Teaching Tip #1 Three Gamification Tips You Can Use Today

(A slightly longer form of this article appeared as a Teaching Tip for Oakton on September 3, 2019 as a form of publicity for my September gamification professional development workshop)

If you've ever used a device, app or program that tracked your progress, awarded you a badge, or ranked you on a leaderboard, you've experienced a form of gamification. Gamification is defined as the application of game concepts to non-game situations. It's used widely in advertising and business to engage customers and employees, and we can use it to draw our students' attention away from their smart phones and back into the classroom.

The good news is that gamifying your course doesn't have to be complicated. You can do it easily through D2L/Brightspace and with a little planning you can gamify face-to-face lectures and discussions as well.

Here are few simple common elements of gamification theory you can start using right away to motivate students and to teach them not only content but also the benefits of good study practices.

1. Rewards/Achievements: What makes Fitbit and Candy Crush so addicting? It's the steady stream of intangible rewards like colorful buttons or banners that read "Great Job!" or "You got this!" that stimulate the pleasure centers of our brains. D2L has an incorporated "Awards" system with a wide variety of pre-made badges you can use. I've listed some YouTube links below that walk you through the steps of using badges. You can award badges for finishing readings or completing assignments; you can even make a "You signed up for the course!" that every student will get when they first sign on. In a face-to-face classroom consider handing out stickers or tokens. The receiving student can then turn those in at the end of class towards extra credit, or toward the overall points of their team? After all, "50 points for Gryffindor!" was very motivating to Harry Potter.

2. No stakes: Most folks play games to relax. We all have students that get overly anxious when it comes to grades. So some of the gamified tasks should not heavily graded or worth only a few points (pedagogically these are called "formative assignments"). An easy way to do this is online is with practice quizzes or tests on D2L. (And wouldn't you rather have students do practice tasks for badges than turn in homework you'd have to manually grade?) There are also multiple outside free sources you can link to (like Quizlet flashcard sets, Google's self-driven Peardeck worksheets or video platforms) that you can track as well.

3. Instant feedback: This is very important. In the same way a puppy learns a new trick, humans learn best if they know immediately whether if they did a task correctly or not. This is easy in face-to-face classes as you can tell students right away if they told you a correct or valid answer in discussion. Online, those hints or answers need to be on those practice quizzes right after the student takes them. Think about how those Facebook quizzes work online... not only does the taker get feedback right away, but they can show off to their friends. You can do the same thing with badges on D2L.

Other gamification concepts to consider include:

  • Embracing Failure as the road to "Leveling Up" (or as we used to call it: practice)

  • Multiple chances to gain badges/achievements

  • Teamwork

  • Short- and Long-term Goals

  • Short and Long-term Competition

  • Student/Player Agency

  • Visible Progress

  • ...and more

Links for D2L awards and badges videos:

Further Reading:

The Best Bumper Stickers are Non-Committal

I made some bumper stickers/magnets that I thought were funny and have been driving around with them for years. Then the Politics! magnet disappeared (I suspect it was stolen by aliens) so I had to make new Opinions! and Politics! magnets:

Politics Sticker at BuildASign HERE

But then I decided I wanted to make them into stickers and made some at RedBubble where they were much cheaper. RedBubble will take your design and let people use it to make a T-shirt or decorative pillow I guess? and then send you some money and I’m like, sure why not. I got an email that I made like three dollars because someone in Sweden bought some shirts. So, yay Swedes!?

Redbubble T-shirt for some reason

The moral is: if you make yourself a sticker you think is funny, other people will too?

The moral is: if you make yourself a sticker you think is funny, other people will too?

Norwegian word of the day is: “problem” translation: “problem”

  • For eksempel: En person har et problem. (norsk)
  • For example: A person has a problem. (English)

This word of the day has been brought to you by: The Norwegian is the Easiest Language for English Speakers to Learn Council.

Assessment, assessment, who's got assessment

So I was supposed to run a workshop entitled: “Build Better Assessments to Meet Learning Objectives: How to write your course assessments so they are valid, reliable, and effortless to grade!” Yeah, I know, I wouldn’t want to take that either. My major beef with that title is it has the word “assessment” in it.

The word “assessment” is horrible. Who wants to be “assessed”? I don’t. To me, being assessed sounds like you are being summed up as to whether you are worth giving the last tank of oxygen in the spaceship.

To me it conjures up that first day in middle school gym in the locker room when my eyes met with a classmate called Betsy S. whose pool locker for swim class was next to mine. She’d clearly reached puberty when she was born and was all 1970’s tan and naturally blond and busty and gorgeous, and she clearly forgot that I existed the moment she looked away the way a goldfish forgets where the edge of the fishbowl is (not actually true, but I was in the middle of writing about myself and forgot what I was writing about). Meanwhile I was still years away from puberty, a year younger than everyone else, twenty pounds underweight and friends only with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. (I also ended up failing swimming class because… it’s me.) That is a bad assessment. Or, for a slightly less emotionally damaging example, arguing with this one guy for five minutes to go out to get a bite after an event where I met him as he looked me up and down saying he got free food at his dorm. I finally bribed him with a free meal at a nice place and dragged him to dinner; I married that guy. (I also ended up failing marriage.) Or standing in front of six frowning departmental chairs and the deans defending my graduate thesis. (Okay, I did pass my thesis defense but it was still scary!) To me that is an assessment. Not some multiple choice quiz.

Of course, while you are a student you get in the mindset that every grade is an assessment of your value as a human being. But that doesn’t help anyone. It certainly doesn’t help student anxiety.

Assessment in the pedagogical circles just means testing, but nOOOoooOOOooo we have to say assessment even when we talk to people who don’t know how to pronounce pedagogy. (I’m still not confident with that one.) Because it’s no fun if you can’t use big words that most people don’t understand. Trust me I know, I’m a doctor. Exophthalmometry, anyone?

Here at the college where I teach part-time “Assessment” is a big buzz word and it makes all the faculty and staff insanely anxious and angry for reasons I don’t totally grok yet. I’m assuming they didn’t ever have a locker next to Betsy S. so I figure it is because they fear getting extra work, being judged, submitting to public ridicule, receiving a demotion or being fired.

It’s all ridiculous because when we talk to colleagues about assessment all we are trying to find out is whether our students are actually learning what we are trying to teach them. And hey, it’s hard to teach students that are in the mindset that passing a quiz is just a chore, that they don’t really have to learn anything, and if they do poorly it only means that their instructor hates them personally.

So I would like to replace the phrase “assessment” with any word or phrase that is sort of the same but not scary. Like: verification, evaluation, measurement, puppy, sunflower or cheese curds. Maybe I should go on a public service campaign to de-mystify the word assessment so that everyone feels better about it. I doubt that will happen, but maybe I can get some balloons or flowers to pass around. That usually puts a smile on faces? Anyone?

I will now assess what you have learned from this blog post.
An "assessment" is:

  • ___A. a critique of everything that defines you
  • ___B. an evaluation by a set of standards
  • ___C. a list of your shortcomings and why you fail
  • ___D. a consensus by your betters that nobody likes you

The answer is B. It's always B.


Today’s Norwegian word is evaluering.

evaluering is either the Norwegian word that means assessment or it is a new service that joins up a variety of outlet stores online to get you the best deals:

Join our e-value ring!

eValueRing.jpg