Gamers vs. Haters

Image credit:  http://www.seascouts.org.au/wp/2nd-abbotsford-cub-blog/

Gamification of school... awarding badges to boost motivation... capturing the gamer spirit in the classroom.  OK, where to begin with this one?  

Image credit:  http://www.gaming.psu.edu/gamification/digital-badges/

Let me just start with this... I am not a gamer.  I am more of a hater.  So for this week's topic, gamification of the classroom, I am officially very biased and I know it.  I suppose I come off as a grumpy old man to my students, but video games are one of the favorite subjects for classroom rants whenever I'm feeling a little riled up.  (Some of my other regular rant topics include smartphones, pseudoscience, water bottle flipping, and Kanye West.)  But when it comes to video games, I just don't get it.  I don't see the value.  I see how it's fun.  I see how it's addicting.  But overall, I don't see it as a good thing.  Why escaping into another world through reading a great book seems more wholesome, I don't know and can't really explain.  I guess I always just think of reading (or even watching a movie) as a way to expand your mind and vicariously experience the world through other people's perspectives.  And no matter what, I don't know if I'll ever be able to see that benefit as something that could come from gaming.

This year's hot game was of course Fortnite.  I haven't played it.  I haven't watched anyone else play it.  I don't know much about it except for the fact that you build stuff and kill people.  For a shooter game, it's particularly non-violent (by which I mean more cartoonish violence with no blood) and there are all sorts of goofy trendy dances that avatars perform, which have taken on a life of their own with people mimicking them in real life and all over social media and YouTube:

  
Sure, it's fun.  It's a popular fad.  It's part of 2018 pop culture.  Winning a battle in Fortnite certainly takes strategy and practice.  It could be seen as kind of an "accomplishment" but only in the context of the game.  Just like landing the perfect water bottle flip, the skills on display through most popular gaming are not the kind of skills that translate into something useful for anything in life.  Maybe there's some research somewhere that says otherwise, but I haven't come across it yet.  It would be one thing if gaming weren't consuming hours upon hours of peoples' lives, time that necessarily is taking away from time reading a book, eating dinner, exercising, playing outside, drawing, doing homework, talking with your family, etc.  On this Fortnite subreddit, some players discuss how many hours they play per day.  A few play 5 or 6 hours per day, and a one claims to play (this one game) for over 10 hours per day!  Who knows how accurate a picture we can get from just a few online comments, but based on what I've heard from my students, it would not surprise me in the slightest if some of them regularly spent over 5 hours per day playing Fortnite.  Not to mention, lots of players are racking up hundreds of dollars in bills playing this "free" game, by purchasing all sorts of add-ons.  I could go on and on about various games (don't get me started on Minecraft).  They all just seem like flashy ways to waste hours of your life, while giving you the illusion that you're really accomplishing something worthwhile.  (I told you I was biased.)  Nowhere is this more evident than on Twitch, a streaming site dedicated to watching other gamers play.  I repeat:  You sit an stare at a screen watching someone else you don't know play video games.  I know I'm an outsider and just don't get it, but seriously, am I missing something?  How is this a thing?  I just can't imagine a more pointless activity in life.   

So call me old-fashioned, but this phenomenon freaks me out a little.  Another thing that freaks me out: At the pool where my own three kids take swim lessons, there is a large room with a wall of windows looking towards the pool so parents can watch their children as they swim with the instructor.  At any given moment, I'd say easily 75% of the parents are staring at their phones, and a fair percentage of these are playing mindless games.  I recently heard about a public pool that made their wifi password "putdownyourphoneandwatchyourkidswim".  I don't know if it's true or not, but if not, it's a pretty funny story.

So gaming is all around us, and I'm not sure what to make of this notion of "gamification".  I can understand the appeal of earning badges.  In fact, I have been taking my own kids to our local public library each week this summer to participate in their QUEST program for which each child completes a fun task or craft and earns a real physical badge.  My two older boys are collecting them and keeping them on keychains.  It's pretty cool, plus it gives me an excuse to get the heck out of the house!  

But I'm very skeptical about using this type of motivation in the classroom, especially at the secondary level.  To me, it screams FAD.  I have noticed that a lot of the blog posts and resources I've found regarding the use of badges are dated from at least a couple years ago, which makes me wonder if the idea is kind of on its way out already.  One resource that I found, called ClassBadges, seemed like a pretty promising system for creating, awarding, and managing digital badges.  It is still operational, but is no longer being updated and their blog hasn't been updated since 2014.  

After doing some more poking around, I did find a few proponents, including a high school social studies teacher who reported having some recent success with gamifying her American government class.  When given the option, her students voted to earn actual physical badges (even ones just printed on card stock), which the teacher (and I) found pretty surprising.  I just picture my own 9th graders who are just soooooo above it all.  Everything is so "stuuuuuupid".  In fact, a wide variety of things are apparently the "stupidest thing I've ever heard", according to some of my most vociferous whiners.  (I tell them that everything can't be the stupidest; the word implies the singular pinnacle of stupidity.  One girl replied that it makes perfect sense to say lots of things are the stupidest if things just keep getting stupider all the time.)  Of course, I know that this is partially just a front, and every once in a while, I'll catch them geeking out on science.  (I always try to point it out to them.)

One blog that I read discussed a few ideas about gamification that I did like.  Self-admitted gamer and teacher Keith Sorensen compares badge-worthy educational tasks to gaming missions and points out that not all tasks necessarily have to be super meaningful for learning.  He recommends that to keep kids motivated, you should award badges for three different categories of tasks:  specific, extraordinary, and random.  The first two are the obvious ones I would have thought of:  tasks that require you to master a specific concept, or tasks that challenge you to push further and think outside the box.  But the third category is pretty interesting.  Sorensen recommends that some badges should be awarded for things that are fun, pointless, and random--things that kids would never have thought of and are not necessarily tied to learning.  Thinking of badges in this way helps me get a slightly better grasp as to why this form of motivation might just have some value.  

That said, I also read a 2016 blog post from Michelle Baldwin, a Colorado elementary teacher, who said that badges actually got in the way of her students' intrinsic love of reading.  Some students got emotionally upset if they weren't able to earn all the same badges their friends did.  So I can see it both ways.  

The only personal experience I have with badges for learning was via Canvas, my school district's recently adopted Learning Management System (LMS), which will be piloted in 7th and 8th grade next year (they're also going 1:1 with laptops).  At the end of this past school year, teachers had seven (yes, SEVEN) snow days to make up after students were already done.  The administration understandably didn't want to come up with seven full days of staff development, so for the last two days, they created a couple modules through Canvas, which teachers could complete for trade-in credit so we wouldn't have to actually show up those two days.  After completing each module, I earned a digital badge demonstrating that I had completed the required task.  Of course, it was the very end of the school year and I was stressed about a million things at that point so that may have played a part, but for what it's worth I can unequivocally say that earning the badges did not increase my motivation.  

I could be wrong but I can see the same going for many students who just want to figure out what the minimum effort they need to put in to earn their badge and then rush through the task.  They might see it as a cheesy ploy from out-of-touch adults trying to relate to the younger generation but totally missing the mark.  I suppose I'll get the chance to play around with gamification when I begin using Canvas with my students a year from now, as it has an integrated badge award system.  Maybe I'll eat my words and they'll be all about it, but I guess we'll just have to see.  

One final thought:  I ran across a few sites that discussed gamification as a way to increase motivation in the workplace.  Asha Pandey at the eLearningIndustry blog offers some ways that gamification is "reshaping corporate training" by making it competitive and fun.  I'm starting to feel like such a naysayer, but wow, I find this really hard to believe.  The whole idea just seems like such a manufactured attempt to tap into human psychology with a lot of wishful thinking.  I really can't imagine this fad lasting for the long haul.  But again, I could be wrong!


References:

Baldwin, Michelle.  (2016, May 12).  "We don't need badges for reading."  Avenue for Learning.  Retrieved July 25, 2018 from http://avenue4learning.com/2016/05/12/we-dont-need-badges-for-reading/

"My gamification experience."  (2016, May 12).  Teaching With Technology.  Retrieved July 25, 2018 from http://usingeducationaltechnology.com/mission-american-government-gamification-experience/

Pandey, Asha.  (2017, Oct. 24).  "5 killer examples on how gamification in the workplace is reshaping corporate training."  eLearningIndustry.  Retrieved July 25, 2018 from https://elearningindustry.com/gamification-in-the-workplace-reshaping-corporate-training-5-killer-examples

Sorensen, Keith.  (2013, Apr. 24).  "We need more stinkin' badges."  The Five Points of Technology and Education.  Retrieved July 25, 2018 from http://keithosorensen.blogspot.com/2013/04/badges.html