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

Why not use gamification?

[SirGarlon]

why not use the concept in universities and other educational institutions?

Because flunking people who don't care about learning is preferable to pandering to them?

Re:Why not use gamification?

[omnichad]

I'm not sure if I agree. Part of a topic being engaging or not is having it be presented in a way that shows its importance. My favorite class in high school was a history class where the teacher used role-playing to show just why certain decisions were made. Even if it was done for the wrong reasons I think it could still have a positive effect. Even as someone who would pay attention anyway, having an entire class engaged presents far more perspectives than being the only interested student.

Re:Why not use gamification?

[Pentium100]

Except that some parts of this are because of human psychology. I remember one professor saying that you need to lecture no more than 15 minutes at a time, then tell a joke or something otherwise everyone will fall asleep (or just will not learn anything, even though they tried to pay attention to what is being said). Yes, sometimes, the topic is so interesting you can listen for the 1.5 hours, but most of the time you will forget 99% of what was said after the first 15-30 minutes.

As for

If you are going to a university but you can't be bothered enough to pay attention and actually engage yourself in your own education, even if the material is dull, then just save us all a lot of trouble and stay home.

this can be used to justify not having any lectures at all. Anyone sufficiently motivated should just read the relevant books and learn, the professors just needs to give the list of the books to read and then grade the exam/papers.

Why are you opposed to things that make life easier? I mean if gamifying education leads to better educated people, why not do it? If using a wheelbarrow makes it easier/faster to transport snow/dirt/etc short distances, why not use it?

Re:Why not use gamification?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Why are you opposed to things that make life easier? I mean if gamifying education leads to better educated people, why not do it? If using a wheelbarrow makes it easier/faster to transport snow/dirt/etc short distances, why not use it?

I've been thinking about this sort of question in the bigger picture. What set me down the path was the political observation that as a party republicans are anti-gay except for individuals like Cheney who have a gay child, the party is also pro-torture except for individuals who have actually been tortured like McCain. So I've been trying to figure out if there is a rule that explains such things instead of just trying to score political points.

What I've come up with is this: People like to create their own "personal" rules for how members of society should behave - generally these rules are simple, even natural, to follow for the person who makes them up. Gay marriage is an easy one - straight people have no interest in getting gay married. It is a rule that is natural for them to follow so they have little understanding of what it is like to be on the other side of that rule. A more trivial example came from the husband of a good friend of mine - he forbid their pre-teen daughter from chewing gum. Not for any health reasons, simply because he thought people who chewed gum looked stupid. Of course he didn't like to chew gum himself so he saw no value in it and came up with this rule that didn't cost him anything.

I see the same thing here - chances are the OP is someone for whom traditional educational methods worked pretty well. That makes it easy for him to endorse the current system - it worked for him, it should work for anyone. Anyone for whom it doesn't work must be defective, lazy, wants something for nothing, etc.

Looking back over my life, I can see how I've made up a bunch of similar rules about both trivial and important things. Those rules haven't really helped me, they just gave me a reason to look down on other people who didn't deserve it. In some cases even to dismiss their humanity. In the long run all it did was make me miss opportunities that were right in front of me. So now I try to question my own assumptions about how people should act, and when they aren't directly hurting anyone I make a conscious effort to accept them rather than disparage them.

Fun

[Hatta]

It's no longer fun once someone forces you to do it. Then it just becomes insulting. Doubly so if you already know what they're trying to convey and will be penalized for poor performance at the game despite mastery of the material.

Boring?

[Missing.Matter]

Honestly, if I'm paying $500 - $1000 *per lecture*, I'm going to sit and pay attention no matter how boring the material or the professor is. I realize that some professors or subjects are dull beyond comprehension, but you're actually *paying* to be there so sit up and listen. Get a good night's rest, read the material before coming to class, engage yourself in the discussion (or if there is no discussion, engage yourself in an internal discussion with questions).... no need to dress up like cartoon characters to make the class interesting like we're teaching 3rd graders with uncontrollable ADD. This is college. These are (ostensibly) adults. Give me a break.

Re:I've always hated gamification

[Hatta]

It's not just you. From The Simpsons season 3:

Principle Skinner: Oh, licking envelopes can be fun! All you have to do is make a game of it.
Bart: What kind of game?
Principle Skinner: Well, for example, you could see how many you could lick in an hour, then try to break that record.
Bart: Sounds like a pretty crappy game to me.
Principle Skinner: Yes, well... Get started.

If the Simpsons were making fun of your idea 20 years ago, you might not want to build a career on it.

It's about effective teaching

[Okian Warrior]

Compare a course where you would retain 30% of the content with a course where you would retain 70% of the same content: which would you choose?

Everyone whining about "pandering to the unmotivated" is missing the point: the current class/lecture model started over a thousand years ago and is not optimized for learning. In this century we now know much more about the neurological underpinnings of how people learn, so it makes sense that we should try to optimize the process.

College (or an online course, or work-related training) should be as effective as possible. Some lecturers have this figured out, but most don't.

Stanford is considered a hard school not because the material is difficult, but because it's presented in a way that's hard to learn. Only the brightest and most motivated students can thrive in that situation, which helps to build the "best and brightest" reputation. The reputation comes not from quality of education, but difficulty of education.

(Check out the online videos for Probabilistic Graphical Models by Dr. Daphne Koller at Stanford. Alternately, check out her book on the subject. The book is largely unreadable, and the videos are dreadfully obtuse. Her class at Stanford is well known as a weeder.)

One great aspect of the ongoing MOOC revolution is that everyone is competing on an open field. Instructors using more effective techniques will be perceived as better teachers while the "old-school, cannot change, it's always worked for me" crowd will be left in the dust.

Gamification is a technique for more effective teaching.

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.