Video Games for Learning

Video games in education is one of the top strategies I'd love to incorporate more often in my classroom; it is up there with graphic novels. In fact, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a course on implementing graphic novels and video games into the ELA classroom during my undergrad at Shippensburg University. That class was structured like a real-life video game. We had core, story-line quests (assignments) to complete; optional, side-quests that we could choose a combination of to "level up" to the next grade level (each letter grade was determined by the amount of XP [points] you earned); and final bosses to tackle (final assessments).  

My professor, myself, and two of my classmates were even able to travel to NCTE's Annual Convention in Las Vegas to present on video games in the classroom. (Here is the Prezi we used at the convention, and here is the Prezi I created that delineates James Gee's Learning Principles in the popular video game Bioshock (has a seriously great story line and character development and setting and mood and I could go on and on). Both are more helpful with the actual spoken presentation, but I don't know where the transcripts for them are!) 

With that being said, I feel as though I've done a considerable amount of research on this topic prior to the class I'm currently enrolled in for my Master's at Wilkes. I think gamification in the classroom is a FABULOUS idea. A lot of people will immediately think, "woah, our kids play enough video games; they don't need to be gaming at school, too!", because to many people, video games are viewed negatively. So, gamification could come with a negative implication. But they're 100% wrong. Gamification doesn't necessarily mean students are playing video games in class (though, I have had students do that before--more on that later). Rather, gamification is the structuring of lessons and activities through core gaming principles, concepts, and theories (which can be nothing but positive for students and teachers alike).

In his novel, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Gee spends copious amounts of time describing 36 principles that are found (and used) in most video games that allow for optimal learning. Here are those principles:

1) Active, Critical Learning Principle
All aspects of the the learning environment (including ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning
2) Design Principle
Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core to the leaning experience
3) Semiotic Principle
Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc.) as a complex system is core to the learning experience
4) Semiotic Domains Principle
Leaning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them.
5) Meta-level thinking about Semiotic Domain Principle
Learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationships of the semiotic domain being learned to other semiotic domains
6) "Psychosocial Moratorium" Principle
Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered
7) Committed Learning Principle
Learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and practice) as an extension of their real-world identities in relation to a virtual identity to which they feel some commitment and a virtual world that they find compelling
8) Identity Principle
Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a a way that the learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity) and ample opportunity to meditate on the relationship between new identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on, their multiple real-world identities, a virtual identity, and a projective identity
9) Self-Knowledge Principle
The virtual world is constructed in such a way that learners learn not only about the domain but also about themselves and their current and potential capacities
10) Amplification of Input Principle
For a little input, learners get a lot of output
11) Achievement Principle
For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learner's level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner's ongoing achievements
12) Practice Principle
Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring (i.e. in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots of time on task.
13. Ongoing Learning Principle
The distinction between the learner and the master is vague, since learners, thanks to the operation of the "regime of competency" principle listed next, must, at higher and higher levels, undo their routinized mastery to adapt to new or changed conditions. There are cycles of new learning, automatization, undoing automatization, and new re-organized automatization
14) "Regime of Competence" Principle
The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging but not "Undoable"
15) Probing Principle
Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; reprobing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis
16) Multiple Routes Principle
There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and problem-solving, while also exploring alternative styles
17) Situated Meaning Principle
The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols, texts, etc.) are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not general or decontextualized. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered bottom up via embodied experience
18) Text Principle
Texts are not understood purely verbally (i.e. only in terms of the definitions of the words in the text and their text-internal relationships to each other) but are understood in terms of embodied experience. Learners move back and forth between texts and embodied experiences. More purely verbal understanding (reading texts apart from embodied action) comes only when learners have enough embodied experience in the domain and ample experiences with similar texts
19) Intertextual Principle
The learner understands texts as a family ("genre") of related texts and understands any one text in relation to others in the family, but only after having achieved embodied understandings of some texts. Understanding a group of texts as a family ("genre") of texts is a large part of what helps the learner to make sense of texts
20) Multimodal Principle
Meaning and knowledge ate built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not just words
21) "Material Intelligence" Principle
Thinking, problem-solving and knowledge are "stored" in material objects and the environment. This frees learners to engage their minds with other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge stored in material objects and the environment to achieve yet more powerful effects
22) Intuitive Knowledge Principle
Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up in repeated practice and experience, often in association with an affinity group, counts a good deal and is honored. Not just verbal and conscious knowledge is rewarded
23) Subset Principle
Learning even at its start takes place in a (simplified) subset of the real domain
24) Incremental Principle
Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead to generalizations that are fruitful for later cases. When learners face more complex cases later, the learning space (the number and type of guess the learner can make) is constrained by the sorts of fruitful patterns or generalizations the learned has founded earlier
25) Concentrated Sample Principle
The learner sees, especially early on, many more instances of the fundamental signs and actions than should be the case in a less controlled sample. fundamental signs and actions are concentrated in the early stages so that learners get to practice them often and learn them well
26) Bottom-up Basic Skills Principle
Basic skills are not learned in isolation or out of context; rather, what counts as a basic skill is discovered bottom up by engaging in more and more of the game/domain or games/domains like it. Basic skills are genre elements of a given type of game/domain
27) Explicit Information On-Demand and Just-in-Time Principle
The learner is given explicit information both on-demand and just-in-time, when the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can best be understood and used in practice
28) Discovery Principle
Overt telling is kept to a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample opportunities for the learner to experiment and make discoveries
29) Transfer Principle
Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for, transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems that require adapting and transforming that earlier learning
30) Cultural Models about the World Principle
Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without denigration of their identities, abilities or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models that may conflict with or otherwise relate to them in various ways
31) Cultural Models about Learning Principle
Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models about learning and themselves as learners, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models of learning and themselves as learners
32) Cultural Models about Semiotic Domains Principle
about their cultural models about a particular semiotic domain they are learning, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models about this domain
33) Distributed Principle
Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols, technologies, and the environment
34) Dispersed Principle
Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may rarely or never see face-to-face
35) Affinity Group Principle
Learners constitute an "affinity group," that is, a group that is bonded primarily through shared en devours, goals, and practices and not shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or culture
36) Insider Principle
The learner is an "insider," "teacher," and "producer" (not just a consumer) able to customize the learning experience and the domain/game from the beginning and throughout the experience.

Jane McGonigal pens a similar, but different list in her book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. She calls hers "Fixes to Reality". She also has done a number of fantastic TED Talks on Gamification.

Fixes to Reality
Fix #1:  Tackle Unnecessary Obstacles. Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our personal strengths to better use. Unnecessary obstacles increase self-motivation, provoke interest and creativity, and help us work at the very edge of our abilities.
Fix #2:  Activate Extreme Positive Emotions.  Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.
Fix #3:  Do More Satisfying Work.  Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work. They help us achieve a state of blissful productivity, with clear, actionable goals and vivid results.
Fix #4:  Find Better Hope of Success.  Games improve our chances for success and eliminate our fear of failure (by making failures fun and by keeping the game going.) They train us to focus our time and energy on truly attainable goals.
Fix #5:  Strengthen Your Social Connectivity.  Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “prosocial emotions,” including happy embarrassment and vicarious pride.  Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) provide ambient sociability – the feeling of being around other people even when we’re physically alone.
Fix #6:  Immerse Yourself in Epic Scale.  Games make us a part of something bigger and give epic meaning to our actions.
Fix #7:  Participate Wholeheartedly Wherever, Whenever We Can.  Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever we’re doing and help us enjoy our real lives more, instead of feeling like we want to escape from them.
Fix #8:  Seek Meaningful Rewards When We Need Them Most.  Games help us feel more rewarded for making our best effort. Points, levels, and achievements can motivate us to get through the toughest situations and inspire us to work harder to excel at things we already love.
Fix #9:  Have More Fun With Strangers.  Games help us band together and create powerful communities from scratch. They can build our capacity for social participation, connecting us in new ways.
Fix #10:  Invent and Adopt New Happiness Hacks.  Games make it easier to take good advice and try out happier habits.
Fix #11:  Contribute to a Sustainable Engagement Economy.  The gratifications we get from playing games are an infinitely renewable resource. Crowdsourcing games can engage tens of thousands of players in tackling real-world problems for free.
Fix #12:  Seek Out More Epic Wins.  Games help us define awe-inspiring goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together. Social participation games can help players save real lives and grant real wishes by creating real-world volunteer tasks that feel as heroic, satisfying, and readily achievable as online game quests.
Fix #13:  Spend 10,000 Hours Collaborating.  Games help us make a more concerted effort – and over time, they give us collaboration superpowers.
Fix #14:  Develop Massively Multiplayer Foresight.  Games help us imagine and invent the future together. They can turn ordinary people into super-empowered hopeful individuals – by training us to take a longer view, to practice ecosystems thinking, and to pilot massively multiple strategies for solving planetary-scale problems.

It is principles like Gee's and fixes like McGonigal's that are perfect for "gamifying" one's classroom to make it more friendly and accessible for today's student. Nowhere in those principles/fixes does it say a teacher needs to let their students play video games. It would be extremely effective for teachers to begin modelling their lessons, activities, and assessments using the above principles/fixes. These principles/fixes incorporate intrinsic and extrinsic motivators seamlessly.

However, I have used video games here and there over the course of my teaching career. in addition to video game/gaming principles/fixes When I lived in Buffalo, NY I was a science teacher at a Expeditionary Learning charter school. Students spent large chunks of time on an "expedition" (an overarching concept or questions) in all of their classes (cores and arts). For one expedition, students were learning about conservation, deforestation, animals, habitats, etc. We spent three days at the Buffalo Zoo learning about animal exhibits, conservation, and the like. As part of their final, cumulative project, students wrote persuasive letters to the zoo to try and convince them to build an exhibit for their chosen endangered animal, they did scientific drawings of their animal, they designed blueprints and descriptions for the exhibits/habitats among many other things. All of these things they would later set up into an exhibit (separated by Biome) which was attended by all of the Zoo docents, the students' parents and teachers, and the community. It was in this expedition that I allowed students to "play video games". For students who had completed all of their requirements, I encouraged them to create their zoo exhibit on Minecraft. I think you can view them here. I'd recommend Dolen's and the first half of Kainoa's.

Anyway, all this to say I think gamification is a fantastic idea for anyone open-minded enough to make it past the name. I note that I haven't said much about badging. I'm not sure if I'm meant to dissect badging with/by teachers or badging with/by students. I know that I can sometimes find it a little obnoxious when I receive an email and the sender's signature has a ton of badges (especially for obscure and/or super easy to accomplish things). I mean, I do have my Google Certified Educator badge in my own email signature, but that's it. I don't have my EDPuzzle Ambassador badge or my NoRedInk badge because they're silly and unnecessary. So, I suppose those are my brief, but honest, thoughts on badging.