Gamification.nu

Levelling up

For some time now I’ve been trying to see how scaffolding can help to ‘level up’ students in a meaningful way. It is both being used in education and in game design to help someone reach a goal in steps that match and challenge someone’s skills. There’s many places to start thinking about this, from the ideas of Vygotski (ZPD) to Dreyfus & Dreyfus, from the ideas of Bloom to Bateson. What is the ladder or pyramid I want my students to ascend? How do I facilitate the kind of ‘flow’ (Csíkszentmihályi) where more skill and knowledge are needed after every step? What ultimately defines an expert?

I have recently discovered www.learningandteaching.info, a website that is entirely written and maintained by James Atherton. He wrote an elaborate post about expertise that not only makes more sense of the Dreyfus & Dreyfus model for me, but also defined the true expert as someone who treats daily practice like a game. Following Roger Caillois, I would call this gamelike approach by experts ‘ludus’ indeed, although I would argue that ‘paida’ could just as easily be typical (behaviour) for great experts. Think for instance of Richard Feynman that one day decided he would only start doing things for the fun of it at the University, which led directly to the work he received a Nobel prize for. Of course he was playing a ‘serious game’, but in a field that was that new (quantum mechanics), he had to also just ‘play around’ with it first.

My biggest discovery is definitely the idea of threshold concepts (TC). It trancends the issue of scaffolding and mastery by trying to figure out if students will actually learn anything worth learning at all in my classes. As far as I get it, a threshold concept is an insight (or belief) that offers a complete new way of looking at a subject and which obliterates any previous way of seeing. For instance, once you know how to read, you can not NOT read and from now on you ARE a reader. In a way I guess this is how I quit smoking successfully after three failed attempts: I first had to convince myself I was a non-smoker and then it was hard to think of myself as smoking again. So once you’re over this threshold, there’s no way back to the way you used to BE.

Think of a Threshold Concept as a portal into another dimension. The above screenshot I edited from Portal 2 is in fact not the same kind of portal (TC), as you can easily go back through that portal. Understanding the portal dimension itself in Portal IS actually a TC in my opinion. The first time I played Portal, I definitely had to first learn what kind of navigation a portal enabled. Troublesome knowledge for sure. Once I ‘got it’ I entered a new reality: ‘Now you’re thinking with portals!’

The thing is, it’s hard to pinpoint what a Threshold Concept exactly is and how it is different from simply learning a key concept for instance. It seems more of a revelation than something you can master, yet more often than not it takes just as much effort to finally have this revelation as it takes to master something. And there is no guarantee you will ‘get it’ (or ‘believe it’) in the end. So if a TC cannot be mastered in simple steps, can there be any form of scaffolding my lessons at all? That is what I’m struggling with.

Currently I am trying to define the TC in my lessons on Cross-media Communication, so I may then see how I can get my students over these thresholds. As TC are still very much a field that needs more exploration, I have taken the liberty to ignore the idea that TC cannot be learned in clear forward steps by students, simply because I need to give myself a chance to learn from making the right mistakes. That way I may learn exactly why it is so hard for students (and myself) to master a TC. I think I need to make mistakes, because it is in the spirit of a TC, where one has to go back and forth continuously to grasp something. And I’m still in my holidays, so there’s no harm in playing around with it a little bit.

So let’s presume some aspect of a TC can be mastered or scaffolded, what would it be? Are some TC more important than others? Can I make more threshold concepts follow each other up in a meaningful way? Can I make a series of ‘portals’ to guide my students through? 

So first here are the TC that I imagine exist in the field of Cross-media Communication. The way I ‘found’ them, is by simply trying to complete the following sentences:

• ‘Why can my students not see that …..’
• ‘It’s actually quite simple, it’s really about …..’
• ‘This one student suddenly got it when …..’
• ‘The first time I understood what this was really about, was when …..’

From this came the following attempts to define TC in cross-media:

• Media are extensions

Many students love to try out new media without understanding what they are about. Especially in advertising, students love to check out what’s hot in the media landscape and move onto the next big thing before they ever grasp the essence of the medium they just used. What helps to really start understanding and working with new media, is the notion that media are basically extensions of our body and mind (Mc Luhan). Your shoe is an extension of your foot. TV is an extension of your eyes. A flag is an extension of your country. A give-away pen is an extension of your company. 

I think every student should at least have read ‘The medium is the message’ once in their lifetime. It will make them see the world through new eyes. Once I had read it (as a student), something inside me ‘clicked’. Before I read the book, surely I had observed how a tool like a hammer can become part of you body. But that did not mean that I actually truly grasped the underlying principle. Yet once I got it, I suddenly could no longer observe the world around me without this notion. I think it is this notion that should kick-off my semester of Cross-media. How else will my students ever understand in which fundamental ways companies use media as extensions of their brand.

 Once you see media this way, you can really start to deeply understand the nature of the media you select.

• The art of communication is really the art of coding

What some students get particularly frustrated by is when the audience does not understand what they mean while they think they are clearly communicating directly (either verbally or in cross-media). They assume that if they themselves understand what they are trying to get across, then others will understand this message as well. It often does not matter how much I talk about differences in culture, language, perspective or context. They often still claim that it’s all just laziness on the part of the observers if they do not understand the message: ‘If they really care about what I have to say, they should make an effort to understand me’.

I found the best way to let them understand how silly that is, is by giving groups a coded message from outer space (I am from Nasa and just intercepted this message) and letting them crack the message without giving them any clue. Not only do they not understand it, soon enough they discover that everyone in the group ‘reads’ a set of very common symbols in a completely different way (the aliens communicate through a set of three random pictures from Google Images, thinking we earthlings will surely understand this). Even a set of two visual cliches like a heart and a ladder do not make any sense by themselves. It is how they are combined into a new image that allows them to make sense. The lesson being taught here is that communication is an indirect, two-step process of coding and decoding and that all we can do as professional advertisers is to code a message in such a way that the audience may really ‘get it’ when decoding the message.

Once you see communication as indirect and coding-decoding, you can no longer think your ideas or visuals will speak for themselves.

• Brands do not create brand meaning, people do

I forgot who wrote this and now I cannot find it back online (so it must be quoted wrong), but I love this notion. It’s about how we must understand that in Cross-media, we cannot really add value or meaning to something, we can only attribute it and hope that the audience will feel the same way. In the study of affordances, we can see that people may use your amazing give-away pencil not to write, but to scratch their back while they are typing on their laptop. The value the pencil has for its owner has nothing to do with the value the company wanted it to have. The user may even start to associate the logo of your lawyer firm with getting rid of itches. Which unintentionally may be quite spot-on about what you are about as a law firm, but that’s a different story.

 Once you see meaning and value this way, you can really start seeing your brand through he eyes of others.

I’m not sure if one, two or all three may really be pure threshold concepts, but they surely offer students a new way of looking at media applications. Most of it actually seems to be about learning to see your work through the eyes of others. 

Then I saw the brilliant talk on threshold concepts by Professor David Perkins and I sensed I had stumbled upon something useful for my scaffolding mission. Perkins distinguishes a shift from ‘object’ to ‘tool’ to ‘frame’ that make up the steps towards grasping a TC (which I assume is mostly about the frame). 

In my field, being cross-media, I would argue that seeing media as extensions would be the first TC or at least the first step towards the final TC. It somehow makes the step from objects (media) to tools (instruments). The second step, from tool to frame, has more to do with the ability to see your media as meaningless instruments, unless you can create a cross-media strategy with them that connects to the context or culture of your audience and can be decoded by them. And voila: TC accomplished! I can only hope it will be that simple.

That being said, I want to map out various activities (playful learning like the alien message example) that will get students to step over these ‘thresholds’. From physical and virtual media to communication tools to (new) strategic perspectives. And ultimately I would love for the students to develop new frameworks, new ways of looking at possible strategies, really improving or changing the game of cross-media advertising, so that they may breathe media by the time they are professional advertisers.

It is also exciting for me to see that Perkins has written a book (I just ordered it) on education in which he uses the analogy of learning to play baseball in ‘Little League’ first, to grasp the whole game (the basic rules), before one can become a probaseball  player. This seems to offer another way to imply scaffolding as well and makes me think of tutorial levels in games which I have written about before). As soon as I have the book in my mail and read it, I’m sure I’ll write a blogpost about this aspect. 

For a quite a few mornings in a row now, I get out of bed early, excited to read more about some aspect of learning I have not learned about and I somehow always end up on Atherton’s website. Not only because it offers such a nice and eclectic collection of theories and references, but also because I really like how he analyzes it, improves on it, discards ideas that he thinks do not work (James, thank you for pointing out the helpful book ‘Visible Learning’ by the way) and how he annotates his own texts, often with a typical sense of humour of a man struggling to create an optimal learning environment within rigid school systems.

P.s. : These are the three main sources that have triggered my thoughts on Threshold Concepts:

1) Threshold Concepts in the wild - Expanded version (Atherton, Hadfield and Meyers) - 2008 2) Threshold Concepts - Another angle (James Atherton) 3) Threshold Concepts - Moving concepts from objects to instruments to action (Professor David Perkins) 2011

Found this great tool to make these wordclouds and it is quite good to see that the word Student is more prominent on my blog than the word Teacher. Words like Commander and Squad make it look quite military though, which has to do with this one long post.

The other wordcloud (white on black background) is from the next page of posts and is less militaristic :-)

Gamified Education - Part One

About a month ago, I made a trip to Utrecht to talk with Karel Millenaar from Fourcelabs (in above picture with his personal Lego Toolkit that he uses to prototype games). FourceLabs designs playful experiences in the public domain. He also teaches at the Game Design and interaction department of the HKU in Utrecht.

We talked for four hours straight, getting down to the nitty gritty of the stuff that really matters. Even though Karel has a superior knowledge of games, we quickly found common ground. Sharing our experiences as teachers and our ambition to take games seriously was enough to go on for hours, if not days. I am very grateful for Karel’s willingness to share his ideas on games and education.

This article is based on my notes from that conversation, with additional reflection after digging deeper into various internet sources.

Safe Play

Rule number one in games is that you must be able to choose to play, to join a game, to join ‘the magic circle’. As Karel stated, a game should feel safe. It should be safe to join and safe to leave. So even though education usually seems more forced than free, creating a safe environment could help to overcome this issue. An important aspect of that is to first introduce a lesson by explaining what its added value is, giving students the opportunity to consciously choose to pursue it. If a teacher does not explain this first, chances are that students do not see the point and thus think of it as a mindless task.

An extreme example of forced play can be found in Chinese labour camps where inmates have to play World of Warcraft for twelve hours straight and are beaten when they do not play hard enough.

Roger Caillois (See picture above) defines this aspect of free choice as follows: ‘Play is free. Playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion.’

Karel’s point about explaining the value of something to a student actually comes pretty close to the following statement by Caillois: ‘The game is ruined by the nihilist who refuses to play because the game is meaningless. His arguments are irrefutable. The game has no other but an intrinsic meaning.’

A student that chooses a school or even a teacher does not automatically choose a school project. So in order to make play possible at project level, a project first of all needs to be meaningful to a student.

For instance, when a teacher wants to use the playful presentation format of a Pecha Kucha talk, and students do not know why, they will not be eager to do it. It is only after they are informed about its usefulness that will they accept the strict set of rules.

What helps a great deal is to do a try out first, to get used to the rules, without consequences. This gives the student a chance to get a feeling of safety. I personally do recall occasions where a friend, new to a card game, could only be persuaded to join only after agreeing to play a few trial rounds, with all cards open on the table. Not only does this make it possible to get a basic understanding of the rules, it also creates a safe game setting that leaves room for someone to opt out without destroying a ‘real’ game. This means that whoever decides that the trial run was interesting and valuable enough, can now choose to play according to the rules.

More ideas on tutorials can be found in my article ‘what I’ve learned from Black & White’ .

The teacher as a gamer

Talking about gamified education and its relationship to game design, Karel surprised me by observing that as a teacher I seemed to think more as a gamer than a game designer. Regarding my life and my teaching job as a game however, does not necessarily make me a game designer, nor does it mean that my students regard their studies as a game.

As explained before, education as a game means that a student can always choose not to join. For many students, education is deadly serious. So for a teacher like me to regard their education as a game could be called far from safe and as I discussed in ‘Gamification without being too loud about it’, calling education a game did not do me any good so far. We discussed this topic further and Karel explained some interesting ways of going about this, focusing on possibilities of the teacher as a gamer.

If a school project would be treated as a Role Playing Game (RPG), the teacher could be a dungeon master. As a dungeon master you stay outside of the game. A dungeon master is a time intensive role that aims to keep a game going. You could consider him a human game computer. This is something that I have tried out in my classes and I now understand why this did not work out as I hoped. When using this role, soon enough this exhausts the teacher, as he is the only one that keep the game interesting and motivating.

So Karel proposed that I regard a school project more along the lines of the game Battlefield. The teacher can then actually be part of the game. Battlefield 2, definitely uses RPG elements as well. For instance one can choose to be an engineer, a medic or a sniper. Yet the multiplayer aspect of the game allows players to organize into squads that come under the leadership of a single commander to promote teamwork. And it is this commander role that could prove interesting to me as a teacher.

Where the other units solely rely on First Person Shooter (FPS) perspective, the commander uses a Real Time Strategy (RTS) interface. It gives him an overview and additional logistical tools that the other players do not have. You could say it’s a limited form of God Mode. Still, the commander is always in contact with the other players, seeing the big picture and coaching the players.

Seeing as my motivation is more that of a gamer (being part of the game), instead of a game designer (staying outside of the game), this approach may suit me better.

A commander in Battlefield 2 may be an exclusive role in a team, it does not mean that the commander has to be played by the teacher though. In fact, in Battlefield any member of a team may apply for the position (priority is given to players of higher rank) and a commander may resign at any point, freeing the position for other members of their team. They may even be forced to resign by a successful ‘mutiny vote’ by the team (which by the way is declared useless by most players).

Also in Battlefield 2 there’s the role of Squad Leaders (FPS perspective). They assign their squad a variety of objectives (in a school project this could be field research, planning, production, etc.). Orders may also be given directly by the team’s commander. And squad leaders are also responsible in the team to issue requests from the squad to the commander.

I can imagine that this can lead to four basic phases in a year that borrow from these multiplayer elements in Battlefield 2, applied in the second Academic year:

1. Solo Roleplay

Learning the workflow of a game at an early stage is always first and foremost focused on building up confidence in your individual skills as a student. In the beginning of the year, when the teacher still outranks the students (in a new discipline), the teacher would be the commander, giving players various individual tasks, so they can try out various individual roles. A basic set of initial roles (for instance in advertising: a copywriter) may be given whereas there should also be space for students to explore and discover additional roles. Unlike games, in real life new roles are continually discovered (for instance in advertising: a conversation manager). In any case all roles need to make sense within the storyline of the project, which makes a clear storyline and general purpose essential at this initial stage. The teacher will give affirmative feedback as soon as a student seems to fit into one of the roles. The main aim for a student will be to learn the workflow, the required techniques and strategies in various scenarios.

2. Squad formation and Squad leaders

As soon as there’s enough confidence the next step can be taken, the phase of mastery of roles can begin. This is also the time that a student will start to see the relationship between the various roles and it becomes possible to direct actions accordingly. Once the roles are mastered at a certain level, students can start to make a name for themselves and offer their specialism to teams. Just like in RPG games, students could offer their specialism on a bulletin board, so teams with the right balance in roles can now be formed. Squads of up to six students operate under the lead of student squad leaders that are now introduced as roles for the first time. The teacher would still have the role of commander and will try to help coordinate the teams.

3. Rise of the commanders

Once certain team members get experienced enough and show signs of leadership, the teacher can take a step back and let one of the students take up the commander role within the team. The squad leader will take the lead in short term practical daily operations, whereas the commander will be more focused on long term strategy. Maybe the teacher can start as the commander and be asked to resign by a team when all members feel they’re up to it and have chosen the right candidate. The teacher may then take up the role of adviser, not interfering with teams unless a team asks for a meeting.

4. Team Mastery

As soon as enough students show they’re skilled enough to be commanders, the teacher could step back entirely and just enjoy observing the game. The commander position can then be open for anyone with enough skills to take it on. At the end of the year all the students will need to have proven to be able to master one or more roles, one of which may include the role of commander or squad leader. The teacher can even play the role of adversary, trying to challenge skilled teams in order to force them to adapt to new and more difficult circumstances. This is the stage when some teams become so well coordinated that they will become super teams that are likely to feel the need for competition, ready to take on any other team and even teams outside of school.

I think there are a lot of interesting ideas to explore in this first scaffolded setup and I would love to exchange thoughts on this with some hardcore Battlefield 2 gamers.

Four years

In Dutch higher education I think this scenario is best suited for students in their second year. Here’s the ideal plan for the years before and after this second year.

In the first year the students have tried out some basic skills without choosing roles or specialisms yet. They choose a field (for instance advertising) and get ready for the second year where roles in this chosen field start to become apparent.

In the third year, when teams have mastered working within the context of the school, they can start to operate in the context of the outside world. Again this would match perfectly with their skill set. They can now start to work for ‘real clients’. Initially within a safe and protected project that ensures enough educational value. Also this is the time to collaborate with other disciplines and create cross-over teams that present the students with new team dynamics. Then slowly towards the second half of the third year they can join real pitches for real clients and finally, during their internship at the end of the year, put both their individual as well as their team-based skills to the test and learn the rules of the real world.

In the fourth year students are ready to define the essence of what he or she would love to pursue in a professional career after school. The student follows a minor to further investigate this direction and finally in the final project has a chance to safely try out this personal approach before going through the final gate and stepping into the real world.

To be continued in part two where the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) model as explained by Karel Millenaar is evaluated for educational purposes.

What Design Can Do For Our Planet

At the What Design Can Do (WDCD) conference in Amsterdam I ran a workshop for CrossLab. With four Graphic Design students and my CrossLab colleague Michael van Schaik, we spent two weeks (after class) to devise a break-out session. The breakout Visualizing Data showed the transformation of a dataset into visualized data.

On Thursday, May 26, a CrossLab students team conducted a survey among 200 of the conference visitors. The central issue to be addressed: how committed are you as a designer? How social is your design? The questionnaire was based on three stereotypes of social and environmental awareness - ranging from naively involved to indifferently destructive. Hence, the visitors were confronted with questions like: Do you chat with or talk to people living in your street? When do you shut down your computer? Do you ever upload something online that is useful for others?

Their answers were collected, processed and visualized. We were using iPads that sent the answers to a local wireless database. From this database the planets were automatically generated, printed and finally students cut out the numbered planets, made them into buttons and handed them out to the visitors.

The metaphor of a planet represented their individual profile and level of involvement. The process resulted in a collective ‘data portrait’ of planets, a universe we would live in if it were up to the visitors of WDCD. On Friday, May 27, I informed the audience about the process of data visualization - from questionnaire to planet - and unveiled the universe according to the visitors of WDCD.

What makes this event interesting within the context of gamification was the fact that we used some core game principles. First of all it borrows its three stereotypes from Real Time Strategy games. These inspired the answers to the questions. For example:

_Do you chat with or talk to people living in your street?

1. I like to be left alone actually, I care about my privacy! (evil)

2. I love my local community. Parties, visits, it’s all good! (good)

3. I keep a minimum of contact. You never know if someone might help me some day. (calculating)_

Anyone who’s ever played a game like Command & Conquer, StarCraft or any of the empire building games, will recognize three distinct races. The aggressive, the defensive and the trading kind. Also we used typical visual feedback that may strike a chord with players of Spore. A comic book style that is clear, even on a 3cm. button. And finally there’s the extra specials that can only be unlocked by unique answers in the questionnaire.

With: Michael van Schaik, Aldje van Meer, Kris Soroka, Tijn de Kok, Romero Watamaleo en Stefan van Rijn.