Professor Cliff Lampe Talks About Gamification in Academia (Video)

Professor Lampe is using gamification in his 200-student lecture classes to make them more interesting. He says big-class lectures can often be as boring for the professor as they are for the students. A little bit of game-type action can spice things up and make classes more interesting. Near the end of the video he points out that gamification is becoming popular for employee training in private enterprise, so why not use the concept in universities and other educational institutions?

Comments

I've always hated gamification

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or is gamification incredibly condescending?

Re:Why not use gamification?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to defend gamification, but I think you overly-simplified the issue of engagement in the classroom by making it a student-issue. Even for the most engrossing subjects, if you have a poor teacher it is not unreasonable to expect even exceptional students to become disengaged. I for one love math and statistics, but when had a 1/10 online rated professor teach the subject, I never paid any attention in class whatsoever, opting instead to teach myself afterwards directly from the book. Had the teacher been open to supplemental tools to improve his ability to relay information in new and different ways that made learning a more engaging topic, then I just might have stayed awake during his class and not read the book in a quiet library afterwards.

While I am not suggesting that gamification be the answer for all teachers everywhere, and it certain contexts it can be almost condescending in implementation, using gamification as a supplemental tool in a teachers arsenal can greatly improve classroom engagement. Not everyone who doesn't pay attention is an arrogant lazy bum.

Re:Resource for teachers interested in Gamificatio

[fermion]

Certainly the socratic method and socratic circles can be a highly effective method to teaching many subjects. In fact, the classic lecture is exactly this. It models the method, and then encourages the student to go out and have dialogues, with students for example, taking on the roles of Simplicio, Salviati, and Sagredo. While this method is useful for philosophical discussions, it has fallen out favor for evidence based discussion as it inherently introduces personality into the discussion.

And it is not really relevant here as we are specifically talking about engagement and grading. It does not matter if students are paying attention to a teacher or box. The key is that student engagement is the issue. Likewise, it does not matter whether grade are added up, or awarded based on tests, or level completed. What matter is that students are graded based on the content and skills they can demonstrate, not how they can manipulate the system to earn points.

This is where the games come it. They can hold the attention of the student. But a game is something that is an adversarial process, where information is held back, and must be unlocked by completed often unrelated tasks. The experience of the student in that a game is often separated from the knowledge and skill is exactly what causes it be difficult to use. For instance, I once used a game that was developed by people who were very smart and very familiar with teaching, learning, children, and assessment. Points were added and levels gained as the student when through the process. Some motivated students did very well. But many students just played the game to win, that is simply figured out what the game rules were, played by those rules, and then exited without significant learning.

Which is why simply saying that counting up, that rewarding the class for success, that being positive and engaging student self esteeem, is not sufficient and has not been sufficient since these things were in wide use 50 years ago, 100 years ago, I mean maybe even 10000 years ago. And what we are talking about is not educating a elite, but educating everyone. And to do that a wide array of methods must be used, not just the favorite or the one currently in fashion.