Digital Play

It’s my pleasure to introduce a guest blog post by James York, who, as I mentioned last week, has been doing some very interesting things in his classroom, using gamification to motivate his students. Thanks, James for an inspiring piece on how you get started – I’m sure it will lead to more language teachers following your lead.

Gamification—the application of game-mechanics to real life situations—is currently reaching (or reached?) the peak of its hype cycle invading all areas of our life from website loyalty systems, the rewards and achievements in video games, social apps (Foursquare, SCVNGR), health apps (Runkeeper, Fleetly), and recently even our classrooms (Class Dojo).

I personally heard about the phenomenon through the book by Lee Sheldon: The Multiplayer Classroom which really struck a chord with me for a number of reasons:

1. I am an avid gamer,

2. I have a deep interest in CALL (based on personal experience as a language learner),

3. I was frustrated with my universities grading system.

Upon finishing the book (actually, while reading also) I immediately started planning out how I could adapt the concept to my own situation. As a language teacher my goals for students were initially grouped into the four key skills: Listening, reading, speaking, and writing. I then thought up a number of tasks (or in this case “quests” that would help students develop each skill. In Sheldon’s book (and MMORPGs) there is usually a distinction between solo and group quests, so I also thought up a number of each which can be mostly thought of as: group = in-class quest, solo = out of class quest. The list of available quests was put up on a project wiki as reference for my students. Their XP scores were also made public on the same site.

I then had to pitch the whole idea to my students. I did this with the following slide show which I showed the class at the start of the semester. The idea to start the first class of the semester with “You all have an F!” is again from the Sheldon book.

Solo Quests

Solo quests epitomize the self-study or autonomy that we as educators want from students. With reference to Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and in principal the notion of giving students choice in what they learn, I believed that providing a decent range of tasks would appeal to both performance- and mastery-orientated students. There was no pressure to do any single quest, and they could do as little or as much as they liked. Obviously, the students that did more would guarantee themselves a higher grade based on the cumulative nature of attainable XP-per-quest, but there was still no direct i.e. “You HAVE to read 3 graded readers a semseter” pressure from me, their teacher.

Sample quests included:

Quick writing

Instructions

1. Set yourself five minutes to write. Not four. Not six.
2. Write as much as you can about the English lesson you had that week with Mr York. Here are some things you can write about:
   1. Did you learn any new words or grammar points?
   2. What did you do in the lesson?
   3. Was the lesson good or bad? What was good or bad?
3. VERY IMPORTANT: Write how many words you wrote, your student number and your name on the paper.

 

Scoring

• You will get 10XP each time you complete a quick writing activity. (You can only do it once a week).
• The person who writes the most words will also receive a bonus 50XP at the end of the semester.

 

Skype

Instructions

1. Add Mr York on Skype. His username is yorksensei
2. Leave a voicemail of you speaking about anything! Some examples include:

 

Leveling guide:

There are a number of levels to this quest series.

You must do the quests in order.

It is OK to repeat quests 2 – 9.

1. 20XP: Give a self introduction.
   1. Your hobbies
   2. Your family
   3. Where you live
   4. What you like / dislike etc.
2. 20XP: What you did this week.
3. 30XP: Read a book for 30 seconds.
4. 40XP: Speak about the things you like / dislike about Mr Yorks new teaching project.
5. 40XP: Read something you wrote for 30 seconds.
6. 50XP: Give your opinion on a news article / news story.
7. 50XP: Speak about your hobby / favorite sports team for over 30 seconds.
8. 100XP: Speak with a friend for over 2 minute about the things you like / dislike about Mr Yorks new teaching project.
9. 100XP: Speak with a friend for over 2 minutes about your week at TDU.

 

The skype quest features a quest line similar to what you find in RPGs, and is based on the notion of presenting more difficult challenges as players (or in our case: learners) get better at the specific task to keep them interested. Too easy and it becomes boring, too hard and it becomes frustrating.

Group quests

Group quests were mainly quests that were part of the coursework I set for students such as creating a presentation about a theme which all group members had a common interest and the RPG battle game I developed (part 1 / part 2). One particular group quest that worked well and I repeated on numerous occasions was the Textbook Review Battle. Here are the details:

Instructions:

1. Guilds (predetermined groups of students) choose a page that we have already covered from the textbook.

2. They ask questions to their opponent guild about vocabulary or grammar on that page.

3. Preparatory five minutes:

   1. They test each within the group first. During this time, they must also browse through the book and review all that we have done because they are going to be tested on something by their opponents, too.

   2. 10 BONUS XP for the group who finishes first.

   3. 5 Bonus XP to the group who finishes second.

4. Dual five minutes:

   1. Guilds take it in turn to ask a question to their opponent guild.

   2. Guilds must ask a total of 10 questions.

   3. Guilds have 10 seconds to scan through their textbooks for the possible answer to a question.

   4. Each guild-mate must answer a question at least once. There is no order in answering.

   5. Questions can be: 

      1. Regarding vocabulary

      2. Regarding a grammar structure

      3. An original question based on the grammar/vocabulary on that page.

   6. Questions cannot:

      1. Require a Japanese answer

      2. Be taken as-is from the book.

      3. Require opponents to use words/grammar that we have not covered previously in class.

      4. Be something that the opponent team will not know the answer to. E.g. “What is the largest lizard in America?”

Scoring:

• If a guild answers a question correctly, they are rewarded 10 points. 

• If they cannot answer the question or answer incorrectly, the asking team gets 10 points.

• The team with the most points at the end of the 20 questions (10 each) is declared the winner and receives 50XP. The losing team gets 10XP. If it is a draw, they both get 25XP.

Extra information:

• If the guilds cannot decide if a question was answered correctly or not, they can ask the teacher to be a 3rd party judge.

• Relates to the “intergroup competition as a means of building within group friendships” p.25 of Group dynamics in the language classroom by Murphey and Dornyei

This task worked for a number of reasons:

1. Students had a choice in making their own questions

2. The element of competition increased engagement

3. Not knowing what they would be tested on made the task exciting

4. Knowing the answers to questions reinforced what they had learned during their time in my class.

5. (From a teachers perspective) Students were eager to review the course content!

Experience points

As seen in the above examples, the incentive for completing any quest in the “multiplayer classroom” is the promise of a pre-determined amount of experience points (XP) which are used in place of the typical A to F grading system. The concept is that students start with zero points and by accumulating XP, they work their way up towards getting an A (awarded at 900 points in my particular context). Speaking from my personal experience, there are three important characteristics to this model that promote greater engagement from students.

Choose your own route to an A

In contrast to the traditional model of only rewarding students that achieve perfect test scores, with the XP system any student can reach the A-grade level. Why? Because grading is based not only on tests, but also on the effort students put into their language learning endeavors on a daily basis. Additionally, they are free to choose the tasks/activities that they WANT to do, not what the teacher sets them.

Visualisation of their grades

Although the model of experience points is one taken from role-playing video games, I feel that if we analyze the term literally, it has real relevance to educational contexts, especially language learning. We are rewarding students for their experience in speaking/listening to/reading/writing the target language. The more they do, the more experience they have with it, and in turn, the more they are rewarded for their efforts by their teacher.

In language learning, it can be very difficult to measure progress, as there is no tangible object to reflect ones knowledge or experience. Thus, by giving students points (regardless of how generic the value is), they can also see how much they have achieved as their value goes up over time.

Competition

One issue I have been trying to overcome since working at my current establishment is the lack of response from students when asking questions to the whole class. Little did I know that what worked for me in an elementary school setting would also have relevance in a university-level classroom also! What I am talking about is the simple manner of rewarding students for answering questions, providing insights, listening carefully, etc.

As can be seen on the left hand side in the picture below, I drew a grid on the white board at the start of each class, which represents where each student group is sitting. Whenever any student did something that I thought deserved a point of recognition or praise, I would make a line in their section of the grid. At the end of the lesson, the group with the most points would be rewarded with a specific amount of XP. While this system works well, you have to be careful not to make the lesson more about accumulating the most amount of points rather than learning English!

http://yorksensei.posterous.com/creating-rage-comics-with-efl-students#

As mentioned above, another way competition was woven into the curriculum was with group quests that were designed to pit students against each other. Competition is an element that motivates students differently, so if putting students against each other individually, you may find the class at different levels of excitement or engagement. If however, we put students into groups, I find that the competitive students help get the non-competitive students engaged and a focus on teamwork is fostered.

Reflections

Looking at any one of the XP sheets reveals a few details regarding what did and didn’t work with this trail run of the project. I would like to tackle the positive and negative aspects separately.

Positive aspect 1: Class Participation

At the start of the previous semester, students were told that their class participation would count towards 30% of their overall grade. However, no daily feedback or record of their individual participation level was taken, meaning that “class participation” was a vague teacher-determined (biased?) value decided upon at the end of the semester.

With this method though, where students get instant feedback on their participation, and a clear reason to participate (to gain XP), class participation levels went up. A lot. Whereas before I would have to ask a question and force myself to count from 10 up to 30 seconds before finally providing the answer myself, I had multiple students offering answers almost instantaneously after asking a question.

Positive aspect 2: Fun

Quite a simple point, but with the addition of game-like activities and team-based “battles” the class dynamic was one of laughter, rivalry and camaraderie. One example includes teams trying to catch their opponents out with tricky questions based on a presentation they just gave. Another being students laughing out loud as I put on Final Fantasy battle music as BGM for a particularly demanding activity.

Negative aspect 1: Unbalanced XP achievements

At the same time as doing this project, I also started an Internet English and crowd-sourcing project called EFLcomics (which you can read about more here). This project basically had students making short comics for the website Reddit.com where native speakers would correct mistakes and leave comments. As a means to promote my students to submit comics to this project, I proposed that for each comic students submitted, they would be rewarded with 25XP. This figure further increased to 50XP towards the end of the semester as an additional incentive to submit material. In summary, then, due to my own personal interests, the XP weighting of quests was skewed.

Negative aspect 2: Still a lack of self-study

Although class participation went up, only a few students actually completed solo-quests as part of their self-study. As a result, towards the end of the semester it looked like a good proportion of the class would fail, so I had to dish out XP points for class participation. Not ideal. I think there are a number of reasons why students were not motivated to increase their English self-study and I have provided commentary on how these issues may be approached in further implementations of this project.

1. They are not used to studying English at home!

• Although the way the course was introduced was all very playful, it may be worth reinforcing the fact that they will fail the course (a new concept for them?!) if they do not study outside of class.

2. There wasn’t enough support to show how tasks could be done at home.

• Go through a number of the solo tasks at the end of class.

3. There was too much choice regarding which solo quest to do.

• Set a specific quest as homework each week. This will force students to attempt a number of different quests, which may result in them discovering which ones they enjoyed and would like to continue.

Finally

One thing I will definitely be improving next year is the structure of “quest lines.” Compare the Skype quest line to the quick writing quest. The structure and gradual increase in difficulty of the Skype quest line is structured more like a game where challenges and rewards increase exponentially to keep players engaged. The “quest line” concept will thus be applied to all areas of self-study solo quests in the coming semester.