I’m not sure how I feel about putting a cutsie skin on tetris when the blocks are made to represent slaves (i.e. people) and the ‘board’ is a slave ship. I think I get the idea they are trying to portray – maybe it’s enough just to see the concept without actually playing the game?
The story of an accidentally cringe-worthy children’s game about the Atlantic Slave Trade.
This is Part 9 in my continuing saga of my current iteration of a gamified course.
It occurs to me that it might be worth spending a little more time exploring the process of coming up with new quests. I spend a great deal of time doing that when I first designed this course and had a lot of fun doing it.
Giving these different names to my assignments somehow disconnected me from what I had been doing (a good thing after 35 years of teaching). By the way, I should say right up front that I’m pretty sure I could never have done this when I was new to teaching. Here are a few guiding questions that might help you come at the process of designing assignments a little differently.
Like I said before, using MMO quest categories to classify my assignments has opened up possibilities I had not considered before ( – notice I am using assignment / learning task / quest interchangeably. In the end, I don’t care what my students want to call them as long as I know what they’re talking about, AND as long as they do them.)
Here are a few more examples of MMO quests and possible assignment equivalents. In each case, look at the MMO description of the quest and see if you can think of some additional task that fits your course that could be described that way.
If you think of any to add, please post a reply!!
| Usual Meaning: | Possible Learning Tasks: | |
| Achievement | The quest is to reach a certain achievement, such as a particular level or craftskill rank. | These would be the kinds of assignments / learning tasks that are typically given out as “regular assignments”. These are typically not repeatable (i.e. learners can submit ONE per course), and would normally be worth 5-10% of the final course grade. In a gamified course, these are also not repeatable, and in a 1000 XP course, would be worth 50-100XP. |
| Boss Battle | The boss in a game is a major opponent, so the boss battle is the on fought against that major opponent. It is often necessary to reach a certain level of achievement or gain a minimum amount of experience (sometimes by challenging lesser opponents) before one is allowed to enter into a boss battle. | This should be something relatively unique as well as something that can normally only be attempted after a certain level of achievement has been attained or after a certain amount of time has passed. A final exam is a good example of a boss battle. |
| Chain | A quest that is part of a chain must be unlocked by first completing previous quests in the chain. | A series of quests that must be completed in the order specified. |
| Collection | Collect X of Y: A character is tasked with finding a certain number of objects of a certain type to continue the quest. | This will be some sort of data gathering activity, such as creating a class poll. In that case it would include mounting the poll, collecting data, and analyzing and reporting on the results. |
| Craftskill | In order to complete the mission something needs to be crafted by the player (or developed by some kind of craftskill). | The nature of the ‘craft’ will vary depending on the course being taught. It should be something that is an appropriate ‘craft’ for the topic of the course. For example, creating an avatar might be an appropriate craft in an online course, a drawing might be appropriate in an art class, and a program might be appropriate in a computer programming class. To determine what kinds of things could be crafts in your course, ask yourself what your learners can make. |
| Delivery | The quest giver wants something delivered to someone else. | OUT-OF-CLASS: This will usually be a request to find out more information on a topic or concept and to prepare something that can be shared with the class. It will be something done outside of class time. It will normally be assigned in on class and then examined in a subsequent class. It will likely be some sort of GoogleDocs Exercise; e.g. Share a link; answer a question |
| Fetch | Find an item, weapon or key and bring it to someone or something. | Retrieve a link, image, article, or other resource. Bring something to class to share. |
| Persuasion | Convince an NPC of a certain position, using dialog. | Write a reflection to an article/video/etc. Write a position paper on some topic. |
| Talk -To | Talk to a given NPC. | This can be used for class interaction or communication, such as commenting on a post or article written by another player. |
| Test of Lore | Listen to an NPC and answer the questions correctly. | Quiz or test. |
| Timed | Complete the objective in the given amount of time. | These are quests that will have a natural expiry date, such as posting an Introduction to the Group. |
** NOTE: Be very careful about trying to make things funny or playful. Fun is one of those things that tends to be very personal, so your idea of fun may not be your students’ idea of fun. I’m sure many of us can remember those teachers or professors who seemed to be hugely amused by the things they did or said, and we thought they were lame, or worse yet, disturbing.
If you are interested in following my course journal, watch for the “Gamification 101” heading.
Also, for more information on gamification, check out my website here.
This is Part 8 in my continuing saga of my current iteration of a gamified course.
So far I have talked about deadlines, the difficulty of modularizing, scoring, and the quests.
I finished reviewing my quests from the last year.
Most of them are still fine.
A few needed a little tweaking. Many of the standard and mini quests are repeatable, meaning the student can submit more than one for marks, but they need to be different. For example in the collection quest, they can create up to four different polls and submit them all. I had intended for each to be done using different software (although they can use Excel to do the analysis on all of them). Last year a lot of students used the same software for all of their polls and used questions that were very similar in type. I need to make it clearer that I mean for them to do each one differently.
As a result of a Google Summit I went to in August, I decided I wanted to try an iterative design for one of the quests – you know, where the student hands in a partially completed work, I critique it, they fix it, add some more and then submit it again.
It occurred to me that we don’t often do that with our students. Most of the time we give them assignments that they hand in, and then we mark them and give them back. Occasionally we give out assignments that have a few milestones they must meet, but we rarely give them something back, ask them to fix it, and then mark it again. We do that sort of thing all the time when we publish papers. I went many rounds with both my thesis proposal and my dissertation. As academics, we are used to taking “notes” (as they say in the entertainment biz.), but we don’t usually do that to our undergrads. I think we should – not all the time, but sometimes.
SO, I modified my website assignment to make them submit a draft, then the first iteration, followed by two iterations before the final version. Almost 1/2 the points are going to be connected with how well they have incorporated the suggestions.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
One of the really fun parts about this model for quests and points is that it really frees me to include a wide variety of tasks. We really don’t give them very many distinct experiences when it comes to asking them to do work and assessing it. I know it’s way easier to recycle old assignments (sometimes for decades), but we should really be trying to think of stuff that’s new and interesting.
We often justify hard deadlines for assignments by saying that students need to work to deadlines. That is absolutely true, BUT, don’t they also need to learn to work when there are NO deadlines? When do we teach them that?
Defn: Notes – the meeting a director usually has after a rehearsal or performance
to tell the cast and crew how he felt about their performance and to make
any changes he may think are necessary
If you are interested in following my course journal, watch for the “Gamification 101” heading.
Also, for more information on gamification, check out my website here.
This is Part 7 in my continuing saga of my current iteration of a gamified course.
It’s time to talk about the quests. Let me get this out of the way right at the start. It really isn’t necessary to call your learning tasks (or assignments) “quests” BUT when I did, I found that it actually allowed me to think more creatively about the work I asked my students to do than I had in a long time. I’ve always been pretty good at coming up with interesting assignments, but when I started looking at the assignments and other exercises as quests, it seemed that more possibilities opened up. When I play a video game there are all kinds of challenges – both big and small, and they all contribute to my score and progress in the game. That’s a useful concept.
Because I wanted to experiment with the playfulness that I suspected was possible when I gave my students quests rather than assignments, quizzes, lab exercises, and learning tasks -AND – because I love sorting and organizing, I looked to MMO’s (multiplayer online games) for inspiration. I won’t give you the full list here (although it will be in my gamification book), but I will you a sampling at the end of this post.
Before that, I want to show you my quest template. Because I am offering such a wide variety of quests, I wanted to make sure that I was still covering the course objectives. To do that, I included an abbreviated a table of the objectives as part of every quest description, and I highlighted which objectives were addressed by each quest. This is fairly novel, but it is something I first did when I designed an inquiry-based introduction to programming way back in 2003 (long before gamification was a thing).
Here’s my quest template:
I have 4 categories of quest, classified by the number of points they are worth:
The epic quest is basically the same as a major course project; achievement quests are like regular assignments; the mini-quests are much like lab exercises, but the standard quests are new. I haven’t had this size of assignment before, but classifying quests along a continuum makes them an obvious category. We tend to attribute a level of importance to the major project, regular assignments, and lab exercises that may or may not be warranted.
I can create a bunch of different quests, and then decided how to determine “the rules”, i.e. which ones students have to do in order to pass the course. It allows me to say the following: each student must complete the epic quest, at least 3 of the achievement quests, and then at least one of each of the other kinds of quests. This ensures that the students get a variety of experience.
As promised, here are a couple of examples of how I have “mapped” sometimes traditional assignments onto quests:
Quizzes are called Tests of Lore. Yup, I still have quizzes, but my students get to try them more than once (trust me, they will remember better if they do the test, look up the right answers and then do it again).
Reading Reflections are now Persuasion Quests:
Usual (Game) Meaning:
Convince an NPC of a certain position, using dialog.
Possible Learning Tasks:
Write a reflection to an article/video/etc.
Write a position paper on some topic.
Posting a self introduction to the discussion group is a Timed Quest
Usual (Game) Meaning:
Complete the objective in the given amount of time.
Possible Learning Tasks:
These are quests that will have a natural expiry date, such as posting an Introduction to the Group.
I may describe some more as we go along, but for now this is enough. What I still need to do is go through each of my quests and make sure they are reasonable, and that they are up to date. I’ll let you know if I learned anything new tomorrow.
If you are interested in following my course journal, watch for the “Gamification 101” heading.
Also, for more information on gamification, check out my website here.
This is Part 6 in my continuing saga of my current iteration of a gamified course.
In a course where assessment is primarily attainment based rather than time-based, and that uses criterion-referenced rather than norm-referenced measures, getting the learning tasks (assignments, quests, etc.) right is key.
I give my students lots of choices when it comes to how they earn enough points to get the grade they want. For simplicity, I decided that 10 XP (experience points) would equal 1%. That means that a perfect 100% takes 1,000 XP. My school has an institutionally determined mapping of % to letter grades, so this allows me and my students to see where they stand easily. In most courses, anything below a certain % – like 50% – is a fail. Since everyone starts off with a score of 0, this would mean that they would appear to have an ‘F’ for a good portion of the term. That doesn’t seem reasonable to me, and it’s certainly not encouraging. To address that, I set up a variety of levels so that students could see themselves making progress. In the grade sheets (I call them Score Cards), the display of the letter grade is grayed out until they get past the ‘F’. I want them focusing on their score and their level – at least for the first part of the course.
Notice that there is a level ABOVE 1,000 XP. Given the wide variety of tasks they can do, it is possible for them to end up with more than 1,000 XP at the end of term.
This is a key aspect of this gamified design.
We’ll come back to this later and look at it again. For now, it’s enough to know that students start off with a score of 0, and everything they do adds to their score. There is nothing in my class that can result in their losing XP. If they do an inadequate job on a particular quest, they will get less than a perfect score – but they will still get some points. They almost always have the option of fixing their work and resubmitting it for reassessment (students rarely take me up on that offer), or they can do other things to make up for the points.
Next time, we’ll look at the quests themselves. Part of getting ready for the new edition of the course is to look over the quests and see what needs to be adjusted.
If you are interested in following my course journal, watch for the “Gamification 101” heading.
Also, for more information on gamification, check out my website here.
This is Part 4 in my continuing saga of my current iteration of a gamified course.
Last time I ended with a high-level course map.
Maybe you can see why many of these “modules” actually need to be interleaved.
So that means that my pre-test idea isn’t going to work. On the plus side, this mapping helps me to see what it is I’m actually doing in my class. I plan to share these with my students so they can see too.
Tune in tomorrow for the next step in my course design.
These are the details of each “module”:
If you are interested in following my course journal, watch for the “Gamification 101” heading.
Also, for more information on gamification, check out my website here.
Last year I was invited to do an interview for a local TV station. I know this isn’t a big deal for many of my game colleagues, but I don’t get on TV very often so for me it’s kind of cool. I recently found it on YouTube, so here it is.
This is Part 4 in my continuing saga of my current iteration of a gamified course.
Last time I ended with a high-level course map.
Maybe you can see why many of these “modules” actually need to be interleaved.
So that means that my pre-test idea isn’t going to work. I have something different planned for tomorrow’s post, but tune in the day after for the next step.
These are the details of each “module”:
If you are interested in following my course journal, watch for the “Gamification 101” heading.
Also, for more information on gamification, check out my website here.
