Game-Based Learning

Our capstone project for this course was the development of an educational game that could be created as a digital game.  Our cohort is very small; only seven people, and so for this course, there were only two groups established.  I worked with two (ESL) teachers and a teacher whose primary experience is in the health industry, but who, herself speaks English as a second language. My major in my undergraduate degree was French as a second language, so we created a game with the primary goal of assisting language learners with acquiring basic vocabulary in a game-based environment.  The idea of creating a game sounded initially simple, but as we progressed through the process, we came to understand that games are much more complicated in their inner workings (rules, exceptions) than we initially thought.

Finally, we wrote a research paper as a group to summarize our learning in the course, both practical and research-based learning.

The images below are stock photos with our game photoshopped onto the screen to illustrate how we would envision it appearing in a digital environment.

My official reflection for this course:

EDER-679, digital game-based learning was, without question, the most interesting post-secondary course I have ever taken. There are multiple reasons for this. First of all, the overarching topic of the course is of great interest to me as I undertake the infusion of games into my computer technology courses, it is critical that I am knowledgeable in some of the research in this area and can thereby explain my choices to parents, other teachers and administrators. Secondly, I have engaged my own students in the process of inquiry-based learning for over a decade. However, the concept of inquiry-based learning was introduced to education after I had graduated from school, so this was my first experience as a student in an inquiry-based classroom, and I gained many insights from that experience.

The design of the course was innovative and intriguing. To design the digital game-based learning course as a game in and of itself is a brilliant concept. At times, and I will speak for my colleagues, we felt confused with the assigning of points, and the daily reporting of XP points, but I would attribute that to a number of things. Firstly, we were not a particularly young group. As I have mentioned, this was my first experience as a student in an inquiry-based classroom. The same was true for my colleagues, they were also reticent regarding the daily XP reporting. Within our cohort we didn’t have a person to use as our “go-to” person to clear this up for us when we felt uncertain. Ultimately my strategy became to attempt to do the reporting correctly, attend class and try to ascertain in what way I had erred in my daily reporting. It was for no lack of reading the course outline, nor trying to understand that I continued to feel hesitant. As we were an older group of students, I think we were all fairly heavily reliant on feedback and wanted to know where we were at in terms of our grade. We seemed needy, in my opinion, in this area; myself, of course, included. Perhaps a demonstration of the filling out of the XP points on the first day (or a screencast of someone doing this activity with an explanation of why the person chose each number) might be useful. I definitely would have viewed such a video repeatedly. We are a generation of learners who seem to require reassurance and feedback.

The act of remaining anonymous in the microblogging really posed an obstacle for me. Our cohort is small with just seven people, and I stood out as the one who has indulged in games, uses games in the classroom and has fairly strong opinions about screen time and its inherent value. I was committed to playing the game in terms of participating in the course, and as such very much wanted to stay behind my avatar, but found that this frequently silenced my commenting. I further, did not want to dominate the discussion board; it would have been easy for me to do this. I already felt that I was perhaps dominating the in-class discussion, and did not want to come across to my professor, or to my peers as some type of know-it-all. I am pursuing my M.Ed to learn; not to teach others, and I really wanted to participate as a student and play the game of microblogging as it was designed.

My favorite part of the course was the discussions that took place face-to-face. Our cohort came from such varied backgrounds in terms of both experience with gaming and opinions about digital games. I thoroughly enjoyed watching us all evolve our philosophies on the topic over the course of the two weeks. The researchers who were present in our class were absolutely fantastic in terms of asking very good, stimulating questions, and the discussions led by Dr. Kim were spirited, thoughtful, insightful and important. I think gamification is an exciting topic, and I found that all students were thoroughly engaged in the discussions, even those who had negligible experience with video games, or who perhaps entered the course with a tone of hostility toward gaming and its stereotype.

Undertaking the task of designing a video game with very limited knowledge as to what constitutes a good video game was challenging and thought-provoking. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of inquiry. It was enlightening to realize how much we understood with such a blatant lack of knowledge of what constitutes a good video game. There were, of course, gaping holes in our knowledge, and a vast amount of learning to be done. But it was, as a student, refreshing to approach learning through this method. To realize, as a learner that you actually do have some ability to conceptualize the material being taught is empowering, and in that sense, I found the course structure with the inquiry task to be very refreshing.

In my particular guild, I was the only one of the four of us with significant experience in both gaming, and in the use of technology. At times, the conversations within our guild could crowd into a frustrating place for me, in that there seemed to be gaps in their knowledge that to me were obvious, and the time constraints of the course itself did not lend to lengthy debates amongst us.  But, the members of my guild were all open-minded, flexible-thinking excellent people. We worked incredibly well as a team under immense time pressure. We were able to make fast decisions and carry forward with our planning, despite some of the gaps in understanding. Certainly, I am not implying that I knew a lot about games coming into this course; the scope of my learning was immense. Beyond my experience playing games on all types of platforms, I also brought the computer skill to the guild. The task of creating our image prototypes fell to me as I am fairly proficient in Photoshop and other imaging software. The creation of the maze in Adobe Illustrator, a program I am much less familiar with, also was my task. I must be clear, in no way were my other group members not pulling their weight; certainly they were. I just felt very fortunate to bring the experience with technology and gaming into this course that I did.

The actual gameplay we engaged in during the first hour of a number of the days was outstanding; both for me personally, but also watching my classmates engage and learn. It was incredible to have access to some of the games from thirty or more years ago; some being games that I played in my childhood that I have long ago forgotten. Additionally, it was eye-opening to play some of the newer games and discuss the stereotyping that was promoted just by the game itself. The experience of playing some of the games really enhanced our guild conversations and offered some enlightenment to all of us as we went through the process of designing our game.

At the end of the on-campus portion of our coursework, I was both proud of our game and simultaneously disappointed in it. I knew how much thought, effort, work and conversation had gone into its creation. I understood how much actual time and work goes into the creation of a real game; as well as the immense number of humans employed by major game designers. This knowledge lent itself to my having pride in the fact that we had come up with something that could actually masquerade as a real game. However, at the same time, I felt that our game was utterly simplistic and puerile. It seemed that no one would actually ask the two questions that Will Wheeler identified as being at the core of a good game: “Can I play?” and “Can I save it?”. Realistically, it was a simplistic maze with nothing more to it than a glorified rote learning goal. Any ideas that we had for something bigger, flashier and more fun gave way to both the tight timeline for the course, and the limited gaming experience of my guild members.

Our original idea involved a business concept, and I felt that it could have been evolved into more of a Sims or Sim City type gaming experience, but the lack of background knowledge within my group of games as a whole forced this type scenario to be abandoned for something that the whole group could conceptualize; not just one person. We had to begin making our decisions quickly, and so we pared the ideas down to the maze game that we presented on the final day of courses. What I do find interesting is that I believe that if we were to be given the task of designing a game from scratch today, we would embark on a much deeper, more sophisticated game because of the immense amount of learning that took place during our on-campus time. I think that what we learned through the readings, the discussions, and certainly the gameplay we engaged in would compel us to have a stronger narrative, a more significant victory state and an overall more meaningful game.

In a nutshell, I found this to be an excellent course, despite my own reticence and feelings of uncertainty with the XP points and the daily assessments. I suspect that may have had more to do with my expectations as a student than the setup of the course. As I look back across the whole of the course, I do feel that I understand how it was set up to be a gaming experience in and of itself, and I feel that it succeeded in achieving that goal. I would be eager to participate in research in the area of gamification going forward, and would happily open my classroom to any of the faculty who were involved in this course.