Progress is an interesting thing. It is something like
dancing the fox trot (I called it a cha-cha when I was explaining it to my son
who is a dancer and he corrected me) – one step forward then two steps back. Last
week when I started reading the book we were considering for our gamification
course, I was very excited about it. The book (Gamify Your Classroom) seemed
like it would be just what we needed as a framework for our course. While the
book started out promising, the further into it I got the less I was able to
align with what we were wanting to do. Molly came to the same conclusion in her
own reading, so at our weekly meeting last Monday we decided that while the
book has some great resources, we shouldn’t use it as a text for the class.
Once that was decided, we were back to square one with content, and had to
decide where to go from there.
Learning Objectives
One of the things that we decided to do was to formalize the
learning objectives for each topic we were going to be covering. I think that
we each had ideas of what should be included, but we never formally put them
into writing and we felt that would give us a little more direction and
structure. I have been working this week on creating learning objectives for
the portion of the course that I am developing. This includes the language of
games, game elements, uses for gamification, gamification design framework, and
tools for gamification. I have been
taking notes on these subjects and have begun to formulate my objectives, but
they are not quite ready to be written about in this blog. Hopefully that will
be the focus of next week’s post.
General Brainstorming
We did have some fun at our meeting brainstorming things
that we can do to make the course feel more like a game. We had the idea of
having an NPC (non-playing character) introduce the topic that the student
would be learning about in any given village by giving them quests. Upon completion
of their quests they could get some kind of clue that would help them to
advance to the next area.
Another thing that we talked about was that to be able to
create a gamified course, it is important that you understand games and how
they work. Reading about games is all well and good, but to really understand
games you need to play them. I doubt too many people will complain that we will
be assigning games as homework. I am in the process of developing a “game
scavenger hunt,” where the students will demonstrate their understanding of
game elements by finding them in games that they play. They will document these
elements using screen capture or pictures and explain the element and how it
was used. This should be a really fun assignment.
We also talked about wanting to create some games for the
course, which might require the use of JavaScript. Unfortunately, JavaScript
doesn’t work in Canvas so we will need to link to an outside site if we are
going to do that.
Also, in keeping with the game theme of allowing the player
to choose the path that they follow, there will be 3 tracks in our course. One
will look at gamification in the K12 classroom, another will look at
gamification in higher ed, and a third will look at gamification in business.
The final project in the course will be the boss battle and
will happen as the final quest in the game. This will be the focus of the
second half of the semester and will be dependent upon the goals of the
student. It will give them a chance to use everything that they have learned.
This past Monday’s meeting was a wonderful brainstorming
session and lots of ideas were thrown around. I have listed just a few of them.
I am currently in the process of researching and further brainstorming, and
will be spending a lot of my weekend doing just that. Things are starting to
get exciting, and hopefully things will start to come together. I am optimistic
that we are finally on a path that will lead us to what the course needs to be.
Let the games begin….
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