I’m not a game designer. But, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call me a designer. Nor would it be a stretch to call teachers designers. They design experiences for others to have in order to learn.
Teachers are Designers
The staid way to describe this work is lesson planning. Planning isn’t a word I particularly like, it’s weaker. We can plan a dinner. A protein, veggie, and maybe a dessert? But really good learning experiences are richer than that. Maybe the better food analogy is a gourmet meal compared to a weeknight dinner. It takes care to consider the aesthetics, the tablescape, the multi-step recipes.
Schell tells us that game experiences have four elements:
- Mechanics,
- Story,
- Aesthetics, and
- Technology.
I’ll go further by suggesting my own definitions for these. Mechanics are the things we do as players, following the rules. Rolling dice, picking up cards, moving our pawn along on the game board. But why would anyone pretend they were doing anything in a game? That’s where the story comes into play. The story is how you understand your role in the game, whether you’re a wizard, a knight, or the mayor of a city. The aesthetics of a game support this story. It’s the reason there’s images of candy in the board game Candyland. If we’re playing SimCity, we expect to see buildings and roads and rivers and all of the things that remind of us living in a city. Finally, technology describes tools we’ll use to play the game. A bat and ball, a ball and pins, or in the case of Monopoly, the cards, pawns, and the like, including the board upon which we’ll move those pieces.
While weaving the psychology of games into learning as a kind of gamification is one thing, I bring up these game elements because I’m not sure we’re used to, as instructional designers, of thinking about the elements that will contribute toward the feeling of playing a game.
Individually? I’ve seen these come alive. I remember walking into a classroom where glowing paint had been applied in the room and blacklights used to transform the aesthetics of the room for a unique activity. It’s enough that I remember the aesthetics and forget the activity! But my point is, teachers, and maybe especially elementary teachers? They’re old hats at transforming their classrooms to encourage wonderment and learning that is designed to engage their students.
Like the décor on a board game, or the art in a video game? Sure.
How many project-based learning activities start with situations—stories? You have been put in charge… and your task is to design a solution… These serve to bring a real-world experience to students within the tidy confines of a school classroom.
The mechanics required in many classrooms, which require reading, reasoning, and writing things out, are somewhat banal to what can contribute to the procedures and activity in a real game. The key here may be to replicate, in some way, a real world situation (mining for gold, testing samples for genetic mutations), or they can be constructed to facilitate equitable experiences for every student on their team.
I remember watching one classroom teacher who led a lesson that required students to use Scrum—an agile software development technique—in their groupwork. They had been trained with the mechanics of together approaching a problem, deciding a course of action, breaking down into steps, and dividing the work, before checking in to assess their progress.
Games attract us because we’re motivated to play. We derive joy from games, satisfaction that’s nearly addictive. Why can’t learning embrace some of the motivational aspects of playing games?
Learning Requires Engagement
I plan to write more about gamification. But the reason I think it has a place in our toolkits as educators is because it helps us move learners toward becoming engaged in hard and challenging activities. In Prensky’s book Digital Game-Based Learning, which attempted to sell readers on the virtues of designing games that can teach, he provided a profound list of ideas about learning. I’d like to repeat a few here:
- You can’t learn unless you fail.
- Learning should be fun. Learning should be hard work.
- People many times learn just in time, only when there’s a need.
- People learn through feedback.
- People learn through reflection.
- People learn from stories and from parables.
- People learn by playing.
- People (can) learn through games.
- People learn when they are having… fun.
I don’t think every lesson, class, or experience needs to be a game when we consider designing high-quality instruction. However, we can learn a lot from studying what makes games good, what we can borrow, beg, and steal from the psychology that goes into designing a great game.
Author Jane McGonigal (2011) wrote:
“Hard fun is what happens when we experience positive stress, or eustress. From a physiological and a neurological standpoint, eustress is virtually identical to negative stress: we produce adrenaline, our reward circuitry is activated, and blood flow increases to the attention control centers of the brain. What’s fundamentally different is our frame of mind.”
— page 32.
Because, the best games, I’ve found, are difficult and challenging. And as humans, we’re motivated by appropriate challenges and the satisfaction when we overcome them. In a nutshell? How is that different from learning itself?