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:

Assignment-template-blue

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.

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