 Well, I have the top of the hour, so I say, let's begin. Let me welcome you. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, host, and your chief catherter for the next hour. I'll be your guide in this conversation about the future of higher education. I'm delighted to see you all here. We have a terrific guest. I really am delighted to welcome Professor Karl Kapp. Karl is a professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania who specializes in structural technology. He is, among other things, very passionate about gaming and I think about creativity and higher education with technology in general. So I'm looking forward to a wide-ranging conversation about structural design and how we can use that to better improve teaching with technology. Let me welcome Professor Kapp. Greetings. Hey, greetings. Hi, great to be here. Oh, great to see you. So glad you could make it. Well, so glad to be here. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, and so glad for all the folks who showed up. Great, great crowd. Me too. Well, I think you'll find the Future Trends Forum community is very thoughtful, very funny, very perceptive, and we'll have all kinds of questions for you. But I want to start off with a couple of quick questions myself. The first is when we introduce academics to each other, I find that we can often go on for some length and the most economical way to introduce is to ask someone what they're going to be working on for the next year. So what topics are going to be uppermost in your mind and what projects for you, for example, what book projects, teaching, administration, what does next year look like for you? So, so, interest, so my personal projects are working on a digital card tool to create digital card games. I found, yeah, it's really interesting. I spent a few years ago, I did a 3D virtual game in Unity and so much overhead to learn how to play and, you know, to me, Unity is like swimming but, you know, working in it, but not for everybody. But everybody's familiar with the card game. So card games are easy and simple, so I'm doing that. On the university level, interestingly enough, Bloomsburg University is merging with two of her sister schools, Lockhaven and Mansfield. So our faculty and our university are going through that merging process. So that's been and is and continues to be quite a project. And they're working on another book on gamification with a woman from Microsoft. So they've implemented gamification and she and I are putting down her thoughts, mostly she's putting down her thoughts, I'm assisting and we're working on that project and my pet project for the years. I've created a series called the unofficial unauthorized, sometimes they call it unauthorized, unofficial, but either way, unofficial history of learning games. I got really interested in the past of learning games. Someone had posted somewhere that they invented something about games and I'm like, I think no. And so I wanted to go back and see really when it started and it was, you know, well beyond when they invented whatever they invented. So it just got me really interested. So I'm looking into the Oregon Trail and I'm looking into war gaming and something called the Crimson Contagion which was a tabletop exercise that actually predicted the pandemic about a year ahead of time, really fantastic and interesting kind of topics. That sounds fantastic. I would love to see that. And in fact, my students at Georgetown working on gaming and education, we'd love to, you know, do whatever we can to throw things at you or to look at drafts. Yeah, no, that's great. I would definitely send a link to the first four episodes. Wow, terrific, terrific. Now speaking of links friends, you'll see at the bottom of the screen on the left edge of it, there's a kind of tan colored lozenge shape that says Carl Cap's homepage. And guess what, if you click on that it takes you to Carl Cap's homepage. So if you'd like to find out more about Carl, if you'd like to get in some of his previous books or look at his classes or his consulting and workshops and his blog, it's all there. It's all there. Carl, that sounds like a fantastic year ahead. What do you teach? Yeah, yeah, so I'm teaching. So I teach, well, this summer, I'm teaching a course in instructional game design. And in the fall, I teach, well, my favorite course is a course called Managing e-learning projects. And in that course, I form students into teams or companies. I give them a mock request for proposal. They have to then write a proposal, prepare a sales presentation, create a working prototype, and then present it to our corporate advisory council. So we just, we do it twice a year. So we just had it in the end of April and we did it all kind of in Zoom. And one of our graduates has a little studio downtown. And so he added a lot of elements there and we threw in some mirrored just for fun and breakout rooms and had a great time. That sounds fantastic. Who gets to be on the corporate board besides you? Fun, actually, it's, actually I do very little when we finally get to that stage. It's individuals who are practicing in the field of instructional technology or faculty in the field of instructional technology primarily made up of our alumni, which is really exciting because I tell all my students, you're not done with this class till you come back and sit on the other side of the table. And so we have a real nice kind of mixture of fresh graduates, graduates have been out 20 years and corporate people who aren't graduates but who are interested in instructional technology. So it's a lot of fun. Well, that sounds like a lot of fun. It really is. It's the reason why I went to Bloomsburg. So I was only gonna go to Bloomsburg for three years to check it out. And so like 20 plus years later, I'm still there. You've definitely checked it out. Well, we have a couple of questions that are just starting to come in. And friends, if you're just joining us, again, if you'd like to send in a question, you can do it from the bottom of the screen. Just click that question mark button or click the raised hand button to join us on video. And one of them comes from, let's say, this is from Wendy who asks, I'd like to pursue a PhD soon. And I hope to merge my loving of gaming structural design. Any suggestions on where to check out in terms of colleges? That's a great question. So first of all, I always encourage anyone who's thinking about a PhD to definitely do it because there's no time like the present. It's really interesting. Do it for yourself though. Make sure you do it for yourself. So in terms of programs, I think the University of Maryland had a program in game design and probably the best-known one there's my friend, David Metcalf, who is in, and I wanna get this right, one of the Florida universities, is it Florida States or is it Florida? Let me, I'm looking him up right now so I don't get it wrong, but I already have got it wrong. Oh, there we go. So he's in central Florida, has a really good simulation and gaming program. So that's the one that I'm most familiar with and that would be a really great one to check out. Art, Bloomsburg does not have a graduate program in structural science, only a master's program. It's interesting, the state system of higher education in Pennsylvania has very few master's program, very few doctoral programs. In fact, Bloomsburg only has one in speech and hearing. So yeah, so that one is a good one to start with. Well, thank you. That's a really great direct and informative answer and Wendy, I hope that satisfies and I hope it gives you some direction and good luck. Good luck indeed. Now we, so if you're new to Shindig or to the Future Transform, that's an example of a text question. So you can see it's pretty easy to ask. Now let me see if I can bring Dan the soda up on stage to give us an example of a video question. It's Dan Losoto, excuse me. University of Alaska Fairbanks. Hello, Dan. Hi, Brian. Hi, Carl. Hey, Dan. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. I was really excited about this conversation today. I've got maybe two questions. How do you approach faculty that are, they have some preconceived notions about gaming like it's a distraction from their curriculum. And then also the challenge of those faculty or maybe other folks that think of something in terms of gaming, but that's not, it's not really, it's inherently boring. It's like to textbook. It's, you know, and students turn away from it because they know, you know, they're being tricked into some sort of just another boring assessment sort of thing. Yeah, no, that's a really great question. So one of the things that I try to do with faculty that are little hesitant about games or using games is I'll do two approaches depending on the mindset of the faculty members. So one is there's actually a lot of research out there and a lot of examples of using games for learning. So one of the, you know, people say, well, my subject's too serious for games, right? Well, guess who uses games the most? Military and medical education. I don't think there's much more serious than deciding to shoot somebody or trying to save somebody's life. So I kind of give those examples and the Crimson Contagion example is a tabletop exercise used by the federal government to gameplay what would happen with pandemics. So I talk about that series. The other thing that I have tried to do and have had some success with is I brought them in and we've played a game. So it's not really an activity. Sometimes I don't even call it a game. I call it an activity and I get them involved and then all of a sudden I say, oh, by the way, you know, we're playing a game. And sometimes they're like, wow, that's really kind of interesting or really, I've learned a lot. So sometimes that visceral experience of doing it yourself or sometimes that rational, here's kind of how games work. One of the things that, and then I think the problem oftentimes is in terms of fun games and just games is there's not enough modeling. So if you think of someone who's gotten their PhD and they're a faculty member or whatever degree depending on where they're teaching is that they're good, we're good at studying, at being serious, at getting to the endpoint in terms of literature reviews and all that kind of stuff. And not a lot of our academic experience has been learning games. So modeling and showing them how learning games can be fun and not boring, how they're not just multiple choice questions with points, how it's not just, oh, you get a badge and you get a badge and you get a badge. But you show, look, here's the critical thinking that takes place in order for the students to make this decision. Here's the example of where your subject matter expertise is applied to this game situation like in history and those kind of things. So those are a few areas that I try to stress, but I think having the faculty play the game or play a learning game that you know is effective works really well. So those are some ideas. Great questions. Is that helpful? Yeah, in general terms, whenever you work with a faculty member, you're always looking for specific tricks that will always get you past that particular challenge. Again, I'm talking in gaming mechanics here, but that's how I tend to look at life sometimes. Right. Yeah, that's a great. I used to call, you know, they're not games, they're genuine, authentic memory enhancement systems. And so sometimes. Nice accent there, very well. Right, yes, yes. But it's funny because, you know, there's some really interesting research a number of places about active learning and versus just pure lectures and how active learning again and again, Trump's just dumping of information. But the model is pretty comfortable with dumping information. So sometimes I have to make them crawl before they can walk. So let's just use an audience response system. We'll just ask a couple of questions, right? And what's in it for you as a faculty member? Well, it automatically takes attendance. Okay, so let's just go ahead and do that. Okay, now that you've asked a couple of questions, why don't we integrate them as decisions in a scenario? Okay, so now let's ask your students to make a decision about that. Oh, okay, yeah, that wasn't so bad, you know? And so the great thing I think about teaching sometimes is it's kind of like Groundhog Day, right? Every year you're teaching the same thing or close to the same thing. So I say to the faculty, this year, let's just try this and this, get comfortable with it and then we'll go for, and oftentimes they get very excited about that and then it's easier to go to the next step. Good, nice, thank you and thank you, Dan. Yeah, thank you. I hope you're enjoying spring in Alaska. We are. Friends, if you're new to the forum, you can see this is how it works. We have questions by video and questions via the Q&A box and that's how we proceed. I'm saying this to encourage people to ask questions but there's already a torrent of questions coming up so I'm just gonna turn to those really quickly. We have Neil Fung, welcome back, Neil. Neil has a question about his undergraduate studies. I don't remember any educational games used. What is the current prevalence of games in higher education? That's a great question. First of all, I'm sorry to hear that, Neil, but it's probably not unusual. There's not a ton, there's not a ton of games. So one of the schools that, again, interestingly, one of the schools that use a lot of games are business schools, right? You play through running a business or operating a business or going through that. So that is becoming more and more prevalent but it goes in phases. So for example, in the 1970s, there was actually a book called Serious Games. In the 1970s? In the 1970s, that was the title of the book by a guy named Clark Abetz, ABT. And before that, I bought a bunch of game books from like the late 60s and one of the books says, one of the problem is you walk into every corporate CEO's office and they're playing games. Not anymore, like, what happened? And a lot of colleges were doing that as well but what happened was in the early 80s, late 70s, there was a cultural movement toward more conservative, no child left behind and all that kind of stuff and it even hit the college and so there's less and less games there and now it's starting to research more with video games. But so I would say less than probably five or 10% of all college classrooms across the country are using any kind of learning game but there are lots of opportunities to do that and lots of, it doesn't have to be a full-fledged game. So you could add game elements without having to construct a huge game. So you could have things like, let's, and it's much, much better to do it, like some audience responses than that's leaderboards, it's much better to do it in teams because then the students don't wanna let down the rest of the team. So they'll answer questions team-wise where, you know, if they're answering questions by themselves, they may be like, yeah, I don't want to. But any game, if you can think of where you can add some strategy, somebody mentioned, I think, word gaming somewhere. And they're definitely strategy games thinking about, for example, the first corporate game was in 1930 in a typewriter factory in Russia. Before that time, they had no typewriter factories in Russia and they were trying to get people up to speed on how do you run a factory? So a woman named Mary Burstein created a game to teach people how to run the factory. But you could teach it in social work. How do you run a city, right? You use SimCity. The other thing that you can use is you don't have to develop a game or use a learning game, use a game like SimCity and then talk about the lessons, right? Use a game like, you know, this is an easy lying fruit, but you could take pandemic and we could talk about what's it like to live through a pandemic and what's it mean to be in a pandemic and, you know, all that kind of stuff. In fact, there's one game called pandemic, I think, or not pandemic, plague, plague, I think. And they said, and some of the research is whenever there's a pandemic, like SARS or whatever, playing of their game increases by 300% because people want to make sense of what they're going through. And that game is interesting because you play as the virus or as the bacteria and you're trying to infect as many people as you can. So, you know, it's kind of flipping it on its head which is kind of interesting. Oh, it is. That is, that's a great game. And I'm glad to hear you mentioned Burstein. That's a, the Soviet origin of this is fascinating. Isn't it? I think it's wonderful, yeah. We have a couple of quick comments from the chat. People are talking about games versus high stakes testing regime. That's very important. And then Andrew Peterson notes, game-based curriculum seems to be adopted by individual faculty members, not by departments or colleges, which would, I think, help. That's a great insight, yeah. Neil, that's a great question. A great question. Speaking of questions, there's another video question from Julie Slade at Chatham University. Let's bring her up to the stage. Hello, Julie. Thank you. And this is my first future transform to attend. So thank you. This is so interesting to me. And Cap, thank you for all that you're sharing. I actually wanted to share a resource, a plug, whatever you might call it. I am part of a group. It's called Professors at Play. If you've never heard of it, it's a new grassroots group that's going on that really looks at all of this. So I just wanted to share that in case anybody in attendance has never heard of it. We're always looking for members. And I myself am back in school when you say about the PhD. I have a doctorate in nursing practice, so a DNP, and I'm back into a PhD program myself. And for my study, I am looking at incorporating play, fun, and games into higher education. So I want to study professors' perception of bringing play, fun, and games into higher education. So I'm hearing you talk about games, and it's amazing, and I love what you're saying. Do you have any advice on play and how to incorporate play in the higher education as opposed to gaming? Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, my mother and my grandmother both graduated from Seattle. Really? Oh my gosh, that's amazing. Yeah, I'm in Pittsburgh. And my grandmother actually worked with Rachel Carson. Oh, wow. Yeah, I never got to meet Rachel, but that's kind of cool. So anyway, so if you think about the difference between games and play is I usually use definition where play doesn't have an objective, right? So game has an objective. As soon as, like I always say, two kids flashing around in the pool, that's playing. As soon as you say I'll race you to the other side of the pool, now it's a game, right? Because you've got rules. If I get out of the pool and run, you say I'm cheating, even though we never even said rules. So I think we learn an awful lot from exploration. And I like to look at how do kids learn? Well, kids learn through play. And one of the most interesting things to me is, kids will go to school all day, and they'll even tell you they're bored at school or whatever, but then they'll come home and they'll play school. And one will be a teacher. Why is that? Well, it's sense-making. So I think play is a way of allowing people to make sense of the world around them. But what we need to do in order to allow that to happen is a safe, open world to play in. So for example, you need to bring in elements that they can add to the classroom and allow them to play and then extract ideas out of that play. And so I think a lot of faculty, some faculty are a little reluctant to allow an unstructured chaotic activity to occur in their classroom. If somebody walks by, if somebody sees it, if something's going on, it doesn't look like it. And the students are like, well, what am I actually learning here? And so to provide that, I believe that, I actually believe that there's no learning without reflection, there's only experience. So if we don't provide reflection and we don't know how to give that reflection or debrief or action after action review or whatever after play, then people become reluctant to use that element. So I think one of the things that would be interesting to study or to think about is the professors that decide to have play in their classroom, not just games to play, why? How? What is their thought process versus someone who allows games versus someone who doesn't allow that kind of thing in the classroom? I think that's really kind of interesting. Yeah, so I wish you the best of luck with that. And thanks for letting me know about the professors to play. That's a great, something to a great group. It is a great group and please join. We love to have all of you involved. Now, where do we get more information about that? Brian actually shared in the chat, professors that play at Twitter. And on Twitter, I shared off the link as well as the Twitter handle. Oh, great. And Julie, whoever runs your Twitter account did a very, very sweet treat about a late dear friend of mine, Brian DeCoele, and that meant a lot to me. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. And thank you, Julie, for the question and welcome to the forum. We have more and more comments and more questions just coming in all over the place. So I'm gonna, it's a whirl, which is fantastic. Clearly, Carol, you're just right here in the middle of the torrent, not just the bathroom, but a torrent. We have another great question from David Hool who asks, if you could dive into the intersection of gaming and equitable access to technology. Yeah, that's a great question. So, wow. So there's unfortunately not as many good tools as there should be for accessibility. So, you know, when we think of accessibility, there's a lot of things to think about with technology. So my first response in terms of accessibility is folks who have hearing or vision elements that they need to deal with that are not conducive in a computer environment or a virtual environment. Games are not overly good at that. Games, there's some tools out there, but they're not as effective as they could be. Now, there's some clever people that have developed entire games based on sound, which work really well for some people. Some on sites a little bit easier in terms of games. That's a whole accessibility issue. There's not unfortunately like an easy button like there's those staples for that kind of stuff. Accessibility that way is tough. In terms of the digital divide, which is another view of accessibility, I think colleges, many colleges that I've been involved with have not done as good a job as they could have of giving technology to the students as part of their entry into the institution. Some organizations do it really, really well and some don't but it's not across the board and it doesn't mean that just because you have access and you go home that you have good internet at home if you're not in your dorm, some schools are community. So that's still an issue. But one of the things that I was really into before the pandemic is there's a huge resurgence in card and board games. And I think 2019 there was 5,000 new board games created, which is just awesome. Now I have to think not all 5,000 were probably as good as maybe we had hoped but still that's a lot, right? And I saw a documentary one time on Johnny Cash and it said anybody who wrote as many songs as Johnny Cash would have a hit just from a pure statistical perspective. So if you have 5,000 games we're probably gonna have hits just from a pure statistical perspective. So we don't always have to use technology for games and when we can get back together after this pandemic thing, I think using digital analog games in the classroom can do a lot. And someone had mentioned before, I mean, students create their own game. So Tiagi who's a well-known person in game design has a concept that he calls frame games. So a frame game is the content changes but the gameplay stays the same basically. So I think one of the things that we could do as faculty is create frames. So for example, you could take the cards against humanity frame and have people come up with more like apples to apples, which is less contentious or less controversial than cards against humanity and have the students come up with the content. Have the students come up with even new rules to play the games and even new ways to play the games. So I think that's kind of a wonderful way to do that as well. So those are some good thoughts to think about games. So they don't have to be technology to be accessible. They can be analog and board games. And there's places like print and play, the game crafter who for very inexpensively, you could take your game idea or your students game idea and just put that into a printed final version that looks and feels like a real commercial version. And sometimes just having that is fun. And card games are great to develop because you could just buy a deck of index cards, just write on the index cards, figure out if the game works there, prototype it and then once you perfect it, then you can print it. So lots of options that 20 years ago I mean, to have a card game printed was cost prohibitive but now for 20 bucks you can get it printed and sent to your apps. Well, you've hit a, not just a torn but a nerve here in the chat. We've got people talking about exploding kittens which I also like. Roxanne is a big fan of apples to apples. I think she was gonna say it's her jam but the pun would be too crazy. And I'm just throwing in the chat here a card game that I've used in my work called the thing from the future which is a card game to get people thinking about different futures, which is a lot of fun. Oh yeah, that's awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you Carl for that great answer. This is becoming more and more inspiring as we go. Jesse Kemp has a whole series of questions and I wanna bring up the first of them which is which assessment method do you recommend for gamification that demonstrates an ROI or you know, return investment and also learning objectives being met? Good question, Jesse. Yeah, that's a great question. So a couple of things I'll put, I have a game zombie, a card game, zombie instructional line apocalypse. So if you're instructional line or you can check out that game. Yes. But it's a scenario based game but the question about how do you assess using gamification? So I actually divide gamification into three different buckets. So one is I call it structural gamification. That's where you add game elements around content but you don't change the content itself. So you answer multiple choice question and you get five points. You watch a video and you get 10 points. You, so in that particular case, typical traditional assessments because it's traditional content tend to be what's used a lot in terms of recall, in terms of retention, those kinds of things. The second type of gamification I call content gamification where you change the content itself to be a little bit more game-like. And a real good example of this is combining with the concept called desirable difficulty. So work in some order to have found out that the easier it is for us to learn something, the harder it is for us to recall it later on. So a little bit of desirable difficulty, a little bit of struggle is good for retention because we have to work through it a different way. And they even said, like when I was growing up, everybody said, well, Carl, when you study, you have to be at the same desk all the time and it has to be totally quiet. You have to be focused. Turns out that's really good for passing the test the next day. It's really horrible for remembering it the next week. The reason is because we need to have struggle so we encode it more deeply than just enough for a test. We've all, I guarantee everybody in this session has crammed for a test and has passed the test. And then four weeks later, doesn't remember anything that's on the test. So games can give you that sense of desirable difficulty and struggle that we can then measure later on in content gamification. So I think content gamification, you want to measure the ability of the person to make a decision, the ability of the person to transfer that knowledge from one situation to another situation, the ability of that person to generalize that information. Those are all, I think, really good ways to assess the effectiveness of that content gamification. The third type of gamification, which really isn't used that much in academia, but is used a lot in organizations what I call performance-based gamification where, and this is why, because your job, let's say checking credit is gamified. So you're supposed to check the credit of customers. Every time you check the credit of customers, you get five points. Every time you don't, you lose five points. So of course you check it every time and it's built into the systems that you use every day. I'm not saying necessarily that's a good thing, I'm just saying it's a type of gamification. So those are some ways to think about answering some of those kinds of assessment questions. Oh, that's terrific. What a primer on this. Again, a really, really good question. It was a really good question. Now we have more questions coming in and I'm conscious of time. I wanna make sure everyone gets a crack at them. And this is one coming from Olgi Gary. And Olgi, if I'm pronouncing it incorrectly, please don't, let me know. And this is a question. In fact, it's a video question. So I'm gonna bring her up on stage. Oh, perfect. And this is a question about intercultural games. Olgi, are you connected to my friend Jay Gary? And we saw the half for many, many, many years. Please tell him hi from me. We're celebrating one more anniversary, I guess in a couple of weeks. Happy anniversary. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yes, yes, my question, and this is excellent. I'm glad you're recording it and also the chat because you're putting a lot of resources in there. But my question is, what about well-established intercultural role-playing learning games such as Bafa Bafa? What is the process if one wanted to bring that kind of game online into the digital age? I put out a game about some 25 years ago. We stopped counting when over 500,000 people had played. It was used by training agencies in different parts of the world. But I get requests for that game all the time but packaging it is not an easy thing. Like Bafa Bafa has so many little pieces. Is there some pointers you can give me or places you can send me that I can repackage that and put it out, the Luna game, and also they can't pay game, both of them. Widely use and I get requests all the time and I'll just say, hold on, we're trying. Yeah, that's a good question. So I wish I had an easy answer for you and to say yes, all you need to do is such and such and such and such. There are a number of tools that can be very helpful for creating games. You need someone who's a little bit of a design sense but one of the things I always say about my students wanting to develop digital games is, let's do a paper prototype first. And then one of the comments I got one time was, Dr. Kopp, really paper? Why do we have to do paper? Well, once you do a paper game and you verify that it works on paper, then putting it digitally makes it much, much easier. So you can then team with somebody who knows how to use a tool. Like construct three is a really good tool. Game salad is a really good tool. Those are very simple game development tools that you could use to create your games. Some games, if they're simple, like a card game, sometimes you can use Articulate or Storyline which are tools as well. But I think that using something like construct three who has a huge community, they have lots of tutorials, it's easier to use than like, if you've ever opened up Unity, I always liken it to the cockpit of a 737. I'm like, how do I even? But construct three is much easier and simple to use. There's a branching story, Muzzy Lane has a branching tool depending on if the game branches. So there are some ways, I would say team up with either the game design folks or game development folks at your university or a nearby university or computer science folks and give them a game development platform and you can work with them to get that kind of game online. Okay, thank you. Great, thanks. Thank you. I see the thing about Ian's gamification is BS question. You know that, I just don't agree with that. When gamification first came out, there was a group of game designers who basically said, how dare anyone else in the world create games? How dare they? Because we are the holders of the secret crest of game creation and no one else, especially these learning people, know anything about creating games. My counter argument is learning people know a lot more about how to get learning out of people, how to design learning, how to develop learning, how to make learning effective and why can't we use elements from games? So for example, points, points badges and leaderboards are often held up as the evil trifecta of gamification and there is some truth to just willy nilly throwing points at some, oh, 10 points for Gryffindor. You know, that doesn't mean anything but if points give you feedback on how correct you are, you know, a scale of one to 10 and you only get a five, you know, you only did half as good as you could do. So that element of points can give you insight into the accuracy of your responses. A leaderboard works well for teams, not so well for individuals. So gamification when properly applied can be a very effective tool. Gamification when improperly applied can be a horrible tool, but guess what? So can lectures, guess what? So can video, guess what? So can discussion. So yeah, it's not inherently bad because it's gamification. Bad gamification is bad gamification but bad lectures are bad lectures. So I did not agree with him. I actually, we presented together at a conference and so we had, it was very cordial but we had a discussion of our frames of reference. It's not all together wrong, but I'm not all together right. So there's a compromise in the middle. I appreciate that and I'm looking forward to your next book on gamification to see how you, you know, how this accounts for it. We are also just a one thing, just a look ahead a little bit along these themes. We have a session coming up on June 17th about a card game based on getting people to have conversations about emerging technology and education. So we're gonna play a couple of rounds of it here in the forum. The game is called What the Deck and there'll be more information about it coming up. But just a little bit more questions. Oh my gosh, questions are just all over the place. I don't think we can get to all of them. So I'm gonna try and get to the highlights as quickly as we can. One from our longtime friend and supporter of the program, Tom Haynes, asks about what are some key principles of gamification that you would see to gaming out an entire semester of instruction as opposed to a game unit within a class? Yeah, so that's a really interesting. So I think it's very close to in some ways problem-based learning. So the course I described before is those students who I put into teams are competing against one another. So I've kind of gamified the semester. I give them roles, you know, or I have them assign their own roles as who's gonna be the project manager, who's gonna be the instructional designer, who's gonna be the graphics person, and then they take on the role of prototype development. So what I would say is if you can, and this is the capstone class, but it's funny because people say, well, you could do that, you know, Dr. Kopp gives your teaching graduate school and his capstone class. Well, one of my graduates actually who teaches sixth grade did the same thing. He divides his sixth grade students into teams and they have to come up with a solution to an environmental problem and they present it to people from the community, which is just a wonderful, brilliant application of that whole concept. So the course, and I inherited, I didn't develop that course, is a frame in which you can add different content. So for example, no matter what you're teaching, is there groups that compete against each other in your field? And can you then give them a project for your class that they have to work toward to do that? And I've seen, and that works really well. I've seen a gamification where instead of earning points for things, you start out with experience points and then everything you do, you either lose or gain experience points. So that's a way to do it throughout the whole semester. I think the important thing, especially when you're teaching college age students, is to frame the gamified experience into something that's as authentic as possible. So competing against another team for a proposal, that's what happens in our industry. Competing for, for example, one archeological dig against another for resources, having students write grants, grant proposals, all those kind of things can be done, I think, in an authentic kind of environment. The last thing I wanna say about gamification is, gamification is using game elements, but it doesn't necessarily need to feel like a game. So for example, progress bars. When LinkedIn, way back when, put a progress bar on their profiles, it increased the completion of profiles by something like 50%. Now people wouldn't say LinkedIn is a game, but that one element of showing progress made it more, so really, another colleague who says, gamification is just a bunch of psychological motivational elements that are applied properly. And so don't think that it all has to be a little fun, like in my class where I divide students and teams, every semester I have a team of students who do not like each other, and I have to get involved and kind of mediate. It's part of the process. So they're not having fun, they're not enjoying that. And we try to teach them how, hopefully how to work together and how to work out these conflicts, but that's part of the process. So don't expect or don't, your end goal should not be fun and laughing and just giggling. If you wanna do that, give them a day off. But if you wanted to learn, then use these elements to motivate them for certain outcomes. Well, that was a fantastic answer to really, really great question. Thank you, thank you. And just really quickly, Sherry Dodd from Indiana University want us to share this. They're doing a free online teach, play, learn conference in June 25th. So, and I'll share that URL in the chat as well. That sounds like a lot of fun, Sherry. Thank you. It does sound like fun. We had a couple of more questions building up in gamification. And one of them comes from Danette at Northern State University, who asks, if you could distinguish between structural and performance-based gamification. It seems the examples were pretty similar. Yeah, so that's a good question. So structural gamification is most often around content teaching, learning. Performance is tied to on-the-job activities. So that's a difference. So for example, the program would be program into, if you were a customer service rep, it'd be programmed into your telephone. So if you went over your one minute that you're allowed to interact with the customer, you would lose points. Where structural gamification is more, there's a structure around content that already exists and you're learning, but it doesn't actually have to do with what's on the job. That's the kind of distinction. That's a good question, yeah. That's a great question. And that, I'm sorry, Danette, let us know if you need to go further. We have an incredibly precise research question from Andrew Peterson who wants to know what Batman comic is for you. So first of all, let me say that it is not authentic. My son bought it for me on the streets of New York. So I can almost guarantee it's not real. But it's Batman, I think it's Batman number one, but he got it for me for my birthday several years ago, but it's just a replica. It's not unfortunately the real thing. Had to get that, had to get that. That's a great question, yes. I get asked that quite frequently. And the first time I'm like, what's happening? I don't even remember. And then I'm like, oh yeah, it's right behind me. That's very good. We have seven minutes to go, which is just crazy. I can't believe we're this far alone, but I wanna make sure we get some more of these questions coming up. Penelope Loon at the University of Washington, Bethel, asks, she loves your LinkedIn classes. Some faculty look down on extrinsically motivating learners. That's a big part of games. How do you engage faculty on this? Well, hold onto that thought, because several other people have been asking a related question. In fact, last, Metsya Plurid points out that last week's guest, or two weeks ago, Alfie Cohen said any point system is bad for learning. So there's that, yeah, yeah. So there's opposition to using points. And Metsya, what do you think? So this is fascinating to me. So first of all, early on someone said, you can't gamify school. That's not bad. Don't gamify school. I got bad news for you. School's already gamified, right? Doing a spelling test and getting points for the spelling test, that's a game. Going from level freshman to sophomore, that's leveling up. Getting a letter grade, that's a badge. So we've already gamified school. So that ship has sailed. In terms of extrinsic motivation, some of the early, early tests that measured extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, the instruments themselves were created so that the respondent could not indicate that they were extrinsically and intrinsically motivated at the same time. It was a false dichotomy. You had to be one or the other. In almost every situation, people are both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated. So let's, Julie, for example, wants to get her PhD, right? Well, you might get a better job. That's extrinsic motivation, but you're also interested in the subject matter. That's intrinsic motivation. So you're motivated by both. But let's say that people still don't like the point system and all that kind of stuff, because if you're purely extrinsic motivation, it doesn't work. You're gonna have a little bit of both. Don't use those elements. Use the elements of story. Use the elements of progress. I call this deep gamification. Use the elements of progress. Use the elements of feedback loop. Use the elements of overcoming consequences. Use the elements of making decisions. Use the elements of prioritization. So there's a lot of elements in games that have nothing to do with points, badges, or leaderboards. In fact, no one plays a game just for the points. There's a really interesting site that all it is is a button and every time you press it, you get points. That's CalClicker, isn't it? Yes, CalClicker. Yes, yes. Yes, I couldn't think of the name. But, and it's got really clever little stories, but it becomes maddening after a while because the other elements of games like cooperation, competition, outwitting an opponent. So don't think of games as these extrinsic elements. Think of the deeper elements of games that motivate you to play them. Problem solving, alternative, thinking about alternatives, overcoming challenges, weaving and creating a story. Use all those elements from games rather than the points, badges, and leaderboards. And that's what content gamification is all about. Just a great question. It is a quick question. Mark Holbert Wilson and another person I've just missed said, what are the elements called for deep gamification? Well, okay. I called them, I'm sorry, what was the question? I was reading the chat. What are the elements called for deep gamification? Or is deep gamification the phrase that you're addressing? I, I, that's the phrase that I've been using called a deep gamification. I think I've seen it in the research. Sometimes call it, some people call it gainful. Sebastian Dieterding calls it gainful design. So that's another way to think about as gainful design. So those are some ways to take a look at it. Yeah, it's interesting, Tom. I've also seen, he talks about some of the studies, but I've actually seen some studies that contradict that, that says that extrinsic motivation actually can lead to intrinsic motivation. Eventually people become intrinsically motivated and setting some of the limits with extrinsic motivation actually drive creativity. So there's a lot of, I went to a conference one time and it was a bunch of researchers about gamification. They said, and this was like a few years ago. They said, well, when will we know if gamification works and they said, well, in about 50 years. And we have enough research and enough body of knowledge to know. So I would say we're still working through some of this stuff and we don't know for sure, but there is elements on both sides. Thank you for pressing on that a little further. And thank you, Mark, as always. I always learn something when Mark asks a question. We've time for one quick last question. Oh, I'm sorry, this is a big question too. And this is a, but it's a really good one. I wanna make sure that we get this. This is from Kay Hamshire, Dallas College. She says, her organization is pushing the need to develop online courses quickly, i.e. five weeks. Does this mean development of games is not possible? Or how complex are the games you develop? Right, so great questions. So for example, my frame of students being broken into teams, I did that this semester online and you could do that as well. What's the subject matter? What can they write or work on together as a team? Is there an element of judgment? All of that thing can be part of it. I also have started to use digital tools, which are the frameworks already created. So for example, I use poll everywhere. And I use poll everywhere part of a story and a certain elements of the story I asked the students, is it this or this? And then when they answer, I can see right away if the students are getting it the right answer or not getting it, a very simple tool and question and answer. And I don't think you need technology for gamification. I think what you need is creative design. And I think using the elements of story, using the elements of character, using the elements of solving a problem or all game elements that you can integrate into it without taking a long time to develop. Usually it takes a little bit longer to develop but not dramatically. And the results are usually much more powerful because one of the things that games do really well is they tap into our emotions. And so if you can tap into a strong emotion, you can help with recall and help with the learning process. These are all great. Each of these questions are great questions. Each of these questions are almost like an entire lecture on my courses. So I feel like I'm like sprinting through the content and questions but these are great, very deep questions. So I'm really enjoying this. Well, I appreciate both your answer to that question as well as your comment overall because we are, I'm afraid, out of time. This has been a terrific, terrific conversation. I'm just delighted at your enthusiasm, Carl, but also the depth of knowledge and your ability to answer questions with incredible precision. And my hats off to my forum colleagues for wonderful, wonderful questions. Just really, really quickly, Carl, how can we keep up with you? Is it best to follow your blog if that takes off again or should we follow you on Twitter or how? Probably the best place is Twitter because I put a lot of information there but also LinkedIn. I have a newsletter on LinkedIn called L&D Easter Eggs. If you follow or subscribe to that, you'll get the latest and greatest on my thinking and links to other things that I'm doing. So that's a great place to follow me. And then if you're on YouTube, follow the unauthorized unofficial series or unofficial unauthorized series that way. But I usually then tweet about all that stuff on Twitter, so if you only wanna follow me in one place, Twitter would be the place. Okay, great. And Roxanne just shared your handle, which is K-CAP in the chat. Carl, thank you again. This has been terrific and very inspiring. I really appreciate it and we're gonna have to bring you back to follow up on this. That'd be great, yeah. Now thanks, everybody. Great questions, great insights, and I learned a lot too, so. Perfect. I hope you enjoy that, yes. Take care and good luck with the book project. We'll talk to you. All right, thanks. But don't go away, friends. Just a couple of points about where we're headed next. First, again, thank you all for the great, great questions and thoughts. This has been fantastic. Looking ahead, again, we have a whole series of sessions coming up covering related and very different topics, everything from technology and academia to sparking emerging and tech conversations with the game, to federal policy changes, improving education equity for black students, and more, just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more. If you would like to look back, if you wanna keep talking about these issues, we have a lot of conversation that goes on on Twitter, using the hashtag FTTE, but we also have Spaces and LinkedIn and Facebook. If you'd like to go back into the past and look at some of our previous sessions where we explore gaming and learning, we've been doing that since the beginning, just head to tinyurl.com slash FTF Archive. There's almost 260 videos there right now. And that's it for right now. Thank you again for a great conversation. Everybody else loved to hear your thoughts about gaming. I'll quickly whip up a blog post about your comments, links, and unasked questions that came up today. Please go ahead and be gameful, and above all, be safe. We'll see you next time. Take care. Bye-bye.