Gamification at a Glance

Blackboard TLC 2017 in Darwin

The Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference 2017 was just held in the first week of September in Darwin by our Moodle hosting supplier Blackboard Inc..  The Conference was delivered over four days through an exciting range of workshops, presentations, and sessions. TaLT had Tristan as the representative participant in the meeting and he has brought back some interesting experience to share with all of us.

Gamification

The gamification of learning is a relatively new educational approach to motivate students to learn by using video game design and game elements in learning environments. The goal is to maximize enjoyment and engagement through capturing the interest of learners and inspiring them to continue learning. It can provide instant feedback to the learners, as well as beter learning environment and experience. It might also promote behavioral change of the students.

The following diagram shows several benefits of adopting gamification in the learning design.

Image 1: https://pixelearning.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/final_info.jpg

Gamification in a day - Introduction

In the conference's Academic Adoption Day workshop, Mark Bailye, Customer Success Advocate and Nicole Wall, Lead Functional Consultant from Blackboard hosted a wonderful workshop giving us the opportunity to experience, explore, engage and evaluate key pedagogical practices including gamification, personalised learning and blended approaches.

At the beginning of the gamification workshop, the learners were divided into groups and experienced a set of well-designed gamification learning activities. Then we discussed what is good about the gamification learning experience. Participants think that the practical interesting learning activities, the clear expectation, and the associated curiosity have made the learning process quite engaging. But also at the same time, the concern was that there could possibly be too many distractions from the learning outcome in the games.

The workshop facilitators then introduced the commonly used approaches in designing gamified courses, including:

• Story telling
• Situated learning
• Constructivist
• Social
• Problem based
• Exploratory

Also, game elements in Gamification have been introduced:

Challenges	Narratives	Measurement
Competition	Penalties	Learning
Development	Rules	Achievement
Exploration	Risk	Skill
Feedback	Rewards/Incentives	Leaderboard

Then Hermy Cortez Llacuna from the University of West Sydney introduced their project of Quest in vUWS, which is a gamification course for new students to get familiar with the university's online learning environment.

Gamifying v UWS: Starting your quest in Blackboard Learn - Hermy Cortez Llacuna - Western Sydney University from Blackboard APAC

Gamification in a day - Do It Yourself

Then all teams have been asked to apply the gamification approach and design a course to teach the colleagues to cook scrambled eggs in LMS. And we only had 2 hours to do that.

We adopted the following approach to do that:

1. Know your learners
2. Design a game
3. Select game elements
4. Create gamified content
5. Play the game

Together with Paul from Monash College, Emily from The Australian College of Ministries, and Dajana from UNSW, we worked on the learning outcome, assessments, and then the learning activities. We decided to use the concept of Exploration to design this gamification course. Those who have played the famous PC game Sid Meier's Civilization should be familiar with that concept.

The course starts as below:
"The sun is shining and you've just rolled out of bed to get ready for the day. You've got a strong craving for scrambled eggs but you just can't remember how to make them!
Go down to the kitchen and have a look if you can find all required ingredients and tools to make scrambled eggs."

Then the learner has to explore the kitchen, starting from the cupboard, to the drawer, the fridge, and the pantry. Successfully accomplishing the tasks allow the learner to collect the tools and ingredients to make the scrambled eggs:

Students who have found the tools and ingredients are given badges in Moodle and we hope that the badges will encourage students to finish the activities. Also, progress monitoring is available for the students to see how far they are from the finishing line.

The learner might be surprised that they were not able to find the eggs in the fridge. But if they keep searching, they will find it in the pantry through the famous Where's Wally game:

At the end, students will finish a quiz and user the Zappar app on their mobiles to scan a Zappar code. You can try that on your phone as well.

Students will watch a video about how to make scrambled eggs and an assessment will be taken after that to evaluate their understandings.

We did a wonderful job and was considered the best by the workshop facilitators. On the next day, Tristan presented briefly about the design in the Game On! session in the conference.

If you would like to know about gamification or try it for a special topic in your unit, feel free to send us an email.