Gamifying a Gamification Course

This was a fun week in the development of our elective on gamification. I spent quite a bit of time over the weekend researching game elements. Molly and I had met the previous Monday, came up with an idea for what should be on each content page (video, readings, some kind of assignment, and a discussion or blog). As I was reading through my content, I was struggling with an assignment. Most of the ideas I had seemed that they would work best as part of a project, but we hadn’t settled on a project or how that was going to work. My research was giving me lots of ideas, but when it came to putting it together I was having more questions than answers.

Molly and I have made a tentative plan to meet most Mondays to discuss where we are and where we should be going with our research as well as to coordinate putting the course together in Canvas. I came to our meeting with my questions in hand. I had three things that I really wanted to talk about:

• Textbooks – We had found a couple of books that seemed like they would work well for the course. When I read the chapters in those books concerning Game Elements (the topic that I was researching last week), both had great chapters that would be very useful. I also found good information online. There is so much information available on this topic now, that it would be easy to overwhelm the students. What we decided was that we would go ahead and use the textbooks as our primary sources for information and to use the Internet content to supplement and fill in any gaps.
• Organization – There is an overwhelming amount of information available online for gamification. It is a relatively new and exciting topic and many people are trying it out and blogging or writing about it. There are not as many scholarly articles, but there are lots of online postings by experts in the field. As I was trying to research the topic I had chosen to focus on this past week, I was finding lots of great information on other topics that we would be addressing. We needed to try to figure out a way to keep up with all of these potential sources so that we can find them again later when we need them. Mollly had been adding them to a module in canvas, but the list was growing quite long and the articles weren’t necessarily categorized.  We have also been collaborating using a Google Drive folder, so I decided that I would add links with a description of their content to a Google document. Molly is going to create modules for each of the topics to be covered and distribute her list of sources to the appropriate content area,
• Assignments – This was a big question mark and one that we realized that we needed to address before we went any further. We had to figure out who we thought our potential students might be and what type of project might serve them. This conversation ended up changing our entire approach to the course. The results of this discussion merit a section of their own.

Our discussion of assignments led us down the path of what the best approach to teaching the class might be. We both agreed that when we were learning about teaching topics, the courses that worked the best were the ones that modeled what they were teaching. By demonstrating how a tool could be used, the student is learning about the tool and also seeing how it works. Based on this, we decided that the course really needed to be a game. (To be honest, we already knew this, but the idea had gotten lost as we had gotten bogged down in the details of the content). We decided that the first half of the course would be a game to teach the students about gamification and the second half would be a project where they put what they learned into practice.

Now that we had a plan, it was time to start putting it into action. Molly has an English degree and a passion for creative story telling so she began making up the story of the game. She has created “lands/towns/villages” for each of the subjects that will be covered. The towns will contain areas where the players read and learn or demonstrate what they have learned through games and puzzles, or share what they have learned with their guild. Molly and I will be filling in the details in each of the locations throughout the game with the idea that the end of the road they are on will lead them to the one final challenge – creating a gamified “something” of their own.  What they gamify will depend on the student since we anticipate a variety of backgrounds for the students in the course.

We ended the meeting by dividing all of the course modules and assigning a primary researcher for each topic. We will share relevant information/links as we come across them if they are in a category that we are not specifically researching. I will specifically be researching the language of games, game elements (as discussed in the previous blog), uses for gamification, the gamification design framework, and tools for gamifying a classroom. Molly will be looking into history, psychology, types of games, types of fun and behavior change. This will be a lot of information to cover in half a semester, so the challenging part will be distilling it down into a manageable amount of information and giving the students resources to explore further if they are interested.

I plan to spend my weekend digging into these topics and seeing what I can find. We decided that we would meet again in two weeks and see what we had come up with. There are lots of exciting things in the works.