1. Playful Pedagogy
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Ph.D.
Rochester Institute of Technology
School of Interactive Games & Media • igm.rit.edu
MAGIC Center • magic.rit.edu
slides online by tomorrow! slideshare.net/mamamusings
20. ―We are beginning to
see ourselves not just
from the inside, as an
actor doing something
on a daily basis, but
from the outside—
understanding what we
look like to the world
around us and
developing a kind of
hybrid identity.‖
– Aram Simmreich
22. Project Goals
• Provide students with a clearer sense of their
accomplishments in various areas (academic, social, and
creative) of their college experience, and provide them with
tools to reflect on their range and balance of activities.
• Increase students‘ awareness of activities and opportunities
outside of their academic coursework, from wellness to
collaboration to knowledge of the campus and city, and inspire
them to sample a range of experiences.
• Enable students to maintain and share a record of their
activities.
• Provide students with a sense of fantasy, whimsy and playful
abstraction in dealing with the stress and growth associated
with the transformational nature of undergraduate education.
27. ―My point is that
the ‗fun‘, the
pleasure of these
elements does
not come from
some extrinsic
reward value of
those elements,
but chiefly from
the experience of
competence they
give rise to.‖
Sebastian Deterding
28. What behaviors did we want to
reward and encourage?
What feelings of competence
could we engender?
What did we want our students to
remember and reflect on?
An attempt to use what we know about games to make learning more engaging and playful (photo of students having fun)An ongoing and iterative experiment ((scientist with clipboard, maybe?)
Inside the classroom
The idea for this came from a conversation one of our professors was having with some students in the spring of 2010, in which the students said “we should get achievements for being awesome.” She took that idea to our chair, who took it to Microsoft Research, who said “here’s some seed money—think this through, then come back and tell us more.”
We wanted to make the implicit map more explicit. What are the mileposts and markers along the way? How do they know they’re on the right track? How can we visualize their progress towards a goal?A personal narrative emerges…what does the narrative look like? How is lore disclosed?
The intention was less about pushing them to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do, and more about recognizing what successful students do, helping new students to discover those activities, and allowing all students to remember and reflect on their accomplishments.
What we wanted to emulate from FourSquare was not just the points and the leaderboards, but the aggregation of information about enjoyable activities, both for sharing and for personal recall.
When Andy first pitched this to MSR, he made a point of saying “GREAT DANGER HERE”…and he was right. The reason you don’t see this achievement approach everywhere in education is that it’s really hard to do well!
By adding external tangible rewards, we can actually do damage to our students’ intrinsic motivations. The focus needs to be on “now…that” rewards, rather than “if…then” rewards.
For this to be successful, it hadto be voluntary, fun, and engaging. Students had to vest in it as creators, not just consumers. This is the key takeaway from Deci & Ryan’s SDT work. We know this because we asked them
http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/a-quick-buck-by-copy-and-paste/http://gamification-research.org/2011/09/gamification-by-design-response-to-oreilly/So….what feelings of competence did we want to focus on?
Big questions that guided our content development.
This was the model that emerged for us—the tension between the athenaeum and the mechanics institute, as well as the tension between individual and collaborative competencies. Bloom’s taxonomy informs the rings, but the important part is not just expansion but BALANCE.
We got some things right…but we got a lot of things wrong, too.
Four kinds of achievements:Collectible cardsUser-submitted content (photos, URLs)System-assigned based on external criteriaCheckins at locations or events (unable to implement properly)