Level Up Your Classroom: The Quest to Gamify Your Lessons and Engage Your Students

The Quest to Gamify Your Lessons and Engage Your Students

Jonathan Cassie

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781416622055
• eBook ISBN: 9781416623038
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this lively and practical book, seasoned educator Jonathan Cassie shines a spotlight on gamification, an instructional approach that's revolutionizing K–12 education. Games are well known for their ability to inspire persistence. The best ones feature meaningful choices that have lasting consequences, reward experimentation, provide a like-minded community of players, and gently punish failure and encourage risk-taking behavior. Players feel challenged, but not overwhelmed.

A gamified lesson bears these same hallmarks. It is explicitly gamelike in its design and fosters perseverance, creativity, and resilience. Students build knowledge through experimentation and then apply what they've learned to fuel further exploration at higher levels of understanding. In this book, Cassie covers

• What happens to student learning when it is gamified.
• Why you might want to gamify instruction for your students.
• The process for gamifying both your classroom and your lessons.

If you want to see your students engaged, motivated, and excited about learning, join Jonathan Cassie on a journey that will add a powerful new set of ideas and practices to your teaching toolkit. The gamified classroom—an exciting new frontier of 21st century learning—awaits you and your students. Will you answer the call?

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Level 1

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Four Guides for One Hero

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You awake to a nearly blinding blast of light from the corridor outside your classroom. Startled, you look at the clock. 8:45 p.m.? Your red marking pencil is behind your ear. When did you put it there? Had you fallen asleep? You're the sort of teacher who never leaves your classroom when that final bell rings for the day. You've got too much to do. Your kids need your best effort, and that's what the time after school is for. But 8:45 is quite late, even for you. Papers are scattered across your desk. Your laptop screen is up, but dark. Your tablet rests in its stand, awaiting your instructions. Your smartphone has a host of text messages, most of them along the lines of "When are you coming home?" You shake the sleep from your tired mind … and your mind turns to that flash of light. What was that about?

Being the intrepid teacher you are, you set out to investigate.

You cross your classroom, straightening the pencils on Jane's desk for the morning and putting Anwar's books inside his desk. (One day, he'll come to value organization, you're sure of it!) You hesitate, but only for a fleeting moment, before you open the door. Its hinges creak a bit as it opens. (You must remember to get some WD-40 when you go to the store…that creak is driving you and the kids crazy.) You step out into the hallway and look right. Nothing. You look left, and backlit from a source you can't discern, four figures stand in the hallway.

"Hello?" you hear yourself ask as you wonder who among your colleagues has decided to arrange such an elaborate prank.

"Hero," says one of the figures, her voice strong. She steps forward, her presence commanding. Her hand grips a staff at least two feet taller than her graceful six-foot height. Her face is radiant and youthful. Her smile is confident; her stance unmistakable in its authority. She is robed in purple silk. You're certain you've never seen her before.

"I am Lady Agon," she says. "My colleagues and I are to be your guides on a journey that will transform you."

"If you dare to risk taking it," comes a young voice—male but still with a hint of youthful enthusiasm. He somersaults in front of Lady Agon and tosses five dice in your direction. They clatter on the hard tile floor. You look at them. Five fours. You can't help yourself. "Yahtzee!" you say.

"The luck of the dice, hero," the young man says. A mustache graces his upper lip, and his smile is rakish. He can't be more than five feet tall and he's wearing some sort of, well, leather armor? He looks a bit like a character from one of those fantasy movies your students like.

He then announces, "You may call me Alea, Prince of Fortune."

"The prince is prone to drama," Lady Agon says. "But that's part of his charm."

Dumbfounded, you have nothing to say.

"Let me introduce my other two companions, equally fitting guides as you embark on this journey," she says, gesturing to two figures whom you can't quite make out yet. The first comes into your sight. Taller than Lady Agon, he (she? you can't really tell) is dressed in loose-fitting white clothing and wears a mask you instantly recognize. It's the comedy mask from the Greek theater. Or wait a minute. Is it the tragedy mask? No, it's comedy. You can't be sure—it seems to morph back and forth.

"Our friend is called The Mimic," Prince Alea says. "We don't know much else, but The Mimic represents the spirit of mimicry and role-playing."

As the last of the four steps forth, you are shocked and momentarily disoriented. Standing as tall as Lady Agon, this figure looks like a sharply dressed business executive but has the head of a fierce tiger. You step back, but as you do, the tiger-headed figure vanishes and reappears a split second later right behind you. You turn in shock to see the tiger's face dissolve in a swirling vortex of light and transform into a panda's.

"Surprised yet?" the now panda-headed figure says. "If not, you will be." He extends a human hand and winks. "My friends call me Ilinx." He leans in and whispers in your ear. "I'm not what's expected."

"You've been at your work a long time, educator of children," Lady Agon says. "And throughout the land, you have the respect of young and old."

You acknowledge her words, cocking your head slightly, attempting to discern at last what this is all about.

"New adventures await you and your students. Surely you're interested in learning more."

"I am," you say.

Lady Agon smiles knowingly. Prince Alea leaps up from his crouch with a whoop. The Mimic now displays the fiery red mask of a luchador. And Ilinx has taken on the form of a sand-colored domestic house cat, purring and coiling in delight at your feet.

"Let's begin," Lady Agon says.

Welcome to the Journey

By picking up this book, you've begun a journey that will add a powerful new set of ideas and practices to your teaching toolkit. Remember, you're a teacher of kids first and content second. It doesn't matter if you teach kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, or university; you want to find new methods and approaches to stimulate your students. In short, you are the hero of this story. And as the hero of this story, you're Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter, and all the other great heroes integrated together. You've picked up this book, so you've committed yourself to beginning your heroic journey. You're ready to leave the Shire or the Dursley's. You're ready to begin.

Maybe you're like me. You've always enjoyed playing games but only recently begun to think about games more broadly—not only as a player and creator but also as a theorist and an educator. By contrast, maybe you're totally new to this phenomenon of gamification and the use of games in the classroom. Either way, I'm sure you have a lot of questions.

What are games really? What's actually going on in a player's mind when he or she engages with a game? How does gameplay shape the way the player thinks? Do different kinds of games have different effects? Do they shape a player's thinking differently, depending on the kind of game?

Most important, though: What is a gamified classroom? In short, it's a classroom in which some, many, or all of the elements of curriculum and instruction correspond to and bear the hallmarks of various game mechanics. Games are well known for their ability to inspire persistence in players. Anyone who has spent time with kids who play games will know that they find game playing absorbing and engaging. How do games get that level of commitment from their players? The best ones give players meaningful choices that have lasting consequences, reward experimentation (trial-and-error), provide a like-minded community of players, gently punish failure, and encourage risk-taking behavior. And they do all of this in a way that makes the player feel challenged—not overwhelmed.

A gamified lesson does all of these things too. It is explicitly gamelike in its design. In this book, you will learn the answers to the following questions:

• What happens to student learning when it is gamified?
• Why would I want to gamify instruction for my students?
• How do I do this?

In Section 1, Upon a Solid Foundation, I introduce the reasons why you should incorporate gamified methods into your teaching practice. I share some practical strategies and language for discussing gamified instruction with various constituencies in schools. I discuss what games are (and what they're not) because even though this might seem simple, it isn't, and I will help you understand that these basics are essential to getting everything else right. I contrast game-based learning with gamified instruction—two ideas that seem to be the same thing but are in fact quite different. Finally, I conclude with a broad overview of a number of teaching and learning theories that inform the content explored in Section 2.

In Section 2, Defeating the Boss, I share examples of dozens of games, specific game mechanics, and techniques of gamification. By focusing on tabletop games (i.e., board games), role-playing games (RPGs), and video games, my intention is to share a wide range of game engines and magic circles (you'll see what these mean soon enough) that you can use to gamify your instruction and your students' learning.

This is your story. You're the hero, leaving the safety of home and setting out for one of the new frontiers of 21st century learning—the gamified classroom. Good luck!

ILINX INSTRUCTS: VIDEO GAMES

Surprise! Let's clear up a likely misconception before we dive into the content of the book. This book isn't about video games. Why not? Because gamification isn't about video games. Gamification is about using the mechanics of all sorts of games (including, but not limited to, video games) to create new approaches to learning. Are video games, on balance, detrimental to society? I don't think so, but that idea is beyond the scope of this book. Are video games actually beneficial to society? Well, I happen to think so, but it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this book. What does matter is this: This book isn't about playing video games. More important than the games themselves (and their role in curriculum and learning) is the gamification that comes from understanding how video games work, motivate, and instill confidence. That's what really matters.

Level 1 Boss Battle

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Lady Agon asks: What teaching method do you like to employ the most because you like it (not necessarily because it benefits the kids)? What parts of this method encourage persistence in your students?

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Prince Alea asks: How much control have you ever given to your students to take control of their own learning? What happened when you did this?

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The Mimic asks: All teachers have an assortment of personas they use throughout the day. Which one of yours best fits a gamified classroom?

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Ilinx asks: What, secretly, excites you most about gamifying your classroom? What worries you the most?

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Level 2

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The Game Is On, Hero!

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You step out through your school's front doors, and on the landing just outside is a huge carpet you don't remember ever having seen before. Ilinx, now dressed like a 1920s-era stunt pilot (with big goggles to boot), snaps his fingers and up snaps the carpet!

"You didn't think we were going to take a yellow bus, did you?" Prince Alea says with a wicked smirk. "Hop on." You do, as do your four guides.

"Where are we going?" you ask.

"To face your first challenge," Lady Agon says. "You've bested many challenges in your career, hero." You sit on the flying carpet as it lifts off and flies away at incredible speed!

"Some of the challenges you've already defeated in your career would have defeated lesser heroes," Prince Alea adds. He begins to guide the carpet down to the surface. Beneat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Author’s Note & Acknowledgments
• Level 1. Four Guides for One Hero
• Section I. Upon a Solid Foundation
• Section II. Defeating the Boss
• References
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright