This post is part 1 of the MindShift Guide to Game-Based Learning and originally appeared on MindShift.

By now, you’ve probably heard the buzzwords: “game-based learning” and “gamification” are pervading headlines in education coverage. Video games have always been popular with kids, but now increasingly, educators are trying to leverage the interactive power of video games for learning. Why? It turns out games are actually really good teachers.

Think about the compounding way in which Angry Birds teaches the rules, one baby step at a time, one superpower after another. Video games teach players the skills needed to overcome particular kinds of challenges; then they require a demonstration of mastery in order to move onto the next level. Players may get three or four chances to show their ability to execute the new skill. If they fail, it’s back to the prior level. If they succeed, it’s on to the next.

Think about popular games, old and new: Pac-Man, Mario Brothers, Space Invaders, Minecraft. Even very small kids can learn to play really complex games. Kids play for hours until they master the game, until they discover the patterns. They talk about it with their friends. They share tips. They share tricks. They learn together.

All games facilitate some kind of learning. Even games that are not meant to be educational teach kids something — even if it’s just the rules of the game. The learning is so effective that it deserves our attention. Educational psychologists study it. Sociologists study it. Neuroscientists study it. They’re all trying to figure out what makes the great games work. In some cases, researchers are attempting to isolate and identify the attributes of video games that stimulate engagement and perseverance. It is this kind of research that has led to the “gamification” trend.

Gamification is popular in advertising, human resources, coffee shop loyalty programs, ongoing fast food promotions. Think of McDonald’s Monopoly game as an early example of intentional gamification. In general, gamification attempts to superimpose the stimulating motivational aspects of the game world onto the life world.

Across the country, teachers are using gamification in their classrooms every day. They gamify learning by replacing grades with levels and merit badges. Rather than simply delivering lectures and then testing for retention, gamification manifests when teachers create project-based units where completion, or the demonstration of mastery, is what allows the student to move on.

When learning is structured like a game, students intuitively understand the cumulative nature of learning. They’re motivated to master a compounding sequence of skills.

Perhaps students receive badges recognizing the successful completion of each assignment. Maybe future learning units are imagined like sequential game worlds–a certain number of badges are required to “open each portal.” The portal is the next lesson or the next learning module. When learning is structured this way, students intuitively understand the cumulative nature of learning. They’re motivated to master a compounding sequence of skills.

TAPPING INTO THE NATURAL INSTINCT TO LEARN

Any teacher can implement a “gamified” approach fairly easily — you don’t need tablets or laptop computers. It’s a matter of reframing traditional assignments as inquiry-based individual or group projects. It’s also a matter of employing a more mastery-based assessment strategy that’s grounded in project-based learning and understanding the motivational benefits of a more game-like structure. Done well, gamifying the classroom encourages students to be motivated by the excitement of moving on to new challenges. Gaming emotions like “Fiero” become a commonplace part of the learning experience. Fiero is the rush of excitement that gamers experience when they overcome challenges. In Reality is Broken, a popular book that suggests ways to bring the wisdom of the game-world into the real-word, Jane McGonigal writes:

Fiero, according to researchers at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Science Research at Stanford, is the emotion that first created the desire to leave the cave and conquer the world. It’s a craving for challenges that we can overcome, battles we can win, and dangers we can vanquish.

Scientist have recently documented that fiero is one of the most powerful neurochemical highs we can experience. It involves three different structures of the reward circuitry of the brain, including the mesocorticolimbic center, which is most typically associated with reward and addiction. Fiero is a rush unlike any other rush, and the more challenging the obstacle we overcome, the more intense the fiero.

Obviously, when researchers stick their microscopes in people’s brains they don’t find neuro-receptors with the word “fiero” scribbled on them like tiny calligraphy on a minuscule grain of rice. But the word “fiero” was chosen by researchers for a reason — to signify a particular neurochemical phenomena. Why that word?

The Italian word “fiero” comes from the same Latin root as our English word “fierce.” This is not only because the particular kind of pride that fiero describes makes us feel like an aggressive alpha predator at the top of the virtual food chain. Fiero also has to do with feeling of wildness. The Latin root “fiera” is also the origin of the English word “feral,” which means untamed or undomesticated.

The feeling of fiero, then, is less about pride and more about being your untamed self. Fiero is about the way you feel when you are liberated from restrictions and constraints and enabled to just be uninhibited, to play free. Gamers want those little rushes of fiero because, in a way, it’s the opposite of feeling self-conscious, of feeling like they need to conform. It neurochemically reminds them that they have the ability to respond in an unrestrained way to the immediate circumstances of the world around them.

In the classroom, fiero makes students see that they’re empowered players in their own education. They’re released into the exciting adventure that learning can be. Without the intrinsic motivating power of fiero, however, gamification becomes nothing more than semantic spin: a language game in which a letter-based grade system is replaced by a points-based reward system. In these cases, gamification does little to address the shortcomings of a system that relies on high-stakes testing.

Be wary of gamifying your classroom in a way that disempowers students through extrinsic rewards. Remember, it is not the gold stars, points, or smiley faces that motivate gamers (nor students). Stars, points, and badges are simply symbolic representations marking a task well-done. All teachers, however, can attempt to harness the motivational power of fiero.

GAME-BASED LEARNING VS. GAMIFICATION

Game-based learning is another great way to empower your students to engage with intellectual problems. They get to experience the fiero rush that comes with knowing that they successfully overcame a challenge. That’s right: game-based learning is different from gamification. Gamification is about making a non-game into a game. Game-based learning usually refers to using actual digital video games as a classroom tool (although, traditional non electronic role playing and board games work exactly the same way, but perhaps not so efficiently), and there’s a slew of video games, digital apps, and adaptive software platforms that can be used for instruction. Some are great, while others are not so helpful.

Each time we reframe class content in order to clarify something, we’re reaching for a tool. Every time we try a different activity with the hope that this approach will deepen our students’ understanding, we’re using a new tool. Teachers can never have too many tools in their tool boxes. Tools enable flexibility and great teaching requires being adaptable.

This blog series is an in-depth guide to game-based teaching tools. It’s about making it easy for you to adopt games for teaching. It’s not that we want you to replace what you’re already doing with video games. Instead, we want you to supplement and compliment your already successful strategies with another potentially powerful tool.

Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll explain the key ideas in game-based learning. We’ll discuss pedagogy, implementation, and assessment. We’ll summarize the research and provide suggestions for practical use. We’ll talk about the pros and cons of game-based learning. We’ll offer you a guide for adding games to your classroom.

The MindShift Guide to Game-Based Learning is made possible through the generous support of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and is a project of the Games and Learning Publishing Council. This is the first in a series of 20 posts written by Jordan Shapiro, author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide To Maximum Euphoric Bliss, and Forbes columnist on game-based learning, education technology, and parenting. He lives in Philadelphia with his two sons and a video game console.

A few weeks ago, the Cooney Center’s own Lori Takeuchi made the long journey out to Billund, Denmark to participate in the LEGO Foundation’s 2014 Idea Conference. The slideshow below documents the two-and-a-half days she spent dreaming, debating, planning, and (perhaps most importantly) playing with thought leaders from around the world to “re-define play and re-imagine learning.”

Photos and captions by Lori Takeuchi.

(Note: This slideshow is best viewed directly on Google+)

View the photos on Google+

The winners of the 2013 National STEM Video Game Challenge at the 11th Annual Games for Change Award Ceremony held at NYU’s Skirball Center.   Photo by Allison Mishkin

The photo above was taken last night at NYU’s Skirball Center at the 11th Annual Games for Change Festival Awards Ceremony as these fourteen young people from all over the country were being honored for their achievements as winners of the 2013 National STEM Video Game Challenge.

Gaming has touched the current generation of learners in a new way. The 2013 National STEM Video Game Design Challenge challenged enthusiastic students around the country to look under the hood of the games they play every day and to create their own. Entries were judged against three criteria (engaging gameplay, innovative/creative vision, well-balanced game play) and by design the competition encourages students to engage with a variety of tools available to them, such as Gamestar Mechanic, Scratch, and Kodu. After the competition ends, it’s expected that students will bring these tools and ideas back to their learning communities.

These enterprising and creative young students also have a gift for helping their peers learn about subjects they are themselves deeply interested in. Look closely at the entries from the 2013 Challenge and you’ll find games that teach physics, French and Spanish vocabulary, and environmentalism. We’re proud of the hard work that these students have put into their winning games and have high hopes for their very bright futures.

Photos from the student winners’ day in New York and the Games for Change Ceremony:

Information about the 2014 Challenge will be announced in the fall.

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of a new series on games and learning on MindShift.  Over the next few months, the series will tackle key principles behind games and learning. Primarily intended for teachers, this guide will provide practical and hands-on suggestions for using games in the classroom.

This is what MindShift’s Tina Barseghian has to say about the project:

How can games unlock a rich world of learning? This is the big question at the heart of the growing games and learning movement that’s gaining momentum in education. And it’s the question that MindShift will explore in depth in the upcoming series of articles The MindShift Guide to Games and Learning. Over the course of the next few weeks and months, MindShift will explain the key ideas in game-based learning, and discuss pedagogy, implementation, and assessment. We’ll make sense of the available research and provide suggestions for practical use, and we’ll talk honestly about the pros and cons of game-based learning. In short we’ll offer you a guide for adding games to your classroom. The post series will evolve into a downloadable guide, and can be used as a touchstone for thoughtful consideration of best practices for teachers and parents.

The series of 20 posts is authored by Jordan Shapiro, author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide To Maximum Euphoric Bliss, and Forbes columnist on game-based learning, education technology, and parenting.

We’ll be sharing many of these posts here as well; and look for a downloadable PDF of the Guide to Game-Based Learning in September!

The MindShift Guide to Game-Based Learning is made possible through the generous support of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and is a project of the Games and Learning Publishing Council. 

Are you a K-8 teacher who lives and teaches in the United States? If so, you are eligible to participate in a Joan Ganz Cooney Center survey about using digital media—including games—in the classroom. Teachers who complete this 15-minute survey will receive no payment, but will instead have the chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card.

Researchers at the Cooney Center are also interested in speaking with K-8 teachers about their use of digital media in the classroom. If you would like to be interviewed—for 20 minutes in person, via Skype, or telephone—please take the survey, which will us help screen potential interviewees.

Ready to take the survey? Click here to begin.

The Games for Change Festival starts bright and early tomorrow morning in New York City, where game designers, investors, journalists, and researchers will gather for a four-day investigation of the current state of serious gaming. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center will be there, hoping to engage with a community who we believe possesses a cultural connection to the young learners of today.

Earlier this month, another game-focused meeting of minds took place in New York, albeit in a more intimate setting and with different goals. Presented jointly by the NYU’s School of Engineering and the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Different Games conference offered a voice to those who feel overlooked by the gaming industry, the outsiders whom journalist Leigh Alexander spoke about in her keynote speech.

Journalist Leigh Alexander recounts her ’90s upbringing, which included video games and alternative music.

A child of the ’80s and ’90s, Alexander saw a good deal of family gameplay (Atari, Centipede, Klax marathons with her sister) while, conversely, the rock music on mainstream radio stations left her feeling excluded. In her corresponding article for Gamasutra, she rejects the mainstream culture of her upbringing as misogynistic and “fixed on aspirational swagger.” The middle ground evaded her for years until, as a teen, she encountered the music of Seattle grunge and “riot grrl,” hallmarks of the alternative culture that exploded at the turn of the last century.

But even as Alexander immersed herself in the music of Nirvana and Sleater-Kinney, by the end of the 1990s, she says, gaming was still stuck in a 1980s mindset.

An alternative gaming culture exists today, thank goodness, and Different Games exists as further proof of this. Attendees left Saturday’s conference with new vigor to continue work on passion projects ranging from a game based on a 100 year-old short story to a puzzle that metaphorically depicts the evolution of the peppered moth. Though these video games cannot hope to win over the commercial industry, small batches do succeed as expressions of their developer’s passion.

Leaving the question: what is the cultural impact of this passion? Can there be, as Alexander suggested, a “Kurt Cobain of gaming” — or a “Kathleen Hanna” or a “Jim Henson”? If this person exists at all, was she in the crowd at Different Games? And will she be in line at Games for Change?

Bruce Pavitt (right) with Sub Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman in 1988.
Photo by Jim Barry

The anonymous crowds gathered at a professional conference would overwhelm even the most powerful poetic soul, which is why an alternative culture (looking to get notice) requires support from enterprising minds. One party left unmentioned in Alexander’s Different Games keynote was Bruce Pavitt, the co-founder of Sub Pop Records who, in 1989, first discovered a local Seattle band named Nirvana and signed them to a three-record deal. Pavitt’s investment contributed every bit as much to Nirvana’s fame as Cobain’s knack for rocking out to saturnine poetry. Though the deal provided Cobain and his bandmates with a meager $600 advance, it’s clear that money wasn’t anyone’s bottom line. As Pavitt told Pitchfork in an interview last February, “[the Seattle scene] was actually about getting loose and letting go. It was inclusive and celebratory. The shows were insanely fun.”

In this, Bruce Pavitt echoes the sentiment expressed by so many subcultural movements of so many decades past: the currency of culture can’t always be measured in dollar signs. Our center’s namesake, for one prominent example, speaks about her early days as a producer for WNET, a time in her career when passion was her sole driving force. In the documentary Pioneers of Thirteen, produced by PBS, Joan Ganz Cooney recalls, “I felt totally that I had to be in public television. It was new in New York and it was exactly what I wanted to do.”

Joan Ganz Cooney, 1971
Source: Carnegie Corporation

Pioneers of Thirteen is a testament to the creative spirit that drives those who work outside of the mainstream, though perhaps it will shock you to know that the same network responsible for introducing Big Bird and Julia Child to the world began with the same ruff-and-tumble spirit as a locally-funded record label. “It was hilarious, though it didn’t seem so at the time,” says Cooney. “All of us were so overworked.” The creator of Sesame Street remembers winning an award for the most nervous breakdowns in a week.

But Joan Ganz Cooney (and the rest of the founding WNET team) continued showing up for work, motivated by grit and, undoubtedly, the “insanely fun” work they produced. After all, despite being a professional conference with representation from the indies and industry itself, Games for Change is about the games first and foremost. Therefore, to all the Cobains, Brownsteins, Pavitts, Redfords, and Cooneys of gaming: we gleefully anticipate our meeting tomorrow. Let’s all have some fun.

The Aprendiendo Juntos (“Learning Together”) Council is a multi-sector group of researchers, practitioners, and policy experts who seek to identify new models and practical strategies to improve educational outcomes for Hispanic-Latino families, through the wise deployment of digital technologies.

In June 2012, the National Center for Families Learning, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and the National Council of La Raza convened the first Hispanic-Latino Families and Digital Technologies Forum to discuss the ways in which Hispanic-Latino families engage with and learn from communication technologies. A subset of forum participants met in April of 2013 for the first time as a working group and most recently in February 2014 to continue the discussion and implement an action plan to deepen understanding of the important contextual factors surrounding Hispanic-Latino families and digital technologies.

Mariana Diaz-Wionczek from Nickelodeon speaks at the AJC meeting. Also pictured, L-R: Andres Henriquez, Mariana, Lisa Tripp, Rick Fry, and Andrea Foster. Photo by Lori Takeuchi.

The 2014 convening included a diverse array of participants, from university researchers and policymakers to school district leaders and educational media designers.  The Aprendiendo Juntos Council was also excited to extend invitations to new members whose influential work and interests could positively impact the Council’s future projects. These new members included Bruce Fuller of UC Berkeley, Mariana Diaz-Wionczek of Nickelodeon, Kris Gutierrez of University of Colorado, Boulder, Rick Fry of Pew Hispanic Center, and Eugene Garcia of Arizona State University.  New council members had the opportunity to share relevant research such as current demographic reports of Hispanic-Latino children, the developmental implications of dual-language learning, and incorporating Pan-Latino identity into media products to promote the inclusion of diverse groups within the Hispanic-Latino population.

Existing Aprendiendo Juntos Council members presented progress made on projects conceived at last year’s convening.  Ellen Wartella of Northwestern University and June Lee of Sesame Workshop both shared survey data that examine technology and educational media use in Hispanic-Latino families. Vikki Katz of Rutgers University presented findings from her work with Mexican immigrant families in Chula Vista, CA who took part in Connect2Compete, a program that provides affordable Internet connection to families who qualify for the National School Lunch Program.  Amber Levinson of Stanford University discussed findings from her dissertation study, “Tapping In,” which examines joint media engagement and learning in Spanish-speaking homes, especially around the introduction of a new technology device (i.e, iPad).

Council members found it encouraging and motivational to see such rapid progress on these studies since the last meeting, and were eager to design additional studies and initiatives to enhance Aprendiendo Juntos work.  Based on discussions from this convening, council members committed to making research more accessible to parents and educators, refining research methods to accommodate sub-cultural variations, and translating research into usable information for content producers.

The 2014 convening was extremely successful in shaping the Aprendiendo Jutnos Council’s goals, moving its work forward, and also in establishing key considerations that are important for anyone conducting research with and designing media-based experiences for Hispanic-Latino families:

1. How can we better design research and content to consider the extremely diverse populations and cultures within the broader “Hispanic-Latino” category?
2. Emphasizing strengths and advantages: In much of the literature on topics surrounding Hispanic-Latino families, issues are often approached in a way that may unintentionally emphasize perceived disadvantages. However, Hispanic-Latino families and culture bring several advantages to the table that must be celebrated and leveraged, especially in terms of family connection and the high value placed on learning.
3. What is educational? Across council member presentations, it seemed that Hispanic-Latino families’ definition of “educational media” was fairly flexible. What kinds of media and technology “qualify” as educational? Is this definition shaped by those designing it, or those who interact with and consume it? How can we make the idea of “educational media” more seamless between designers and users?
4. What are the policy implications of the work of the Aprendiendo Juntos Council and others who are interested in similar topics? How can we better inform policy makers?

Aprendiendo Juntos Council members are actively working together to develop field studies, methods, and task forces to address the above considerations.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Lori Takeuchi and Briana Pressey had the wonderful opportunity to be on a panel at the American Education Research Association 2014 (AERA 2014) annual conference in Philadelphia, PA. This panel was titled, “Learning With Technology: Different Perspectives From Low-Income Families” and held under the Special Interest Group – Advanced Technologies for Learning.

Lori and Briana began the panel with their talk, “The Impacts of Technology on Family Life: Engaging With Media Together, Apart, and On the Move.” In their talk, they describe how coviewing educational television in the past was a way in which children could learn through social interaction. However, as media and technology is shifting, along with family structures, a new definition of co-viewing needs to be defined. At the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, we are interested in joint media engagement (JME), a new form of co-viewing digital media. Unlike coviewing television, which may be restricted to particular schedules and spaces (e.g., living room), JME can occur anywhere and anytime. To highlight JME and learning, Lori and Briana focused on two research studies.

First, with the national survey of parents, Lori and Briana asked the questions: To what extent is JME occurring in families with young children across the U.S.? Who is using media together? Here, they highlighted our work at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center on Learning At Home, a national survey of over 1,500 families (with an oversample of Black and Hispanic-Latino heritage families) and their learning and media usage.

Slide from AERA presentation on joint media engagement. View the presentation on SlideShare.

Second, Briana and Lori examined specific case studies and asked the following questions: How might particular family characteristics and circumstances shape how parents and children engage around media? The in-depth qualitative case studies complement the quantitative survey data. In this portion of the talk, they provided examples of case studies of families with children (ages 6 – 9) from a local community center and their views of technology, digital media, and learning. Here, they highlighted findings such as children’s desire to connect with parents and siblings, which challenge the idea that new media devices isolate children.

In other aspects of the panel, Katherine Headrick Taylor, Ph.D. from Northwestern University presented her work (along with Reed Stevens, Ph.D. from Northwestern University) on the impacts of technology on family life. She asked the questions, “How has the ubiquity of learning arrangements influence technology usages in families?” and “How can we understand family practices that have become mobile?” Through her examination of eight families in the greater Chicago area, she found that parents often are the ones that introduce their kids to the technology and that common family practices can be updated with new technologies. For example, parenting practices, such as checking in on children’s progress in school, can be online now through emails and other forms of communication. The generational divide between parents and children may be overstated. Parents and children are often co-constructing updated family practices the leverage mobile technologies.

Researcher Betsy DiSalvo, Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology (along with Parisa Khanipour, Maia Jacobs, and Michaelanne Dye of Georgia Institute of Technology) presented their work on how parents in in economically depressed communities access learning resources. Here, Betsy presented work on how lower socio-economic status parents search of educational technologies. She found in the work that parents often want to search for education technologies for their children, but that many factors can influence how parents access technologies, such as fear of cyber-attacks and security, the difficulties of using public computers with restricted hours, and reliance on children for technical support.

Finally, Ricarose Roque, a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab explored how workshops for parents with lower-technical backgrounds could be useful in supporting child-parent collaborations in computer programming and making experiences. She found that as parents and children went through these workshops, they expressed changing perceptions on how they see themselves (from technical novice to technical proficient), each other (e.g., parents can learn new technical skills), the technical tools they were using (e.g., being confident in using the tools), and the learning environment (e.g., seeing other parents and learning together). The challenge in Ricarose’s work is to determine how to sustain engagement between and beyond the workshop sessions and work with families with less flexibility and interest.

All four presentations in this session expose the complexity that is underneath families, income, children, and technology usage. Overall, my takeaway as an audience member is that each of these talks on the panel focuses on how parents and children use technology to co-learn together. These days, it’s not about children learning from technology and their parents. In contrast, it’s also not about “digital native” children teaching older clueless adults on how to use technologies. Instead, the interactions are occurring in the middle; both parents and children are co-teaching and co-learning from each other. Technology and learning becomes a negotiation of usage; what are the needs of the adults and children in learning? It’s also about learning from the community. In these talks, there is an emphasis that parents seek information from other parents on digital technology usage. It’s important to understand how parents get their information, who and what resources do they trust, and what information is being used.

Slides from the presentation are below:

Janice Tran,  high school winner of the 2013 STEM Challenge Best Game Design Document

A designer in many senses of the world, Janice Tran is the high school winner of the 2013 STEM Challenge Best Game Design Document.

Although she was a high school senior when she won, Janice is now a freshman in college where she is studying graphic design.  She has been designing since she was young and hopes to harness this creative talent into a career in concept art design, either on a national or international level.  And, like all of our winners, she loves to play games.

Janice’s passion for video games was developed through extensive gameplay with her family. Her favorite game, Super Smash Brothers Melee, involves “the many different characters I’ve been growing up with since my childhood.” This experience reminds her of the fun her family has when they play games together. Once a week, she plays a board game with her family and often they take turns using the family’s XBOX 360

She and her family spend a lot of time together outside of “game time.” As she describes, “my family is amazing and we love to sit down and eat dinner together to talk about our day.” The youngest of three, Janice loves to go fishing with her older sister and together they volunteer at marathons once a month and often run them as well.

It is this passion for healthy living that helped her create Little Green Planet, her winning entry and the first game she ever designed. In Little Green Planet, the player is a Paperboy/Girl and in a series of unfortunate events, responsible for saving the world from Pollutio. He is determined to stop the protagonist from “greening” the earth, and it is up to the player to learn how to use alternative and clean solutions. With the help of friends, the Paperboy/Girl works to create a sustainable robot to save the planet.

Janice’s design included rich hand-drawn images that evoked the game’s desired artistic style.

Janice spent a year finalizing her game’s storyline and the general structure. During this lengthy process her favorite part was designing the characters. “I loved making sure their personality could be seen through the design.”  She found the most challenging part was “coming up with the mechanics and storyline for the game.” While she may have initially found the mechanics difficult to conceptualize, they eventually came together and presented an inspiring and artistic vision that we know has the potential to delight audiences.

Janice managed to combine her passions for design, experience playing with her family, and love of the environment into her game. She excelled by focusing on what she loves and has advice to future competitors based on this experience. “I would tell others to listen to their gut and use their creativity in order to get their ideas through.”

Her own gut has led her far, but Janice also had wonderful teachers and mentors that supported her and offered useful critiques. Knowing that oftentimes friends and observers comment on one’s work, she hopes that others can learn from their peers. “Don’t let others put you down, but when you get criticism on the game itself, make sure to take it into consideration.” Friends’ comments can be particularly helpful because “you know your game is good, when people in the target audience range group become interested in the idea of the game.”

Her final words of advice are for all students: “Creativity is important–don’t let anyone block it.” No one blocked Janice’s, and it has helped her gain the confidence to try new endeavors. She hopes that by following their heart, everyone can make something that resonates with them.

At LEGup (the London Educational Games meet up) we recently hosted an event on gamification and its potential to improve educational outcomes in the classroom. Gamification is something of a hot potato at LEGup – many of our members dismiss it out of hand as nothing more than the “pointsification” of educational products in a desperate attempt to make them more engaging. Increasingly though, others are taking a more nuanced view of gamification, looking at it as a method or set of methods for employing the best entertainment game mechanics to not only increase engagement, but to improve outcomes, whether that be through better retention of information, more complete understanding of concepts or whole class involvement during activities.

At the LEGup Meetup in April 2014.

Our first speaker, Dr. Wayne Holmes from Zondle (who recently completed his Ph.D. in education from Oxford University) has a much more rigorous approach to creating good games-based learning (GBL) products than many other GBL startups can claim. Zondle uses a suite of different games as shells into which teachers can add their own questions. So far, over 100 million questions have been created in the system. Dr. Holmes uses his own research and the research of other academics such as Learning Scientist Sasha Barab and neuroscientist Dr. Paul Howard Jones to test and refine the game mechanics which make Zondle such a successful exam-revision tool for teachers and students around the world. Despite this rigorous underpinning though, Zondle has suffered from its association with gamification. According to Dr. Holmes, some critics dismiss it as a gimmick without having fully realized the research that has gone into it. Some audience members questioned the research and Dr. Holmes was at pains to point out that ‘not all research is good research’. He also highlighted that academics too often exist in silos, and that for educational research to take giant strides forward we need neuroscientists, teachers and psychologists in the same room. You can find out more about the research underpinning Zondle by watching Dr. Holmes’ talk here.

Jamie Brooker, from Kahoot! (a platform for sharing student and teacher-generated questions in the classroom and across devices) is another proponent of gamification in education. Kahoot! was borne out of research conducted at the Norwegian University of Technology and Science by Professor Alf Inge Wang. Jamie was keen to underline Wayne’s point that good research should underpin games-based learning products. Kahoot! is used in different ways in the classroom, for example to help with formative assessment and to reinforce understanding of concepts by repeating the same questions at intervals to check retention. Jamie showed us a video of a class using Kahoot! and the engagement level was high as students raced to answer a question and then see the class results appear on the IWB in real time. Teachers have also reported that using Kahoot! as a vehicle for testing removes a lot of the pressure students feel when they know they are being tested. The makers of Kahoot! have a very close releationship with the teachers who use their product, and Jamie stressed that a lot of the teachers they talk to are highly enthusiastic about gamifying their classroom, and use Kahoot! as a means to doing this. He feels that gamification in schools is not just about the students, but also the teachers, who actively enjoy creating and personalising their own content within the system. You can watch his talk here.

Our final speaker, Eiman Munro of Elementals, took us in a new direction. Her products are traditional card games which attempt to teach different aspects of the science curriculum (for example the elements of the periodic table). Her products take inspiration from well-known game mechanics, such as the concept of Top Trumps or the collectability of Pokemon cards, to increase student engagement. One mechanic she talked us through was “loop games”, commonly used during the plenary section of a class to summarize topics. Card sets contain pairs of questions and answers, randomly distributed around the class. Each student takes a turn to read out a question, and the rest of the class must pay close attention to see if their answer is the correct one. Other successful mechanics include using the rock/paper/scissors concept to teach the relationship between solids, liquids and gases. She has used her experiences testing her card games with children to revise and improve the mechanics of each game. For example, a particular game will focus on one aspect of the periodic table, rather than attempting to cover all of it, in recognition of the fact that it is much harder for students to memorize large data sets in one attempt. She introduced us to her product Elemons, a “living card game” as opposed to a “collectible card game”, which equates different elements from the periodic table with characters who display special powers. Eiman markets her games through toy and game fairs, rather than direct to schools, and doesn’t explicitly label them as “educational games” because she prefers a child-led approach where the child decides to learn, rather than having the game imposed on them. You can watch her talk here.

Kirsten Campbell-Howes is an edtech veteran who works as a consultant in the European startup space. She is currently working with a global telecoms company on a mobile-learning product in Africa and Latin America. She also co-runs the website edugameshub.com and the hugely popular London Educational Games Meetup Group, AKA #LEGup.

Twitter: @campbellhowes @edugameshub