Early in my attempts to incorporate hobby game elements into my classroom, I stumbled across a blog called Gaming the Classroom, and at that moment my conviction that gaming had great potential for learning increased tenfold. The blog is the result of great interest shown to a college course about multiplayer game design taught by Lee Sheldon at Indiana University. But, the type of game design the course taught wasn’t what grabbed me. I have never played WoW or any of its siblings. I was intrigued by the design of the course itself. The entire course was structured like a MMO, like a game. Students have avatars, work in guilds, gain experience points, and level-up to higher grades. To my geeky mind, this was and still is pure awesomeness, so I am using Sheldon’s syllabus as a model for my English courses this upcoming school year.
It is important for me to remember, though, that not all students like games. So, using the language of gaming in a course will not automatically cause all students to look at the course in a more positive way. I have decided that I might not be able to do much about that. I cannot design a course framed with several different themes and disparate languages. Those not into gaming or fantasy tropes will just have to suck it up a bit, I suppose. Maybe they can simply mentally translate the gaming language back into typically classroom lingo. That should be simple enough.
However, these are not the only kids that I need to consider if I want to make the best of this experiment. I also have to consider the gamers in the class that have little interest in their grade point averages. Those of us who play games a lot know that within our ranks are all kinds of gamers; we even have names and categories for these different types of dice-rollers and button-smashers. We know that some want to destroy, some want to investigate, some what to collaborate, and some simply want to win at all costs. We also know that these four motivations do not automatically correspond with a desire to get an “A” in English class.
This means that gaining experience points–XP–must offer more rewards to students than just increasing their course averages. Now, there’s the challenge because if these alternate awards are good enough, some students will choose them solely, even to their academic detriment. Then the parent calls will start, and I will become cranky. At this point, I have come up will one possible way to fight this: awards other than class points/XP are only available to a student who has reached a certain level. This means that before a student can access homework passes or the like he must earn enough XP to level-up to a “C” class average. So, a student will have to be passing the class in order to reap non-grade related benefits. The next challenge is coming up with alternate XP awards that are attractive to various types of students. Homework passes don’t appeal much to a student who never does homework anyway.
I welcome any suggestions, but be sure to check out Gaming the Classroom first. It’s worth it.
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