Gamification
Throughout my Master of Arts program in Educational Technology (MAET), I have been inspired my so many people in the edtech community. However, one video I watched as part of a required lecture in one of my courses really impacted the way I thought out about education and assessments in particular. James Paul Gee, an educator and researcher at Arizona State University, speaks about video games and lack of assessment versuses education and the abundant assessments and perhaps how the design of education could change to that similar of a video game. Sounds silly? Take a look:
During my summer break of 2014, I had the opportunity to present at Flipcon14. I also attended several sessions about flipped learning, one of which was all about gamification as a flipped mastery approach to education. Having listened to Gee's ideas behind gaming in education and attending sessions about gamification, I was making connections about how to include gaming elements to help my students reach mastery with their science content. I had already implemented the flipped learning model with my sixth graders for about two years, and was pleased with the outcome. However, I felt that my students still were not reaching mastery of the science content. I began the 2014-2015 school year with the intent to just try gamifying to see how it would work out. After the first week of school, my students were hooked, already drawing pictures of Pikachu "charging up his grades". Basically, my students are players in a game we call "Sci-Topia". The students "log in" (take attendance) by tapping in on Class Dojo with my ipad. The students work through "missions" (answer the essential question of the unit), go on "quests" (learning activities), and earn "XP" (experience points). Once students have earned a certain number of XP, they "level up" to show they have mastered that concept and are ready for the next challenge. We keep track of XP on two leaderboards, one for the individual who has the highest XP and one to show the average XP of each class.
So what does it look like? Well, our instructional education team from St. Johns County School District came to my classroom to record what a flipped/gamified class looks like.
Video Credit: St. Johns County School District Instructional Technology Team (Kristin Harrington, Lindsay Burke, and Brock O'Shell)