Game On!

 Games in the classroom are possibly the fastest route to becoming teacher of the year! I have yet to meet a person who doesn't like games, and definitely have not encountered a student who would rather make flash cards than play a vocabulary review game. This week, it's all about the games- different styles, formats, and interactive scenarios to make our content more fun!

Game-Based Learning

Game-based learning is the specific use of games to achieve educational outcomes (Bohyun, 2015). This is one of the easiest ways to incorporate games into a pre-made lesson or unit. Games have been shown to have powerful effects on the brain, and can help motivate students to keep trying until they can "beat" that challenge (Hanson-Smith, 2016), so let's apply that to some otherwise boring test review.

For ninth graders, socializing and games are the best things they could hope to do in school. And more now than ever, many schools are ensuring that each student has a computer and internet access at home, making it easier to incorporate virtual games that will be accessible to everyone. There are also lots of game platforms that provide easy instructions and templates, that do most of the work for you! In the past, I've used Kahoot and Quizlet, which used gamified elements such as points, scoreboards, and bright visuals to make multiple choice questions and flash cards more fun. For this blog, I wanted to take it one step further.

To demonstrate how easy it can be to incorporate games into the classroom, I decided to use Blooket, a free (with paid options) website that takes your multiple choice review questions, and adds them into a game atmosphere where students can level up their characters, earn coins to spend on upgrades and new game "equipment," and play games that are based on popular apps and computer games.

In this version of Blooket, every time a student gets a question right, they get to choose a character card to add to their deck. After each set of 5 questions, they fight a monster and move through a haunted tower, hoping to reach the top.

For my creation, I didn't even have to come up with my own questions. Blooket makes available all the question sets that other users have entered, so by searching for "plate tectonics" I found a set that had all the questions I wanted. Then, all I have to do is pick the game style that I want, and it's ready to assign! Try this game for yourself to see how much fun Blooket is!

One of the best part about game-based learning from a teacher perspective, is that it can be super quick and easy to set up. Creating this blooket took all of five minutes, and even if I had written my own questions, writing the questions would be by far the most time consuming step. If you want to know more, check out the video below, where I walk through the basics of Blooket, create a game, and play a round of it, all in under 8 minutes.

These types of games are also very easy to evaluate, because they self-grade. Some of these tools, such as Kahoot, can even integrate with Google Classrooms or other platforms to automatically enter grades for you! To see if a game is helping or hindering student learning, you could try using different game platforms or no game at all for some classes/sections/students, and compare how well they do on the assignment itself, or more importantly, the summative assessment for the material. Because the games incentivize students to complete the assignment and even keep going after they've completed the minimum requirement, it seems likely that students would benefit from the extra review.

I also love that while for some students, the focus is definitely on getting the questions right, for other students (like AP or honors classes), they can still enjoy the review by focusing on the game element, and will often choose to play more levels if they finish the assignment before their classmates and want to "kill time" until class ends.

Another easy way to add games into the classroom is by using frame games. A frame game uses a well-known game structure, such as jeopardy, or a crossword puzzle, and applies it to a new content area so that learners don't have to spend too much time understanding the game mechanics. These types of simple modifications can make test review a whole lot more fun (Kostic et al., 2015), and encourage student participation (Simkin, 2013), even though research seems inconclusive on the effect on student achievement.

For my application of a frame game, I wanted to pick something with simple rules that my students would be likely to know, and something that could be implemented virtually. I chose Pictionary, because I'm always looking for students to find multiple ways to represent scientific vocabulary, and Pictionary helps students visualize concepts while promoting a supportive atmosphere of collaboration (Peterson, 2017), as students gain more points when their peers are succeeding as well. For this particular example, I went with a rather challenging list of words that form the roots of many scientific words. Knowing these will help students be able to remember a lot of other vocabulary more easily!

To play this virtually, I would use Zoom. I could separate the class into breakout groups of 6 or so, and provide instructions that walk them through how to randomly generate a vocabulary word, share their screen using the whiteboard function on zoom, and share the rules of the game. In the image to the right, you might be able to guess that I was representing the root word, therm-, which means something related to heat. Hopefully my students are better artists than I am!

Gamification is the practice of incorporating game elements (such as scores, levels, bonuses, rules, etc.) into a non-game environment (Bohyun, 2015), typically to encourage engagement. Essentially, the classroom becomes a real-life game environment, where positive behaviors may be rewarded with points, bonuses, promotions, and the like. While definitions of gamification vary, typically gamification differs from game-based learning by encompassing more than a single piece of content; gamification extends to include how a lesson is implemented, or how a class is run (Alsawaier, 2018).

For example, if I have a particularly chatty class, I might use gamification to incentivize them to engage in the behavior I want- paying attention and not disrupting class. Students also tend to prefer working as a group, so I've made my rules apply to the class as a whole (Rajšp et al., 2017). Ninth graders are also particularly good at exerting peer pressure, so hopefully they would even encourage one another to help the class score points. The graphic below provides an overview of some rules and rewards I might implement.

With successive levels, I can introduce other behaviors, higher degrees of compliance, and bigger rewards to keep the system motivating throughout the year. It is important to implement gamification such that students are rewarded for effort, rather than "winning," so that a "loss" is not demotivating to students (Alsawaier, 2018). For that reason, I wouldn't choose to provide rewards based on grades or achievement, but behaviors that I know every student is capable of. Really, this is a spiced up form of behaviorism, where students learn to repeat behaviors that produce good outcomes, and not to repeat behaviors that produce consequences ("Instruction," 2017).

The time it takes to gamify a class could be extremely variable. These rules only took me about ten minutes to think up and put together, but introducing it and implementing it in the class could take a long time, depending on the complexity of the game elements. For these rules in particular, it should only take a brief introduction, a few days to practice, and then be easy enough to implement throughout the year. As students reach different levels, I might have to spend time thinking about what rewards or rules to introduce next, but this framework is relatively simple.

Assessing the effectiveness of a tool like this would really need to compare across lessons, units, or classes, one which used it and one which did not. Hopefully, I'd find that after implementing these rules, I could get through more material during class time, have less off-topic chatter, and eventually get higher grades from the students.

Simulations, while they might seem unrelated to games, often involve similar mechanics for increasing motivation; they are new and interesting, put students in a new context or environment, and provide stimulating visuals. Simulations have been shown to be an effective form of active learning (Lean et al., 2006). Simulations should involve the senses, provide a life-like context, and require students to practice needed skills ("Role Playing Instructional Guide," 2012).

When I initially thought about simulations I might use in the classroom, I came up with ideas for visuals, models, items that could be manipulated and interacted with, to represent scientific concepts or phenomena, or replace an in-person lab activity. The image below shows an example of just such a simulation, pulled from Lifeliqe, that highlights different aspects of the water cycle with moving arrows and overlays.

This simulation is modeling precipitation and surface flow of water.

These types of simulations certainly have their place. Today especially, many science labs are being replaced with virtual simulations. I recently attended a virtual simulated dissection of a sea turtle, and the students and I got a lot out of it! However, in many of these activities, students play a rather passive role, where the simulation does most of the work and the students are there to observe, which can lead to some students, well... not observing. I wanted to choose something more active and more involved to profile.

One simulation that I have led multiple times is a role-playing scenario similar to a Model UN, where students represent different countries or industries negotiating a climate change agreement. The simulation I've outlined below is part of the EN-Roads program, produced by the Climate Interactive, a non-profit that I had the opportunity to work with in testing and implementing this and similar programs. I love this program and have implemented it with middle and high schoolers, college students, and adults, all with positive results.

In the simulation, students are given name tags, assigned seats (or broken into virtual breakout rooms), and given a briefing to read that summarizes their character and the interests they represent. For example, students might be broken into groups such as climate activists, farmers, fossil fuel industry executives, and more.  Students can be encouraged to really adopt these roles, even dressing up or changing their zoom backgrounds to align with their group.

Then, students are reconvened for an address presented by the teacher, posing as the UN Secretary General, who provides instructions and context for the upcoming event. Students are guided through several rounds of negotiations, where they have to make agreements that try to prevent the global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

The simulation uses 5 stages- for the middle 3, students are in character according to their given role.

The role-playing is the most engaging aspect of the training, but it also depends on an enormously cool and true-to-life tool that amasses data from industry experts to project global temperature changes based on certain actions. This tool, the EN-Roads simulator, gives students the chance to really explore what actions make the biggest difference in confronting climate change. While it looks complicated, students learn its basic functions through the experience, and tend to appreciate that it is based on real data and scientific projections.

The EN-Roads Simulator features 18 sliders that manipulate different variables affecting global climate projections. In this image, I adjusted the subsidies on renewable energy and the taxation of coal to decrease the projected global temperature. 

This simulation takes a while to prepare for and set up, probably 2 or 3 hours for the first time using it. All the materials are prepared and available for download, so reading through it and getting familiar with the simulator are the main tasks. The implementation can be as short as an hour, or a full-day experience, depending on the depth covered.  

Evaluation of this activity tends to happen during the debriefing on the simulation, where students are prompted to share their thoughts, and in my experience, often share about a strong emotional reaction they experienced, and something new they learned about the science of stopping climate change. When students are able to form an emotional connection to the content, it shapes how they are able to store that information (McLeod, 2019), so I believe that using this simulation to discuss positive environmental impacts would have a much bigger impact than simply discussing them. Certainly, it would be interesting to see if I am right, and compare student scores on the unit associated with this material with past averages.

Virtual worlds are perhaps the most involved form of incorporating games into the curriculum. Typically, they require quite a bit of training or initial set up compared to the other models I've discussed, but some teachers report amazing results from incorporating virtual worlds, and end up engaging their classes in more ways than I would have imagined. 

Why would that be? We are pre-disposed to enjoy "games," even if they feature no real-world rewards, and in particular people can form strong attachments to an avatar that they feel represents them (Featherstone, 2016). Virtual worlds provide novelty, new dynamics for student-student and student-content interaction, and can create meaningful experiences with less cost and time than it would take in real life (Dickey, 2011). For Earth Science in particular, presenting students with a world that has different rules than our physical world could prove to be a good way to engage student interest in the mechanics of how our Earth works.

MineCraft is one of the world's most popular games. If you are completely unfamiliar with MineCraft, check out this 1-minute introductory video to get a sense of how it looks and works.

For my particular demographic, I think MineCraft would be the most likely virtual world that students would be familiar with. It also allows for a lot of building and world-alteration mechanics that could be useful for exploring Earth Science. The game can be made even more realistic by having students download certain "mods," often crowd-sourced pieces of code that manipulate variables in the game. For example, a "water erosion mod" makes it so that water slowly breaks down the materials that it flows over. Many similar modifications are available to create lifelike (or surreal) properties of physics in the game.

I envision creating an assignment to demonstrate weathering and erosion, by asking students to build and then deconstruct an earthen form in Minecraft, showing where each "block" of Earth ends up, demonstrating the processes of weathering, erosion, and deposition. The video below shows a short time-lapse of how one MineCraft user demonstrated erosion be creating a waterfall.

This would be, by far, the most time-consuming activity I've mentioned so far. Learning enough about MineCraft to write this post took me at least an hour, and learning enough to be able to guide students would likely take 5+ hours of experimentation with MineCraft and available mods. It would also require several hours to research the safety protocols that could be implemented, as K-12 students have strict privacy needs that would need to be considered.

I'm not very familiar with virtual worlds, so it's more difficult for me to estimate the time it would take to set something like this up. I know I would need to spend some serious time getting students oriented to MineCraft, perhaps devoting a whole class or two at the beginning of the year to introducing the mechanics and letting students set up their accounts. Once they are familiar with the MineCraft world, I can start introducing them to mods and tasks as they become relevant for each unit. For each project, I might provide a loose project framework such as the sample below, and allow for some creativity and flexibility in the products and processes.

Evaluating whether or not this assignment works for students should be pretty easy on the surface- do students do well on the project? The real question though would be if this platform is more effective than other, less involved, methods of teaching the unit. I could compare scores on this project against tests or assignments from years past, and also ask the following questions to make sure the extra effort to set up this project would be worth it:

• Were students able to demonstrate phenomena in a way that would not be possible in a class lab?
• Were students better able to understand the processes at work by playing them out in MineCraft?
• Did students have more fun completing this project?
• Did students use the extra time in a class period to go above and beyond in their creations?

If the answers to those questions weren't obvious, I could also follow up the assignment with a more traditional assessment on the material, and compare the results.

Games can take many forms in the classroom, far beyond the review Jeopardy that we've likely all experienced. Games can be a wonderful bonding experience, a safe way to let emotions run high, and an engrossing way to approach new material. I hope this has given you some ideas for your own classroom!

References:

Alsawaier, R. (2018). The effect of gamification on motivation and engagement. The International Journal of Information and Learning Technology, 35(1), 55–79. https://doi.org/10.1108

Bohyun, K. (2015). Game Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics. In Understanding Gamification (pp. 17–20). Library Technology Reports.

Dickey, M. (2011). The pragmatics of virtual worlds for K-12 educators: Investigating the affordances and constraints of Active Worlds and Second Life with K-12 in-service teachers. Education Tech Research Development, 59, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-010-9163-4

Featherstone, M. (2016). Using Gamification to Enhance Self-Directed, Open Learning in Higher Education. Sheffield Hallam University.

Gibbs, J., & Tayor, J. (2016). Comparing student self-assessment to individualized instructor feedback. Active Learning in Higher Education, 17(2), 111–123.

Hanson-Smith, E. (2016). Games, Gaming, and Gamification: Some Aspects of Motivation. 21st-Century Language Skills. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.233

Instruction. (2017). SAGE Publications. https://www.wgu.edu/blog/what-behavioral-learning-theory2005.html

Kostic, B., Groomes, D., & Yadon, C. (2015). Game Shows as Review Activities: The Impact on Course Evaluations and Student Perceptions. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 1(4), 349–361.

Lean, J., Moizer, J., Towler, M., & Abbey, C. (2006). SImulations and games. Active Learning in Higher Education, 7(3), 227–242.

McLeod, S. (2019). Constructivism as a Theory for Teaching and Learning. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/constructivism.html

Peterson, S. (2017). Using a Modified Version of Pictionary to Help Students Review Course Material. Journal of Microbiology Education, 18(3). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5976047/

Rajšp, A., Beranič, T., Heričko, M., & Wu Horng-Jyh, P. (2017). Students’ Perception of Gamification in Higher Education Courses. Central European Conference on Information and Intelligent Systems.

Role Playing Instructional Guide. (2012). Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. https://www.niu.edu/citl/resources/guides/instructional-guide/role-playing.shtml

Simkin, M. (2013). Playing Jeopardy in the Classroom: An Empirical Study. Journal of Information Systems Education, 24(3).