice and food for thought for for faculty who are listening in.
Scott, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed our conversation and I've learned so much about gamification and game design.
Um, and it's been it's been a real pleasure, a real treat talking to you this afternoon.
So thanks for for making the time to chat with us and thank you.
(51:20):
My thanks to Scott Nicholson from Laurier's Game Design and Development Program for joining me today.
You can find out more about his work on his website, Scott Nicholson.com, or by following him on YouTube at Scott Nicholson.
Learn more about teaching excellence and innovation at Laurier by following the links in the episode description.
I'm educational developer Alicia Moffat, and I hope you'll join us again on the Laurier Teaching Podcast to hear more stories,
(51:47):
successes, and strategies from inspiring educators.
Welcome to this episode of the Laurier Teaching Podcast.
I'm your host, Alisha Moffat, from the Teaching Excellence and Innovation team at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Today I'll be talking to Professor Scott Nicholson from Laurier's game design and development program.
Scott has been teaching at Laurier since 2015, developing courses like gamification and game design, and escape room and puzzle design.
(00:24):
He emphasizes student choice assessment, flexibility, and incorporates universal design for learning principles across his teaching.
I'm excited to talk with him about meaningful gamification, as well as incorporating play, choice, and reflection into his assessments.
I'm also curious about how he taps into student motivation and builds excitement for learning.
(00:46):
It's my pleasure to welcome Scott Nicholson to the Laurier Teaching Podcast.
I once heard you say that in your work, you teach students how to create games and how to create experiences.
(01:08):
And so I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit more about that process.
Sure. So a game, you know, is a series of challenges that you're choosing to take on when you want to play a game.
You're like, I'd like to make my life a little more difficult, please. And so game designers are about creating those challenges,
something that will make your life a little more difficult, but that you should be able to overcome.
(01:31):
And through that overcome, you get some happy brain chemicals. You get some sense of achievement.
You might engage with a story, uh, and so a game is that kind of thing.
And I try to help students figure out, well, how do I create a challenge?
And a lot of ways, it's a lot like teaching a good teacher is doing the exact same thing.
You're creating challenges for students to overcome. And as they overcome those challenges, they learn something about the world.
(01:53):
They learn something about themselves. So there's a lot of similarities between game design and creating, uh, educational, uh, concepts and teaching.
Um, and tying that all in is this larger concept of experience design.
So experience design is where you're focused not only on like that physical form of the game or in the teaching world, the content of the lesson.
(02:15):
But the classroom environment, where are you
How are you setting up the space so that the students will be in a learning mindset so that they will feel like they're engaged,
so that they may have some intrinsic reasons for what they're doing, going beyond just here's the worksheet, go fill it out.
But this worksheet is in a context of other students, of me, of an environment.
And the same thing is true of game design. So thinking about the game in this larger space, in this larger experience.
(02:40):
And so that's I looked a lot to to theme parks, for example, as models.
Um, so Disney I'm a big fan of Disney for example, the Disney parks. What they do really well is experience design.
And it's that difference between like,
if you go and ride a roller coaster or you ride a roller coaster that's inside of a mountain that's designed to be,
you're traveling to another planet and there's this whole narrative that's going on both before and after the ride.
(03:04):
The roller coaster activity is just a small portion of it, and the same is true with creating a game or creating a learning activity.
It's that larger context that makes the experience. That's really interesting, that's really interesting.
And I think that notion of experience design and thinking about the, the learning environment and, and, um,
and the ways in which a lot of instructors are thinking about how to make learning fun,
(03:31):
how to engage students, how to build in those pieces for motivation, to to motivate students.
What what got you into this? What got you interested in game design?
So I've been engaged with games all of my life.
I grew up in Oklahoma on a horse farm, and of everyone in the family, I was the only one interested in games,
(03:54):
so I would ask for board games for my various holidays, birthday, and Christmas.
But I didn't have anyone that wanted to play them with me.
So what I would do is actually set them up and play set up for players and play all four players myself.
And when you do that, then you really start to think about the game and what is going on in the game and what are the different strategies.
(04:14):
And then that leads to, well, what if I made some changes? Because that's a nice thing about a board game, is anyone can change a board game.
You can try out different rules. You can try out make your own cards.
It's a much easier entry point than, say, if you go and buy a video game.
Many video games, you can't really make changes to it easily.
Uh, but with a tabletop game or roleplaying game, which I also got involved, the tabletop role playing game.
(04:37):
So you're creating stories.
So even as a child, I was involved in game design, and then that led into the university where I got involved in live action roleplaying,
where you would wear funny costumes and take padded weapons and go out in the forest and have grand adventures.
And what I got involved with with that was designing the adventures.
I really enjoyed creating these series of challenges that people would go through and overcome, um, which is a lot like creating.
(05:02):
It's a lot like teaching. It's a lot like any of this experience design,
creating these activities where people choose to take on a challenge and they want to make their life a little bit more interesting.
And then I got involved with board games and have been and involved with those for for decades.
I was the first person to talk about board games on YouTube with a series called Board Games with Scott, which I started in 2005.
(05:23):
I was a YouTuber in 2005, which is now before when many of my students were born.
Uh, but that got me engaged in social media. That helped me get some games published.
And so I was involved with board games. And then I visited my first escape room in Singapore in 2014, and I said, oh, this is interesting.
They've taken live action roleplaying and monetized it and made it easy for anyone to get involved with.
(05:48):
And that's when I started doing research. So I wrote the first academic paper about escape rooms, and I pulled every one
could find through the internet back in 2015, and that led to what I've been doing now,
which is creating these escape room concepts for classrooms and museums and learning.
It sounds like it's had a significant influence in your life and career from from a young age.
(06:08):
And, um, as a child in Oklahoma. I think before we even go further, uh, I'm aware of the terms like game based learning, game design.
You talked about experience design. Um, I'm familiar with the term gamification.
I'm wondering if we can take a moment to clarify some of those terms for listeners.
(06:29):
Sure. And I will focus on two of them that tend to be, uh, confused.
And there is debate among scholars, surprise, surprise about what the definition of these terms are.
And that's gamification and game based learning. And so many people mix these two up.
They use these terms interchangeably. Um, but I use them two very different types of activities.
(06:50):
So gamification is where you take some elements of games and you create an overlay on top of something that you're using.
You're doing, say, in the classroom environment. But this overlay of the game isn't integrated with the activity.
A great example of gamification in the classroom are grades.
Grading systems are games that you're earning points,
(07:14):
but the whole grading system has nothing to do with the actual learning activity that you do in the class.
Instead, it's an extrinsic motivator that we're using to get you to do stuff,
to get you to learn by giving you these points and these levels, which we call grades.
So we've been using gamification for a very long time, uh, in this grade based system.
(07:36):
Game based learning is where you integrate the game activities and the learning activities so that they're together.
You can't pull them apart. So as you're playing the game, you're learning something.
A good example that might be an escape room that's designed to teach a concept.
So for example, an escape room designed to teach electronics.
If you wanted to learn some basics of wiring electronics, and in order to succeed at the escape room,
(07:57):
you had to wire and change the wiring and understand how circuits worked and all that stuff.
Those two activities are integrated. You're not earning points by connecting the wires, you're actually doing stuff.
And so game based learning is where the learning and the games are integrated.
Gamification is where there's this layer. And what it comes down to is the difference in the type of motivation it's creating.
(08:21):
Gamification is using this extrinsic motivation.
It's stuff from the outside trying to get you to do stuff because you want to earn a reward.
While game based learning is based more on intrinsic motivation, getting you to learn the stuff because you want to succeed at the game.
Because the learning and the game are integrated, you can combine those as well.
So you can have game based learning in the classroom with a grade attached.
(08:44):
But I wouldn't recommend it, uh, because as soon as you bring a reward into it, people's interest in why they're doing it gets crushed.
Um, a good example of that.
If I gave you an online game to play, a story based game and you could choose your own adventure, and I said, do you want to do A or do you want to do B?
And you're like, I don't know, what do I want to do? If I said there's a grade attached?
(09:07):
Based on how fast you get through this. Well, then guess what you're going to do.
You're not going to bother to think about what's going on. You're just going to try to find the right answer.
It would be like if I gave you a grade based on how fast you can get out of an escape room.
Well, you're not going to enjoy the escape room experience.
You're going to be focused on how fast can I get things done so that I can get the biggest grade.
(09:27):
So when we add those extrinsic rewards to learning, for example, it has detrimental effects.
Grading has had the most damage on people's interest in learning of anything that we do.
Because people do stuff just for the grade and they don't do it because learning.
We see that when when students ... as they go through, before they go to school, they want to learn about everything in the world.
(09:49):
If you ever talk to a four year old, you know, they want to learn about everything and then they start getting grades for learning.
And then it's like, is this going to be on the test? Well, if not, they don't want to learn it.
And so we've done damage by having these heavy grade based systems that we force people to go through year after year.
So when they get to the end of that process, they're like, well, I don't want to learn anything anymore.
Thinking about those different types of motivation,
(10:10):
can game based learning offer alternative ways for instructors to think about assessments in their courses?
So and again, this is where as soon as you bring in assessment,
as soon as you bring a summative assessment into it where there is a grade involved, then the play goes away.
You're no longer playing. If I say you're going to get a grade for how you do in this game, you're going to make choices to earn the grade.
(10:37):
You're no longer going to be playing the concept of play is the freedom to explore boundary and space.
That's the pocket definition I use for it. So by definition, play needs, you would need to have that freedom to fail.
And we don't have that freedom to fail if we're using it for
You're going to earn a grade based on this game you're playing. Now,
you can use it for formative assessment. You can use it when the goal is to play and learn as you play.
(11:02):
I'm not going to give you a grade for this, but you're going to try things.
You're going to learn from these things.
And that's where like the like the electronics escape room example, if I said you take as long as you want, try stuff out, figure it out.
You're going to learn a lot more than if, hey, you're only going to get points if you do the right thing,
because then you're going to be so focused on doing the right thing, you're not going to allow yourself to explore it.
(11:23):
And we learn a lot more through failure than we do through success.
We learn through trying and failing. Yet we have this educational system that punishes failure so heavily that students will choose
to do a less challenging assignment because they know they'll get a better grade on it,
rather than take on something that's riskier with a greater chance that they're going to fail because of our system,
(11:49):
because of the damage that we've done with our system by putting grades on everything.
So I'd say you need to give your your students the freedom to fail, the freedom to take on hard challenges, to say, well, it's okay if you screw up.
We do this for faculty. Faculty are trying to get tenure. One of the concerns that people have as they're going for tenure.
It's like, oh, well, I applied for these grants and I didn't get any of them.
(12:10):
And when they're going for tenure, what we say is, well, that's okay, because you're learning.
You're learning from what you're trying and failing.
And we need to give our students that same space to try stuff, to reflect upon why they failed and actually put more weight on
the reflection. That's actually where you learn, is stepping back and reflecting upon what's going on.
I'm trying again on improving. That's the process we want our learners to because that's what life is. In life,
(12:35):
you try stuff. If you fail, it's okay.
If you then reflect on it and then improve as compared to I tried once I got my C, a C is a degree, I'm out of here.
That's the current. I've heard my students say that a C is a degree and I'm like, well, I really don't want that mindset in my class.
That notion of of play is really interesting, as well as, in some ways, giving students permission to or the freedom, as you said, the freedom to fail.
(13:02):
Um, and then reflecting on on that learning this is really interesting.
So how then can some of those elements, reflection, play,
how can they impact how students perceive learning as a process and something that is iterative and ongoing. By building into classes,
that ability to iterate, that ability to try something, to fail, to reflect, to improve, then the students can accept.
(13:28):
This is part of how I learn as compared to you. Get one try.
Here's your test. That's the score you got. We move on. That's not good because students then they achieve at a certain level.
They move on. They never, ever go back and try to try to make things better.
I did an experiment when I was starting to explore gamification in the classroom,
and there were some pushes on how to bring in gamification and the suggestion of
(13:50):
you start students with zero points and you tell them you all now have enough,
and then everything you do in the class gives you points.
And as you get more, as you do more stuff, you earn more points and you can earn your way up to a D,
then you earn your way up to a C and etc. so the concept is like a game that you have a lot of stuff you can choose to do,
and everything you do earns you points. And at the end of the class, based on how many points you earned that determines the grade you got.
(14:16):
And this was presented as, oh, it's this great way to gamify your classroom.
Well, the first thing I do is I look at that and say, you know, it's the same thing.
You've just flipped around the grading scale. You haven't really done anything to address the motivation, but I said, I'm going to give it a try.
We'll see how this goes. So I put ... I set this up in the class.
I gave my students a menu of things they could do every week, a cap on how many things they could do and how many points they could earn.
(14:39):
And then in the class, one of the things you do with this sort of system is you have a leaderboard.
Now, I gave each student an anonymized name so that they only knew their own position on the leaderboard,
and they knew where everyone else was, but they didn't know who anyone else was.
They just knew where they were in conjunction with other people.
And what I saw is the first few weeks, about two thirds of the students really participated.
(15:00):
They got involved. They got to see where they were on the leaderboard. And then in week four and five, I began to see a disturbing trend.
And that was 2 or 3 students doing everything they could to fight each other up the leaderboard.
And then that group of two thirds of students who did a lot of stuff stopped doing anything.
And I saw a few students going up and then a whole bunch of students doing nothing.
(15:23):
And then some students had never, never did anything, which is pretty typical for a class.
You usually have a chunk of students that don't really engage in what's going on.
And I said, well, this is a problem. So I let this experiment run for about six weeks.
And then I came in a class and said, all right,
this experiment has failed because what that it did and what that did is that motivated the students who were already strong.
(15:43):
Those top students didn't need the game based system and it demotivated.
The students that needed the motivation. And that's the problem with leaderboards.
Leaderboards turn the whole world into two kinds of people. The people that hate you and the people that you hate.
So that's the problem with using a leaderboard, is that it creates this situation that only the people that are already at the top are inspired,
(16:07):
and everyone else just kind of like, well, I can't, I can't catch up.
So I'm just not going to try anymore. So I had a class now that was falling apart.
So I call this a halt to the experiment. I said, all right, now we're going to look at using meaningful gamification.
And that's been one of my research areas. That's something that I've done.
And it's the idea of how do you take gamification elements that are building meaning that are building intrinsic motivation.
(16:29):
And we really looked at the class and we said, all right, how do we do this?
Um, and that's where I then explored a number of models of things with meaningful gamification.
One of the things that I explored was the ability for students to redo assignments.
That freedom to fail. Let's say you submit the assignment by its due date, and then you can redo the assignment.
(16:49):
And I will regrade the assignment. And this will allow you to have that iterative process that and I say I want you to take
on something that's challenging because you will then get a chance to try it again.
It's not once and done. You can do it again. Now that takes more time.
But it was also taking more time to count all these scores and to create all these charts and do all this kind of stuff.
The other thing I did that was different is I gave the students the ability to propose how they wanted to demonstrate their learning.
(17:15):
So whether students wanted to do a paper, whether they wanted to do a presentation where they wanted to make a game, they would.
Then I gave them a list of things. Here are some ideas, and I said, if you have your own ideas, tell me.
Tell me what you want to do and we will create a learning contract.
And that was the third element I did was I made a learning contract with each student where they said, here is the grade I want to get.
(17:37):
I want a B in the class. Here are the things that I will do in order to earn a B in the class.
And then I went back and forth with the student to make sure that was a fair contract.
And then the students. So the students didn't all have the same requirements in the class.
It was customized to the students interests and the grade they wanted to achieve.
And they knew if they did everything on their contract at a reasonable level, they would earn the grade that they set out to achieve.
(18:02):
So they weren't just always like, well, I'll just do whatever. It's like, no, I know what I'm doing, and all I want is a C in the class.
I'm like, all right, if all you want is a C in the class, here are the things you do and you'll get your C.
And so the students end up being more intrinsically motivated because they got to set their space.
They got to set their types of assignments they were doing. They knew if it didn't and if they struggled, they'd have a chance to redo it.
(18:25):
And that allowed me to fix the first six weeks of class because I said, all right,
given what you did in the first six weeks, that's your starting point.
In the next six weeks, you will need to now achieve this to earn the grade.
So there's people that did nothing in the first few weeks.
It's still worked out for them because I said, all right, you didn't do anything here, but now you need to do this, this and this.
(18:45):
If your goal is to get a C, you need to do these things. If they say if you want an A, okay, then you need to do these things.
So it didn't ... at the end the end goal worked.
We got everyone to where they wanted to be with their grades. And I find when I do that, when I set a learning contract,
a greater percentage of students come out of that group of people that never do
anything because the students had a say in what they were going to do for the class.
(19:08):
And when you get that buy in, when you get the students feeling some sense of empowerment as to what's going on,
they're a lot more likely to be involved with the class.
I think that's a really important point. You know that buy in from students, um, I'm keen to know more about the learning contract.
What's involved in that? What does that look like?
What's the ... can you tell us more about the process of developing a learning contract with with students in your classes?
(19:30):
So I found what works best. And I've used this in a number of classes, is I like to give the students a template.
So I give I have like an A template, a B template, a C template.
So the students have an idea of what my expectation is to earn certain grades in the class, and then they can choose.
I'll give them some choices, you know, do you can do this, this, this. You need to do two of these things.
So it might be for an A you have to do a paper.
(19:54):
You have to take an exam. You have to participate in all ten weeks of the discussion board for a B, you have to do two of those three things.
Maybe for a C, you have to do the exam and get a score of blah or however you set it up.
Um, but then you always have in there I am open to negotiation.
So if and I'll give the students some suggestions, I say, do you want to make a video rather than, uh, give a presentation?
(20:19):
Uh, would you or do you want to make a video instead of writing a paper?
Does that fit better? And what are my expectations around that?
But trying to help the students be able to convey their learning through a method that connects with their skills and abilities,
and that creates a more equitable classroom, uh,
that creates a space where people are able to demonstrate their abilities through a way that they said set forth.
(20:43):
And then I help negotiate to say, all right, you're good at art.
All right, let's figure out an art based project that will help you demonstrate what we've learned in this class.
So game design, for example, I could take any class and say, all right, you want to make a game that demonstrates you understand Romeo and Juliet.
Great. Here's, here's and you could see how you could see how that could be done as a student could create a game demonstrating that knowledge.
(21:07):
And a lot of times when I do that, I help them think about how would you teach this concept to your sibling?
Can you make a game that would teach the important concepts of Romeo and Juliet to your family?
That, and I find that really helps the students get in their mind.
Okay, what I'm needing to do, and to do that, you have to understand the content better than just generating a paper, better than just taking a test.
(21:30):
You have to understand it to understand how would I teach it? That's really what's going on.
While I say you're making a game that ... what's actually going on?
is I'm saying, you're going to be teaching it to other people and to teach it, you really have to understand it.
Absolutely. You mentioned the importance of of choice, right?
That, um, student, uh, assignments, connecting with their own skills, their abilities,
(21:51):
giving students choice in what types of activities or assignments they like to do, um, and developing uh, systems that empower participants.
And of course, this has resonances with universal design for learning.
And I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about that. Sure.
Yeah. UDL Universal Design for learning is something that is it's it's one of the
(22:11):
pieces that I quote when I'm talking about these different ways of forming it.
And it's this it's this idea of creating both methods of conveying material and also methods of demonstrating
learning that align with the students abilities and skills and that idea that it helps the students,
whatever their abilities and skills, they have a way to convey that learning back to you.
(22:32):
If you make everyone take a test. People that test well will do well.
People that don't test well won't do well. Now. The reality is, very rarely in life do you need to take a test.
Are you? It's like, here's your close book test. That's not usually not like when I went for citizenship, Canadian citizenship.
I had to take a 20 question test, um, which I believe what it actually was, was just 20 people.
(22:54):
I'd have to identify as Canadian or not Canadian. And so that I'm practiced so that I can always say in the world, oh, they're Canadian.
So that was actually ... to become a citizen, that's what you have to do, is you have to be able to tell people when someone's Canadian.
Anyway, sorry. Oh, that was another trick there. I see I had to learn how to apologize for things.
That's another another piece on the test.
Um, but so the idea of universal design for learning is you try to create these ways for students to learn based on their interests.
(23:22):
And the nice thing about having students create games or other forms of videos or things like that is that then the best ones,
I reach out to those students and say, hey, can I show your content to people taking this class in the future?
Because that now starts to give me a catalog of other ways to explore content that other
(23:43):
students created using their frame of reference and using their mindset about the world.
So this allows me to then hand those out and say,
here are some examples of games that other students have made in previous versions of the class or videos that they've made.
And that's really useful for a student to see what another student has done.
It helps them understand something and then also gives them a model to say, oh, I could do something like that.
(24:06):
So I always look to create the body of learning, um, resources for UDL type concepts.
You've talked a lot about motivation extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
And we know that intrinsic motivation is a is a key part of successful learning.
So I'm curious about meaningful gamification and how that can help other instructors um, better tap into student motivation.
(24:34):
So with intrinsic motivation I use, um, Deci and
Ryan's self-motivation theory is at the heart of what I,
I that's at the baseline of all the research I've done in this which which explores three things that are important to create intrinsic motivation.
And that's autonomy, competence, and relatedness. So autonomy means that you want students to have choice.
(24:55):
You want them to feel like they have some choice. And we've talked about UDL concept.
We talked about how to give students that choice. Competence is you want students to feel like they're getting better at stuff.
And that's where that iterative process comes into play,
where the idea that you try something and then I will give you feedback and then you can improve and that's going to make you feel better about it.
And relatedness helps you think about how you're doing stuff in relationship
(25:19):
to the world around you and in relationship to other students in the class.
And that's where when we get students to talk with each other, to share what they're doing and to share what they're doing with their family.
So when I have someone make content with that concept of do something that your family could use to understand it,
I then suggest, why don't you show it to your family? Why don't you help?
Help them playtest it? Because in games, playtesting is a huge thing.
(25:42):
Having people see stuff. So creating something that people can share with others helps to build those concepts of of relatedness.
And the goal of meaningful gamification is trying to figure out ways to integrate playful elements that build on this.
So whether it be ... we talked early on about creating experiences and creating that external environment around what you're learning,
(26:06):
that's where you're going to bring storytelling and narrative into the class,
where you're going to connect the things you're learning to stuff out there in the real world.
I have ... one of my research projects right now is something called Escape If.
Which is a low resource tool to allow teachers to use a branching narrative game for a classroom.
So we've been designing it where it's it's a script that a teacher reads all in the open source,
(26:30):
and it's a story based activity that explores ... Right now,
we've been building it around math concepts. So the most recent game we've made is for an audience in Rowanda.
It's going to be going out through the telephone systems later this year. And so the idea is to teach concepts of probability and chance.
And we're doing it through a series of scenarios around the weather and planning
(26:51):
a lunch for people and using things like weather forecast to make decisions.
And so using that story to help people understand what's going on.
Down the road. What I'd like to do with Escape If, is get some funding to create tools to allow learners to now write their own Escape If games,
their own stories, using their own cultural, uh, space that they're in,
(27:12):
but applying what they're learning in classroom to their own spaces,
because that helps then the learners to create stories and to create the stories they can share,
which is where you tie in that relatedness is what's going on.
So giving people context for why they're learning what they're learning, allowing them to try stuff and to fail,
allowing them to have some control over what it is they're trying to do.
(27:33):
These are all ways to build intrinsic motivation. Trying to get away from your just doing it so that you can get a grade.
But looking for any way, whether it be you're doing it because it helps you in the real world in this way,
or you're doing it because it's going to help your little brother learn this thing,
or you're doing it because you get to explore this new form of making content.
So anything we can do to get the students out of I'm doing it for grade and into
(27:57):
I'm doing it because I want to do it. It's going to help them be more interested in what they're doing in the classroom.
And that notion, I mean, we know that that narrative,
we know about the powers of story, in creating story in the classroom, and for opportunities, creating opportunities for students to apply
their learning. What they're learning in the class certainly gets at those higher order thinking skills.
(28:21):
Switching gears a little bit, um, I was thinking about, um, generative AI, of course, as you know, has been a very hot topic this year.
And I'm curious about the ways in which game design intersects with AI technologies.
Perhaps you've incorporated AI to your teaching this year.
Um, or maybe you can tell us a little bit, how, about how the, you know, what role AI may take in your work?
(28:45):
So I start by saying that I've the way I am using it is not the same as the way other faculty are using it, as the way it's used everywhere.
Um, each of us is having to think about how are we going to use these tools and integrate them.
For me, I'm looking at what's going on in the industry and how are these tools being used.
Um, and it is not ... in the industry, it's not we're not touching them at all.
(29:10):
There are some ways in which the tools are being used and I try to help students understand that.
So here are the times when it's useful, and here are the times when it is detrimental.
And so in assignments, I address this with the students and help them understand.
Here's when you can use it and here's when it might cause problems for you.
So I talk about AI as a brainstorming buddy.
AI tools are very useful in the early brainstorming of a project or a game that you say, here's a hey, do you have any ideas around this?
(29:38):
They're really useful for, say, uh, creating a narrative or a story, getting ideas to build your story out of.
Kind of like if you just went into a public place and said, hey, anyone want to talk about dwarves in space?
What would that be like? And you should take the results.
You get as strong as going into a public space and asking the question, because that's exactly what you're getting with these AI tools.
(30:02):
The AI tool is just a single voice that's combining a bunch of random voices,
and it'd be just like you go into a public place and say, hey, what do you guys think about this?
People can give you ideas, but you have to then pick through all those ideas and identify the ones that are interesting and validate ones.
If you're doing something factual, that are true.
(30:22):
Um, if I go in and ask AI about tell me what articles I've written, it gives me a list of articles and very few of them I've actually written.
It makes up all sorts of interesting articles that that I've never written.
It sounds like I could, and that's so I actually use some examples in class and show the students that to say,
look, you can't just ask it to give you citations because it's going to make them up.
(30:43):
Just like if you went to the went out into the tavern and said, hey, anyone want to tell me about this?
You've got to take that stuff with a big grain of salt. So as a brainstorming buddy, it's a useful tool to get started.
It's a useful tool to help you refine your writing, so if you've written stuff, it can be very useful.
And and we've we've been using this for decades through word has had AI built into it for a very long time,
(31:08):
giving you a little squiggles under words that you could do something better with and stuff like Grammarly.
So there's tools we've been using with AI to help you refine your writing,
but you still have to look at it when it's done to make sure it's conveying your message.
It's just like, if I were to give someone something I wrote and I said, rewrite that, make that clearer for me.
And then I reread it and I'm like, this isn't saying what I think it should say.
(31:28):
So you can't stop with the AI, but it can help guide you to doing a better job.
Now, in this case, with game design classes, we're usually not focused on, uh, teaching people how to write.
I want to understand their designs and their ideas. And so the AI tools are used to help them demonstrate what they're doing.
Another place that we do use it, or I use it in my classrooms, is I let students use it for prototype artwork to demonstrate a concept.
(31:55):
So we might be making ... it's something in game design called the Design Document,
which is a early document you make with your big ideas where you might have something you're going to show to say,
this is the kind of world I'm looking to create. An AI tool is really useful to generate an image,
in the same way that you might go to Google Image Search and look for, uh, you might create what's called a mood board, which is a set of images.
(32:17):
You can use AI tools to do those kind of things. But again, as I tell the students, this is not where you stop.
This is used as a communication tool. It's used as something to look at.
And then you hire an artist to say, all right, here's the sort of thing we want to do.
Here's some ideas. Again, our program and game design isn't an art program, so I'm not testing students skills.
And many of the students have no skill in making artwork.
(32:40):
Some of them do, and they love to make their own artwork. Some of them don't, and they're not here to learn that.
So being able to use an AI tool to help them demonstrate their thoughts and their concepts is something that I do.
Now, where it fails miserably, is I teach, for example, a board game design class.
AI is horrible at making a game.
(33:00):
It can make something that looks like a board game.
It can make something that feels like a board game, and then you actually try to play it and it's ... it falls apart.
Uh, it doesn't work. And so I tell the students, you may use it in that brainstorming tool,
but then you've got to actually test this out and fix it because it's not going to be good.
This is the same thing with anything AI creates, is you then have to look at it.
(33:24):
And the reality is in the workplace, this is what students are going to have to do.
They're going to have to understand art, understand game design, understand writing well enough to assess what they're being handed,
look at it, adjust it, and make it fit whatever environment they're putting it into.
So that's the way I've been using AI in my classes.
(33:45):
I ask students to cite any time they do use it, to list what tools they use, to list what prompts they used.
Um, so that there and that that ties us into talking about citations.
Um, but to make sure that whatever they're turning into me ends up being stuff they have worked through.
Uh, because AI is not trustworthy in creating content that they can just put their name behind.
(34:05):
And that's the same attitude I want them to take into workplace, that they're not just going to put something together and slap it out,
but they're actually going to be looking at it and understanding the art, the design,
the writing well enough to be able to make adjustments and make assessments.
I appreciate the analogy of engaging with AI tools is like walking into a public place and shouting out a question and gathering, uh, other input.
(34:27):
Um, but I, I think you make some really good points there with regard to, um, AI outputs and the need to review carefully, the need to verify accuracy,
Correct. Evaluate the outputs and critique it.
Um, and thinking of AI as a, as a brainstorming body.
Useful for ideas, useful for perhaps starting points of designs.
(34:50):
But the importance of being critical with regard to the outputs, I think is a key point that you raise.
So thinking about that, then, we've talked about engagement. We've talked about motivation.
What are some ways in which, uh, game based learning might foster critical thinking and deeper understanding?
So the nice thing that game based learning does is it's going to take the stuff you're learning in classroom and attach it to some context.
(35:16):
Now, I could make a fantasy game where you're going out and you're going to be, uh, you know, going through dealing with mountains and dealing with,
uh, traversing the wilds and exploring caves that you'd never been to before and doing that by solving math equations.
Well, that's really bad game based learning.
We've been actually very ... we've been making bad game based learning for decades, you know, welcome to the Hall of the Math Minotaur.
(35:42):
And you're walking around the maze and all of a sudden there's a wall that appears with a math equation to solve.
And then that's how you defeat the Minotaur. That's bad game based learning.
And we've gotten very used to making these kind of, uh, trivia based games.
So in my classes, I don't allow students to make any games where you're asking trivia questions off cards,
because that's a that's a lazy way of basically turning worksheets into games.
(36:05):
Um, when I critique escape rooms in classrooms, I critique the worksheets and padlocks approach, where you take a worksheet that you'd normally use,
and you just use a padlock to assess the answer, and you're using the padlock to grade the worksheet results.
That's not good escape room design. Instead, what you want to think about is where in the real world would we use something like this?
(36:28):
Now with my Escape If games for example, we have the students.
Many of our games are set in a dinosaur safari, so a dinosaur safari isn't a real place, but it's playful.
And so I always try to think about playful concepts that are easily analogous to the real world.
And that brings me to one of the most important parts of any kind of game based learning.
(36:49):
And that's reflection.
Whenever you're going to run any sort of a game in your class, you want to reserve a third of your time for reflection about what you just did.
You don't just do it. And because learning doesn't come from just doing as Dewey says, learning comes from doing and reflecting.
So when you play a game, you then need time to reflect upon what you just did.
(37:12):
Even if you use a bad game, if you have a good reflection at the end you will learn stuff because the reflection
is where you make the connection between what you've just learned and the real world.
It's where you're building that relatedness that we talked about for intrinsic motivation.
And you and you don't tell the students what they learned.
You let them tell you what they learned.
(37:32):
Because many times when you do something, the students will tell you stuff that you never thought that you were teaching with that activity.
And the student has some aha that you're like, oh yes, that's, that's great.
And if the student has the reflection, then other students are more likely to learn from that reflection because it's their peers that are saying,
(37:53):
hey, here's what I got out of it as compared to me saying, well, what you should have learned from this thing is blah blah blah, blah blah.
As compared to the students actually saying blah blah blah, blah blah and then, but they're more likely to engage.
So that reflection is something that many people miss when they're doing games.
I think we just do the game and end class it's like, no, no, you do the game, but you need to reserve time to change the stage on what's going on.
(38:17):
No longer are you just a player, but now you are stepping back to reflect upon what did you do?
Why did you do it? How does it connect to the real world? And then how are you going to use this going forward?
That's an essential part of any kind of game based learning. Yes, absolutely.
I think that that reflection piece is really key.
That idea of, um, as you said, you know, quoting Dewey, um, we're not going to find meaning in what we do unless we reflect on on that action.
(38:43):
So what does that look like in your classroom? You talked about, um,
students all sharing their reflections and other students learning from the insights that are shared rather than you as the professor,
uh, talking to students about what they should have learned or how they should have responded.
What does the reflection component look like in your classroom?
So there's a few ways to do it. And some of it's based upon how large the class is.
(39:06):
Um, what I like to do, if I have enough time and I've put aside a third of my time for this, I like to start with first individual reflection.
So I have the students. I'll give them a couple minutes. I said, I want you to think about what you did, and I'll have them write something down.
Write down what you learned from these activities, or write down how you would apply what you've learned in the real world,
(39:26):
or write down how you would connect what you've learned in this game to things you've learned in other classes.
Because first, you wanted them to think themselves.
Then I will connect them with other students, so I'll put them in small groups where they will share what they wrote.
So this eliminates the dominant student approach.
If you just put them in groups right away, then usually one student will talk, everyone else will listen, and some people won't say anything.
(39:50):
I much prefer to give everyone a chance to write down some notes, and then everyone shares what they had to say.
What I ... the way I like to do it is single person, and then you put them in 2 or 3 person groups,
and then you have those groups come together and you have each group share what was the most interesting of everything their group shared.
So it could be whatever they said, or it could be what someone else said. And then you bubble that up to then sharing across the class.
(40:16):
Okay. Of everything you've heard, what was the most impactful? Um, you can do it where you've just finished.
And now what did everyone think about this? Um, the problem with that is, again, you have the dominant student effect.
And that can, that can fail.
If you have an online service, you're doing this as an online class that actually can work better for these kind of reflections,
(40:36):
because you can create those spaces where more people, you can have everyone.
I want everyone to type in the chat, but don't press enter what they got out of this or whatever specific reflection question you're looking for.
Then you have everyone hit enter at once so that you get a lot more input.
Everyone thinks about it, people can see what's going on.
So in some ways, teaching in a virtual environment is better for this kind of helping people reflect.
(40:58):
And it won't be dominated by people who typically will dominate an in-person classroom environment.
That notion of of context is really important too.
And connecting, connecting to the learning, but also connecting to, uh, real world, right?
Those those, uh, authentic moments. I'm wondering if there are misconceptions, uh,
(41:19):
or assumptions. Do students come to your class with certain assumptions about, uh, game based learning or game design,
um, or misconceptions that, you know, they,
they arrive in the class thinking one thing and it perhaps is different than what they encounter in your class.
One of the challenges in teaching game design is that you get students in the class who come in believing they are already an expert,
(41:43):
uh, because they have been playing games for 15 years.
They come into the class thinking, well, this will be easy because I've been playing games for a long time.
And so that's ... that is a challenge right away that many professors don't have in topics where students I've,
you know, they haven't been doing algebra for fun for 15 years.
So that's the first challenge that you have. Um, now I do like to help students.
(42:06):
Our first class, we teach in our game design program is called Critical Play,
where we have students look at these things that they've been doing for years and take a critical look at what they've been doing.
When you've been playing Pokemon for all those years and you're really good at the Pokemon games, what are you really doing in the games?
What's really going on in that game when when you're capturing these animals and forcing them to fight the death ... what's
(42:32):
actually going on there and getting them to be critical about what they've been doing and think about it with a different light.
And that's one of our early challenges in game design,
is helping students to step back from being immersed a player and thinking about being a designer,
because making that shift from engaging with something as a consumer to engaging with something as a creator,
(42:52):
um, the biggest thing is getting students to realize you're going to be making stuff that you might not like.
Especially if you go ahead and get a job. You're working for a company, you might be making games that you don't like to play,
and it's fine because you're making things for a specific audience. So that's one of the biggest challenges.
Um, the other challenge is getting people to explore instead of just pushing for the win.
(43:16):
So if I set up, say, when I've done these Escape If games, I've also created versions of them that are digital.
And in the digital game, it's basically a series of multiple choice questions.
And what I find when someone plays those, they are just banging as fast as they can.
A wrong B wrong, C right move on A wrong B ... and they just start pushing their way through.
Not actually even reading the scenario, just trying to bang out the answers as compared to when I run it in a classroom.
(43:42):
And I force people in that small groups to talk about which choice they'd like to make,
and then they raise their hand to vote on a choice, it forces that reflection.
So many times when I do a game, that's a problem I see ... it
And as an example, anytime I use a board game in class, I like to pair students up and have them play as a team to take moves in the board game,
because when they do that, they have to talk about what they're doing. They can't just take a move.
(44:04):
They actually have to engage about here's what we want to do and why it slows the game down, but it makes it a much more reflective activity.
And so that idea of being a reflective player of your game,
no matter if you're making, if you're making the games or you're using the games for learning,
but taking the time to play, to explore, not just taking the time to win,
(44:25):
but taking the time to explore, and that's what I like to create, are those experiences where people have that space to explore,
where maybe there is no right answer at the end, maybe it's just a conclusion, and then you reflect upon what happened and why.
So one of the escape rooms, the learning escape rooms, I did, um, the during the game there's called Ballot Box Bumble,
and the idea was to teach people about Canadian electoral systems.
(44:48):
I just moved to Canada. I'm like, I want to learn more about it. I'm going to make a game about it.
So the students are told that you are volunteering for a poll.
The poll is just closed. Elections Canada will be calling in 30 minutes and would like to get the results,
but they're in this locked ballot box and the poll director is gone and you don't know where she is.
So you start following through, looking through her office for some help to be able to unlock this.
(45:11):
And you end up going through a series of election scandals that has gone,
have gone on in Canada over time, and how this person has been involved in trying to bring these to bear.
So stuff like robo calling, where you have computers that call people and tell them their polling place has changed, that actually happened in Canada.
And so the goal of the game is students are exploring these different election scandals,
and they get to the end of the game and whether they've unlocked the box or not.
(45:35):
There's a phone call from Elections Canada that says, hey, this is Elections Canada.
We're wondering if you have your poll results. The game is won or lost at this moment.
Based on what the players say, it doesn't matter if they open the box or not.
What matters is do they report what they found? So players that just like I got the box unlocked, I counted the ballots.
Here's the numbers. They then lose the game.
(45:57):
They actually I don't say you lose and said I had three newspapers that had different stories based on the ending.
So if they just reported the results, then they have all this video surveillance of these poll workers working with robo
calling data and all of these things that they had to engage with to unlock it,
but they didn't report it.
So they are now looked at as the bad guys, as the ones that did all this as compared to where we found these problems and reported it.
(46:21):
And the lesson is a civics lesson to say if you are involved as a poll worker, part of your job is to observe what's going on.
If there's something suspicious, you should say something because that's what's going on there.
And that's ... but that's unlocked in the reflection. If we didn't have the reflection at the end, then people would just unlock the box and be done with it.
So I like to use those kind of twists to get people to think about what it is they're doing on a larger space than just, I did it for the grade.
(46:47):
I did it to unlock the box. It's like, well, why? How does this connect into the real world?
Yeah, that that point about taking time to explore instead of pushing for the win, I think has a lot of resonances,
as you mentioned earlier, with teaching and what a lot of us are trying to do in,
in our classroom is, is building in those opportunities for students to, um, to fail, as you mentioned,
(47:10):
to to learn to reflect on where they went wrong in order to improve, in order to, to learn.
You've mentioned a lot of really important pieces here, Scott, with regard to reflection and the importance of context and making connections,
giving students choice and encouraging students or giving students the freedom to fail as well.
(47:30):
I'm wondering for for an instructor who is new to this, who doesn't work in in game design,
what is one small, or two, small but impactful changes they could implement to start using some of these principles in their own courses?
Of everything I've tried and everything I've explored,
the thing that has made the single greatest difference is giving the students the ability to resubmit an assignment.
(47:57):
Taking that play model of you can try something I'll give you.
And the way I structure it is, if you turn on your assignment by the due date and you've made an attempt at the assignment,
then I will provide you feedback from the feedback. You have one week to resubmit the assignment and I'll grade it.
And that's the structure that I use. Now, the reality is most students don't.
(48:19):
Most students don't take advantage of this and don't resubmit it, but some do.
And the difference I see ... now you have some students that already got an A.
And they just want a better A. So some students do and resubmit it.
That's fine. That doesn't take a lot of time to grade that. I let students know if you've already got an A, there's really no room for you to move.
Um, but it's those students that end up either if they misunderstood the assignment or they really just want to improve what they've done.
(48:45):
Those students that may end up with like a C, and they want to move that up to a B or, and A.
That's where I see these shifts really happen, are in those students that really take advantage of that ability to have that chance to redo things.
I also think some students push themselves a little bit further because they know I've had students tell me it's like, yeah, I didn't think,
I didn't know if it'll work out, but I gave it a shot because I knew I'd get your feedback and I knew that I'd have a chance to try it again.
(49:08):
And that's the single thing that's made a difference.
The other place that that really helps with is at the end of the semester, students have a lot less space to beg for points to get a higher grade.
When you've given them the ability all semester to redo their work and get some points back, it's like, you know, you had that chance.
(49:30):
So I find when I started doing that, the number of students that came to me at the end and asked for points or asked
for something greatly plummeted because they knew they'd had their chance.
They knew they'd had that opportunity to redo it.
So it really helps from a that sort of post class, um, assessment moment when whenever you post those grades to your local class,
(49:50):
but you haven't submitted them to the university because,
you know, as soon as you post it, you're going to have some emails from people that want to know how can they earn a few more points?
The number of those kind of requests went way down when they'd had that chance along the way.
The other thing I do try to do after they receive their final assessment in that week,
I try to give them the say, here's the grade you will earn if you do not redo this assignment.
(50:13):
So I say, here's your final. So what I do is I post those final grades and then post internally.
Here's the grade you'll earn if you stop now. And then people can decide, am I going to redo it or not?
Again, that greatly reduces the number of people that come to you and say, oh,
I wanted a few more points because it's like you knew, you know, we I said, I set it up, you knew what you were going to get.
And so the students, it also takes away a lot of that stress because now the students know, it's like, okay,
(50:37):
this is what I'm going to get if I stop now, if I don't like this grade, I can redo it and try to try to do better.
So that's something that I've used. So that's the one thing that I would say is to try putting a redo's in your class on that.
They don't work so well on exams, but they work on written projects and things like that where the student can come back.
That's made the biggest difference in my teaching, and I try to always use that whenever I can.
(51:00):
Good advice and food for thought for for faculty who are listening in.
Scott, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed our conversation and I've learned so much about gamification and game design.
Um, and it's been it's been a real pleasure, a real treat talking to you this afternoon.
So thanks for for making the time to chat with us and thank you.
(51:20):
My thanks to Scott Nicholson from Laurier's Game Design and Development Program for joining me today.
You can find out more about his work on his website, Scott Nicholson.com, or by following him on YouTube at Scott Nicholson.
Learn more about teaching excellence and innovation at Laurier by following the links in the episode description.
I'm educational developer Alicia Moffat, and I hope you'll join us again on the Laurier Teaching Podcast to hear more stories,
(51:47):
successes, and strategies from inspiring educators.
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