The Total Learner Experience

On Winning

“Training” and “competition” are not usually words that are associated with each other. However, competition is an innate motivator and humans by nature enjoy winning.

Certain aspects of winning are universal to all competitive activities, including learning. A recent Newsweek article about winning provides insight into how instructional designers can create more engaging training. The author notes that winning by itself is not the most compelling impetus, but that winning while a competitor loses is more satisfying (this would seem obvious to anyone with siblings).

Rather than using  a “task completion” metaphor, instructional designers should use a gaming and winning metaphor when designing training. Rote tasks can be made more engaging if instead of simply reading and reacting in a safe environment, the learner triumphs over a tension-filled activity. Similarly, you can provide competitive opportunities with other learners virtually.

In many K-12 situations “safe” learning environments take out so much of the excitement of competition and rating. You have an obligation to make sure every beginner learner succeeds, but you also have an obligation to groom the special talents that individuals have as well.

How do you turn cognitive tasks into challenge?

Learning objectives can remain the same, but it’s the way that it is presented that changes. You don't have to completely redesign your training to make it more challenging. Consider these simple ideas:

Allow learners to be wrong

• Allow and penalize for incorrect answers. If learners can complete a course by merely clicking through content, they have little reason to engage with the content. Activities that allow for “failure” can create “good tension”.

Add variable scoring

• Reward learners for learning more difficult material by acknowledging that all content is not equal.

Add timed components for some activities

• While not appropriate for all activities, it does create a feeling of tension.

Allow for replay opportunities

• This reduces some of the negative aspects of the capability for “failure” allowed by other competitive components.

Create opportunities to share leaderboard scores outside of the learning environment

• Rather than learning taking place within a silo, authentic learning events can bleed into the larger community.

A simple multiple choice game can be either boring or competitive with a simple design tweak:

Boring

• The learner answers a question and then views the answers tagged with "correct" and "incorrect" feedback.

Competitive

• The learner answers a question. They receive variable points based upon the correctness of the answer, difficulty of the challenge and the speed with which they answered. They are then shown their score relative to other learners. The feedback is also contextual and continues the gameplay.

Take some lessons from this short quiz. How many times did you feel compelled to play?

Games4Change Festival-- Quick Thoughts

I'm attending the Game4Change Festival in NYC for the first time this year. I might do a bit more formal commenting in later posts, but these are a few of the thoughts that keep coming up:

1) STEM-- everybody kept talking about STEM content (science, technology, engineering and math) but I always wonder if STEM content in games is accurate and/or complex enough. I don't know what the answer is to the balance of engagement and science content, but the brief glances I took at some games were encouraging.

2) What is the role of facilitators and teachers for these games? I am not sure that higher level learning outcomes happen for the majority of learners/players without some guided instruction. I know that some choose to become engrossed in this worlds, but the vast majority do not. Also, who will be pushing kids to these worlds. It seems like you will need lots of engaged ambassadors helping get the word out and getting the kids initially turned onto these games.

4) "Everyone"-- People kept saying that everyone plays games. There was a good bit of homogeneity to the crowd. Mostly young, male, and white, with a few Indians and women. This was a laptop-carrying crowd, and while access was mentioned during the education days, it wasn't so much yesterday during the main session. While I spoke with some practitioners who seemed to get it, a lot of the comments I heard tended to assume technological prowess.

By far, the getting kids involved with social games-- as both creators and players-- was the best takeaway I had from this conference. It reaffirmed and rekindled my belief in the power of kids doing.

Serving your learner

My natural inclination is to design for the imagination. I've long believed that if you give students the best tools to create with, that they then can transfer that knowledge to other applications. By the end of my time at the k-8 school, where I taught the same students for 3 consecutive years, I had 3rd grade students creating Flash animations and writing action-scripting. To me this was a major accomplishment, indicative of incredible potential for these students to become producers of multimedia, interactive projects. Every year, however, the complaint was that the students weren't learning how to format papers in Word. The parents saw computer class as a support to the other academic classes, not as a curriculum in its own right.

Now that I am working with students who have been traditionally under-served, I wonder about my own obligations to provide opportunities for academic success. Should this curriculum emphasize more immediate academic skills, formatting papers, learning powerpoint? Or should I emphasize their personal expression and storytelling through exposure to professional graphics, audio and video software applications.

I already know where I stand on this. I am still in touch with the majority of my inspirational art teachers. I learned more about how to present myself professionally from them than any of my drudgerous academic classes. I don't know if I can inspire disaffected students with any software app, but I feel that it's more likely in Alice, than it is with Excel.