 Imagine that your lesson plans could capture the buy-in inspired by student choice, the challenge created by unlimited iteration and increasing levels of difficulty. Combine that with a competitive spirit that is harnessed for learning and discovery. All of that is possible with games in the classroom. Welcome to the K-12 online 14 conference and the gamification strand. This presentation is designed to help you work your way through all of the big decisions about using games without crashing and burning. Some of the turns are sharp and once you're in the race things can move at a pretty quick pace but I've found it's worth the risk. So step out into the world of gamification and let me show you a model that I'm working in my classroom with seventh and eighth grade students. Hi my name is Harrison McCoy and I'm from Arlington, Texas. You know human beings love playing games because they're rewarding and entertaining at the same time. That makes gamification the perfect vehicle that a teacher can use to harness a student's innate motivation and curiosity, transforming the learning into fun and intrinsically rewarding activities. As such gamification allows a teacher to create an environment in the classroom that enables students to feel safe and they're more likely to take risk with their learning. Let's begin by taking a look at what's going on in the world of education today with respect to gamification. Now Jeff Dunn has this great little infographic on the Edgedemic website and he does two things that I think are important to what we're trying to do here today. Let's take a look at this little infographic that he's created. First of all we're going to notice some really large numbers. 1.2 million students failing to graduate from high school across the United States every year. Now many of those students are among the five million people playing an average of 45 hours a week of games. Now I'm not sure how you measure this but there's little statistic here that as a planet we spend three billion hours a week playing video games is pretty staggering. So obviously games are a big part of the culture here in America and around the world. Now what we ought to look at too secondly here is the elements of gaming that we can harness for educational purposes because that's how we're defining gamification. We're using the elements of gaming in the classroom in order to help us pursue our educational goals and objectives. Now a couple of things that are kind of important in gaming that work well in the classroom. This idea of leveling up as we ramp up and unlock content and increase the degree of difficulty as students move through projects and assignments. Of course earning points is that's certainly not new. We've been giving grades for decades but the idea that points are earned with the quality of their performance in these games is kind of an important point. Earning achievements and public recognition for their work that's usually one thing that most people bring into education from gaming. This little paper that's quoted from MIT moving learning games forward. In education we're able to see that that we can use gaming elements to as authoring platforms. Games are used to produce an artifact even if it's another game, a model, a visual text or a written text. As simulations students use games to test theories about systems and tinker with variables. Now this idea that they provide trigger systems I've used this a lot in my class. Games are used as jumping points for discussions and technology gateways as students allow or allowed to use the games to help them become more familiar with emerging technologies that they then use across the content area in all of their education. Now gamification is really one of the most exciting movements in education today. It really but it's really nothing more than simply applying game design thinking to a classroom environment in order to make it more fun and more engaging. It's been a very effective concept for marketers. I mean for years different types of retail establishments have have used gamification in order to soften the blow of marketing and prices and that sort of thing. I mean which one of us hasn't walked into a fast food restaurant and found some kind of pull tab on our drink cup that would promise us that if we could only collect all the right tabs that we'd win a chance at $10,000 or a brand new car. When I was a child I remember my parents collecting SNH green stamps and as a child I would get to lick those stamps and paste them in the little paper books and then my parents would take them down and trade them in on appliances. All of that designed as grocery stores and service station and that sort of thing. Those kind of businesses gave those stamps away in order maybe to get you to forget the fact that you were paying so much for what they were actually selling. It was designed to make the mundane ordinary everyday task of shopping a little more exciting. Now that little walk down memory lane really is only designed to show us that that gamification has been around a long time. Last week, for example, in a professional development class that I went to as a teacher, we were shown a video that was actually made back in the 1970s in which a teacher used Jeopardy to teach English lessons to his ESL students there in Los Angeles. And so that's, you know, 40 years ago plus that we've been doing games in the classroom. Add to that the amazing things that are possible today with technology. And I think you'd have to agree it could be a pretty good time to be a kid in a school that's progressive enough to be thinking about gamification. Now, why does gamification work in the classroom the way that it does? I think it works because it taps into some of the most basic elements of human nature that people have some of the most basic needs that we have regardless of our age. Let's take a look at the psychology of gamification for just a moment before we dive in more deeply into what I'm actually doing in my classrooms. The truth is that there are some teachers who don't easily embrace the idea of bringing games into the classroom at all. I think concerns that the reward systems and the badge systems and all that goes into the gaming will dilute the idea that we should be teaching our students to learn just for the sake of learning itself. I think that's kept a lot of teachers from exploring this new frontier very deeply. Now the truth is that I paid little attention to gaming for a long time myself, even though I've reached two teenage sons who clearly spent a great deal of time in their bedrooms playing video games for most of the time they were growing up. Then I began to read about what we're learning about how brain development in adolescence has is impacting education. And I think I've drawn a pretty important conclusion, at least one that changed how I see gaming in the classroom. You see, as you look at this, this idea of an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex in adolescence, and the idea that they really are not able sometimes until their earlier mid 20s to make decisions that that are the kind of decisions that result from being able to learn for for the sake of learning, until they reach the time that that prefrontal cortex is fully developed, and they're able to make those decisions. They're going to make an awful lot of learning decisions based on what feels good at the moment and what gives them the most juice and energy in the process. Now when I think about that, that began to change the way that I looked at gaming in the classroom. And I made the leap that we were not only asking something of teenagers that was nearly biologically impossible for them to do until they were in their 20s, but we were failing to take advantage of the natural instinct that they have to throw caution to the wind and try new things if there's at all the hope of excitement and reward and a prize at the end. Now granted, I still believe that we should teach them a sound decision making processes, but it might be foolish to teach as though that were the norm rather than the exception. So I decided to bring gamification into my classroom in a really big way. Now before we deal with the specifics of the way that I I brought gamification into my classroom, I think we might need to understand just a little bit about the nature of my class itself. This is a web page that I created as kind of a home base for everything related to the classroom and the games that we were playing. And as you can see on this web page, I teach a class that is called avid. And as the mission statement here clearly says, the mission of avid is to close the achievement gap by preparing all students for college readiness in a global society. That makes my class a little bit different from most content area classes, but I do have some very clearly defined course objectives. And there are actually eight domains that I am required to teach over the course of the school year. Now the eight domains that I that kind of govern what I do are communication, collaboration, inquiry, reading, college preparation, character development, writing and organization. And you can of course see that that the scope of my class is very broad, which does give me a lot of latitude and a lot of freedom in what I do. But in essence, what I wanted to say was that that all of the quests that I developed for my classroom somehow had to fit under one of these eight headings in order for me to stay true to my course design and to be able to fulfill my obligation to to what I'm supposed to be teaching. Now the course of developing a concept as broad as this one theme and title and image and imagery and all of that that went into it, I decided to call what I was doing the avid Delphi and adventure kind of taking on the the avid part of what I do. And then to me, the idea of the the Elphia combined the Delphia with some mythological feeling in my theme because what I envisioned was kind of a forest theme, medieval in nature with the nights and journeys and quests and and all of that going into it. And so what we have here is is a concept really that was designed to treat create a culture in the classroom that invaded and kind of integrated everything that we did. I took on the role of the game master for what we were doing and created this kind of icon or image for myself as this lone wolf who is kind of guiding the process and we'll deal with the backstory for avid Elphia in just a moment, but basically to say to the kids that along the way they are going to have these challenges and quests that they will be completing in a traditional classroom setting. Those would probably be called assignments and we would be talking about grades rather than badges and levels and and the sort of thing that that comes with gamification. Now before we get too far deeply into the concept that I developed in my classroom, I'd like to take a moment and kind of give some props to the developers of a video based web based program called class craft. Class craft is very comprehensive and beautiful way of introducing gamification on a wide scale within even a traditional type of classroom setting. I looked at it and it really was kind of an inspiration for what I did, although what I came up with really conceptually is very different. The idea of that kind of culture being built into a classroom was very inspirational to me and and they did a great job with that. Frankly at the time, the only only reason that I did not look at at class craft more closely at the time it had to do with cost and the support I did not get for implementing that in my classroom from my campus. But at the same time, it's a very well developed and comprehensive way and I would encourage you to look at that as well. Now I wasn't very far into the development process before I realized that what I really needed to do was go back and write a back story for what would actually be happening in the game. And so that's included on the website as well. And it's called the story of Avedelfia, which is a mythical place in the forest where essentially there is a problem because the land needs a ruler and its council of rulers has been wiped out in a battle with invaders from a nearby country. The issue for the students who become participants in this game is for them to read this story and become familiar with it and decide that they are going to participate in the game by becoming candidates for the council that's going to eventually rule this forest and provide leadership for the animals that live there. Very simply the students who are participating in the game, which you go into it hopefully assuming that all of them are going to be participants, are journeymen who are taking quests in order to build up points in order to be considered worthy of consideration for being the ruler of this region of Avedelfia. Now I tend to think of my concept as a culture that I'm attempting to build into my classroom. And in a sentence I've developed this story, which my students or characters or players competing against time to accomplish a selection of quests based on my learning objectives and learning domains that require them to master a set of skills and habits in order to build up enough points to win the race. Inside the story they must work together, pool resources and abilities to save a world of innocence whose lives are threatened in Avedelfia. Outside of the story they're mastering skills that are directly tied to my learning objectives and without which they cannot complete the quests that are an integral part of the game. So let's move on now and look at the quests themselves. That list is kind of long. On the way take a look just very quickly how I integrated the faculty into this. Our principal has become the powerful Zon. It just happens he has one of those great names for a video game. Our assistant principals are the warlords of each grade level. Counselors are our school counselors. They're sages. Guardians of the Oracle would be our library staff and so forth. And so everyone in the school actually has a role to play within the game. The skills that the students are going to be mastered are listed here. Each one is kind of uniquely tied to one of my domains again to remain true to the course that I'm teaching. And then the list of quests that I developed that would be expressions of those skills. For example in order to teach collaboration a student would be recognized for helping another member of his tribe with his or her journey to encourage collaboration within that tribe. Now the individual tribes may actually compete against each other. But within that tribe I'm trying to establish a culture of collaboration with the tribal members. Taking a leadership role in a school club organization becomes a quest which a student can pursue. And notice that the point value out to the side that's really kind of arbitrary. Every individual would probably set his own point value there depending upon the value of the quest, the amount, or degree of difficulty that was involved and so forth. So I have about 18 quests in all that the students can choose from. Some of them the students are actually going to participate in together class wide. But if you'll notice that let's say I believe that number six excelling in special quests as defined by the game master. Being the game master I have the the authority to issue assignments that aren't directly related to a quest. But they've fallen at this category and this gave me the flexibility of being able to add assignments throughout the year that were not specifically spelled out within the context of a quest. So to kind of wrap things up here and just say that if you were starting from ground zero to try to decide how to gamify your classroom. I think there are two things that I would consider first of all. First of all I would decide how much I actually wanted to gamify and exactly how many elements of games that I would want to try to integrate into my classroom. It might be something as simple as awarding badges through a program like Ed Modo, a classroom management system like Edmodo or or class Dojo which is an iPad app. Very simple way to begin to be help the students begin to feel rewarded with the badges for assignments or behaviors that they complete. Or you may want to actually take it into the kind of complex environment of a class craft or something along the lines of what I did. And there are a lot of stops along the way in between those two. Next I would take a look at my curriculum objectives because to me it really has to tie to what you're teaching. And I would give an awful lot of thought to how can I achieve these same curriculum objectives whether it's common core or like we have here in Texas with our own Texas standards. You're going to have to teach those standards and get those things across to the students. And you would want to tie whatever you're doing directly to those. It's going to make your classroom better from an engagement standpoint and a curriculum assessment standpoint. Keep you out of a lot of hot trouble, hot water too with your administrators if you're going to be putting themification in like this. So it's well worth the effort. It's a great new frontier with a lot of opportunity to kind of create and make your own way. There's some wonderful resources out there like this one in the strands that K-12 online are doing during this online conference.