Skip to main content

Re-imagining Schools: The Perfect Game Ecosystem


Seth Priebatsch, who dropped out of Princeton University to found a website called SCVNGR, aims to build “the game layer on top of the world.”  His goal is to take the lessons learned from the game design industry (which grew larger than Hollywood in 2004) and apply them to other elements of the world.  One target he has set his sights on is education. Game mechanics, he argues, can revolutionize the way schools work.

In his keynote address at SXSW Interactive 2011, Priebatsch began by describing schools as “the perfect game ecosystem.”  Schools involve players, challenges, rewards, rules, levels, appointment dynamics, countdowns, incentives, disincentives, and more.  But, he argues, schools are crippled by a number of structural hazards.  One of his examples is the role of grades.  Grades, in gameplay, are like levels, and cum laude, percentile rankings, and the honor roll are statuses or badges that students can earn based on their levels.  

Only several of the ways schools match game ecosystems

Currently, however, students can lose in this game.  Their grades can go down.  In the language of gameplay, he argues that students should never be able to “level-down,” by dropping from an A to a C, for example, because this offers a disincentive to continue engaging.  

In video games today, players rarely face the disincentive of losing.  Games accomplish this by using progression dynamics instead of weighted averages.  In games, players earn points for what they accomplish instead of losing points for their mistakes, as students do on assessments.  In games, a player who does not succeed has the chance to try again.  

Applying this to a class, then, would mean that students gain, let’s say, the “quadratic formula” level or badge after successfully using the quadratic formula in ways the teacher determines.  If they do not succeed, they can practice and try again.  Once students do so to the teacher’s satisfaction, they move on to the “completing the square” level.  After several more levels, students might have to complete the review level for “factoring polynomials.”  

This is a compelling reframing, to me, of how a school might operate. Is school a game?  Certainly not—at least in way that we perceive many games as being frivolous—but envisioning education as a game ecosystem in this way offers an opportunity for understanding the experience of education: how motivation accrues, how students are rewarded, etc.  Followers of what’s happening with Khan Academy’s back end software (not the online video component, but the software that schools use to track student progress) will know that this is exactly what’s happening to math curricula in a number of west coast schools.  It involves a dramatic reimagining of how we understand schools, a reimagining that requires first, the mental creativity to see this new vision of education in one’s mind, and then the material creativity to make it a practical reality.  

--

Seth Priebatsch on Schools and Game Design (start at 5m 33s):


Salman Khan demonstrating Progression Dynamics (start at 7m 30s):


Also:

- Game Design Guide
blogger analytics
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Four Ways to Measure Creativity

Assessing creative work has been a bugaboo for a good long time.  In schools it's the constant refrain: “How can you grade creative writing?”  or “It’s a poem: however it comes out is right.”  In businesses and elsewhere, people demand innovation--and are stymied with understanding how to measure it. But this is not the bugaboo we think it is--in the classroom, or in the broader world of creative work.  Here are four different ways to assess creativity, each designed for different settings: 1. Measuring How Creative a Person Is - The Guilford Model 2. Measuring How Creative a Work Is - The Taxonomy of Creative Design 3. Measuring Creative Work Against a Program - The Requirements Model 4. Measuring the Social Value of Creative Work - Csikszentmihalyi’s Model Notably, in each of these cases, what we mean by "creative" changes a little.  Sometimes "creativity" refers to divergent production (how much one produces, or how varied it is).  Sometimes "c...
8 comments
Read more

Taxonomy of Creative Design

Strategies to improve creativity are many, but they are also diffuse.  Little ties them together in a way that offers a coherent vision for how creativity can be understood or developed incrementally.  The Taxonomy of Creative Design, a work in progress, offers a new theory for doing so. Since creative work can be measured along spectrums of both and form and content, the Taxonomy of Creative Design offers a progression from imitation to original creation measured in terms of form and content.  In doing so, it organizes creative works into an inclusive, unifying landscape that serves not only as an analytical lens through which one might evaluate creative work, but also as a methodical approach to developing creative skills. Here is a closer look: Imitation Imitation is the replication of a previous work.  It is the painter with an easel at the museum, painting her own Mona Lisa; it is the jazz musician performing the solo of the great...
12 comments
Read more

A Cognitive Model for Educators: Attention, Encoding, Storage, Retrieval (Part 2 of 14)

So how do  people learn?  What are the mechanics of memory?  Can we distill thousands of articles and books to something that is manageable, digestible, and applicable to our classrooms?   Yes.   In brief, the cognitive process of learning has four basic stages: Attention : the filter through which we experience the world Encoding : how we process what our attention admits into the mind Storage : what happens once information enters the brain Retrieval : the recall of that information or behavior Almost everything we do or know, we learn through these stages, for our learning is memory, and the bulk of our memory is influenced by these four processes: what we pay attention to, how we encode it, what happens to it in storage, and when and how we retrieve it. Here’s a closer look at each: Attention: We are bombarded by sensory information, but we attend to only a small amount of it.  We constantly process sights, sounds, smells, a...
Post a Comment
Read more