Fun and Games at Learning.com
“Hello, my name is Dave… and I’m a gamer.”
“Hiii Daaave…”
It started with some innocent (even social) tabletop games, and a couple of different sized Rubik’s Cubes on my desk (no really, just a couple!). Let’s not get into the Magic cards, or those cold mornings outside the game shop before they unlock the doors. More recently I can be found playing video games such as Minecraft or Portal 2 with my daughters, who also can’t seem to get enough gaming.
It’s no secret that games are fun, engaging, and addictive. One might even say that there’s a biological basis for gaming that is strongly tied to that of learning. Kids and kittens all seem to love play, whether it’s competitive or purely imaginative role-play. As educators, we can use this to our advantage by employing elements of gamification and game-based learning. Let’s define those real quick:
Gamification is the application of game mechanics to something that isn’t necessarily a game, in order to increase motivation. For example, you weren’t going to finish filling out that LinkedIn profile, were you? Yawwwwn. But that progress bar says you’re already 40% complete — just add your boss’s maiden name and you’ll be 42% done! Well jeez, that’s… actually kinda fun. Feel that dopamine!
Game-based learning (GBL) is the use of an actual game to teach something. For example, many teachers are now using Minecraft to teach collaboration, digital citizenship, and general problem solving. GBL uses the engagement of gameplay to help teach “the whole student.” Think mock trial, or Model UN — immersive role-playing games that give the student an experience that no textbook could.
Here at Learning.com, we have been increasingly dipping our toes into these fun waters. To some extent, any interactive digital lesson is already kind of like a game. My kids have always been eager to play with our content; even the lessons that aren’t the most exciting can engage them, even if all they have to do is drag-and-drop a word. (“When are you bringing your daughter back to do some more of that free QA?” -my project mgr) So in some way, all of our content is already either somewhat gamified or game-based. But armed with strategies that are recently becoming more well-known in the EdTech world, we can crank up the engagement level on new or existing products. I will use our Adaptive Keyboarding (“AK”) app as an example below.
The Gamifying of Adaptive Keyboarding
In general, gamification elements can be added to existing designs, or even to already-developed projects (hopefully without too much refactoring). Because of the componentized design of AK (which we wrote in AngularJS), it was easy to start dev work on the meat of the app while still hammering out gamification elements with the product/design folks. We knew that we wanted a progress bar of some kind, and to give the student some kind of badges, level-ups, or XP (experience points) based on their time spent typing. In our database design we made sure to store, for each user, their current level as well as how much time they’d spent typing at that level. We figured this would give us the flexibility to feed the UI with whatever it needed to satisfy the decided-upon design.
Our amazing UX Architect came up with the idea of changing the entire background of the app when the student receives a badge (levels up). Without a ton of changes to our initial data design, we were able to implement that. We think it makes things a lot more fun, and a lot more motivating to reach the next level.
I’m not the only gamer on the team, though. In fact, our star developer Erik had significant experience developing games using the Unity framework, and single-handedly wrote the purely game-based portion of the AK app. It’s fun and endearing in an 8-bit way, and quite simple: type fast, or the dinosaurs will get you.
While Erik was hard at work on that, some of us realized that kids might only want to play the game. Why practice if I can just play? So we gave teachers the ability to control how much typing a student needed to do to earn game time. Modular design to the rescue! We’d just built a component that allowed teachers to change settings on a whole-class- or individual-student- basis, and this was a perfect setting to add to that.
A student can now go to the Games tab within AK to see how much game time they’ve earned (by doing slightly-less-boring keyboarding on the Practice tab — woohoo!).
So do you see what we did here? In a sense, we have gamified the game-based-learning…. [mic drop] … Is there an award for that?
Coming Soon…?
This summer, a subset of our employees went rogue and did a hackathon. We used self-forming teams, self-appointed leadership, and designed and developed an educational game in less than a week (mostly on the weekend, in fact!). I think we were all pretty amazed with what we could build in such a short time. It was a fun and fruitful experiment that we hope to revisit in a less rogue fashion. (I mean, who doesn’t like coming to work on Sunday, but still.) In the meantime, we are always on the lookout for ways to make our existing content a little more captivating.
As a development team, and as a company, it would be an understatement to say that we value making our content as fun and engaging as possible. After all, if students don’t enjoy it, the customers (the schools/districts) won’t come back. Dinotyper will (probably) never be as famous as Fallout or Fortnite, but if kids are enjoying learning just long enough to put the Pokémon cards in their backpack, I think we’re doing our job.
