Games that Teach are All Well and Good, But …

We’ve been missing the point.

Welcome! You’re a Level 0 newbie.

You see, I’m not writing a blog. Or more accurately, I’m running my blog as a game, and you are my favorite player. New players start at Level 0, and you’ll be able to level up as you read it. Let’s get you started.

If you’re reading this game, you probably already know about games in education (and if you don’t, you can catch up by doing some background reading). So you should be able to beat the first challenge: some True-or-False questions.

1. Instant feedback is an important educational method.
2. The iterative process is a strong learning tool.
3. People eagerly learn about topics related to things they’re interested in.
4. Good behavior leads to good habits.
5. Humans are social animals and prosper when interacting with other humans.
6. Games offer all of the benefits of the above.

If you’ve read the background material, you already know the answers, but if you want to check how you did, you can look at the answer key. If you didn’t get them all right, go back and try again. If you did, you may continue.

We already use games in our classrooms. Educators have been teaching our children via gaming for much longer than the research into the subject, and the new data is encouraging for getting even more games into the classroom. The advent of video games makes classroom gaming even easier by handling most of the game mechanics automatically, freeing up player-students to just play. But is it possible to go beyond the single lesson and leverage those same advantages to improve the entire classroom experience?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is this blog.

Well, not just this blog. This blog and other work like it. Take Lee Sheldon’s The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game. It discusses running an entire course as a game, with player-students (like you) starting at zero and working their way to “beating” the course. There are more than a few educators out there doing similar programs in different ways. I’m one of them.

One of many possible ways to run a multiplayer classroom.

I’ve been answering this question for nearly a decade. It’s a question that I’m still answering, an iterative process that may never be perfected. I’m going to dedicate my little corner of the Greater Madison Writing Project’s uber-blog to my answers to this question and take you along with my experiences turning the classroom into a multiplayer game.

Oh, and congratulations!. You’re now Level 1.