A Master's Thesis on the topic of Gamified Learning

Matthew Baetzhold submitted a Master's Thesis on the topic of gamified learning in May 2013 -this document was intended as a teacher's guide to inform best practice.

The pdf of this work can be accessed here.



Abstract
This guide serves as an introduction to the use of games in education. This paper describes and
synthesizes valuable learning and motivation concepts and discusses their educational relevance.
A case is made that many parallels exist between game design and effective instructional practice.
This guide highlights many of the important facets of game design and discusses how such
concepts might be applied to educational settings. The guide also provides a few case studies that
describe how games have been used in school settings to create positive learning environments
that allow students to explore content at much greater depth. Implications for future uses of
games in research and practice are outlined.

Chris Haskell, Boise State University - White Paper on Gamification.
Lee and Hammer - Gamifying Education

A collection of tools to produce quizzes and game-based quizzes in Flash format

In this blog post, I am going to collect a list of tools that can be used for authoring games in Flash, or making interactive quizzes in Flash.

I am looking for an open source (free) killer application - having an easy to use flash game based quiz generator would be really useful, if it were free.

Here they are: and with the caveat that I have not actually looked properly at all of these options (yet)
I will add things to this list as I come across them.

A Wind Quiz Creator
Content Generator.net
I Spring Presenter
Purpose Games
Question Writer Basic Version 
Quiz Revolution
Raptivity
Survey Monkey
Wisc Online Game Builder
Wondershare Quiz Creator

An Interview with Mr Pai

'Getting Smart' published an interview with Mr Pai on what he called his 'split screen strategy' in December 2012. It is well worth a read.
Ananth Pai, an elementary teacher in Minnesota, turned to game-based learning and a “split screen strategy” to engage and motivate students in the classroom. Education Evolving recently captured his story in a video:

Here is a copy of the interview from Getting Smart:

Today, Mr. Pai shares increased insight into his shift to a “split screen strategy” and how his efforts to personalize learning through proficiency-based learning model fit into a predominantly traditional school setting – with seat time, grades, and more.

SC: How did come across the “split screen strategy?” What inspired the strategy?

AP: I was looking to replace the graveyard computers from the computer lab during my second year of teaching because I could never get the old iMac’s and decrepit PC’s to work long enough for small groups of students to sustain their interest to sites I had bookmarked in the browser. The hope was while one group was engaged, I could support another small group with conceptual learning needs.

SC: Did you receive any push back from parents, administrators or others when moving to the proficiency-based learning method?

AP: From parents, students, grandparents and community visitors to the classroom – I got gratefulness and support. Students even wrote a petition that is still running on my site. Some donated anywhere from very small amounts to a couple who directed the entirety of their volunteer matching dollars ($500) to a classroom fund. My wife and I had begun the fund with about $3K. We got matching dollars from her employer. The most recent activity is parents who are approaching their employers to donate lightly used  (2 years) surplus computers. They have gathered twelve so far and are trying to bring pressure on the administrators.

Aside from that, the “dark side” has deployed well over a million dollars worth of instructional technology in the District and no attempts to secure a small bit of it in the nearly five years since I began this has succeeded. Then there are the overhead costs of two full time Instructional Technology staff who have never visited my classroom. The only support has been from the Director of IT and his staff who assist with maintenance and networking. A parent called the Curriculum Director three years ago based on the success her son had in the class, yet no action! The school board chair can be seen in this video from four years ago, saying, ‘of course, we support innovations like this.’ Go figure!

SC: How does the elementary school provide evaluation of student progress (grades, grade level, etc.) for proficiency-based learning that easily translates to a greater system that is predominantly traditional: age grouped and letter grades?

AP: The grading system is traditional because the rest of the system is traditional. I don’t let that hold me back.

Ananth Pai with Student

SC: How has technology made personalized learning possible?

AP: Each student or small groups of students are on level with their interests and capabilities. I never teach the whole class because it would be criminal to do so knowing the diversity of abilities (ten percentile and under to well over ninety five plus). Students are learning and I spot who needs assistance, then provide that as needed.

SC: In the video it appears that students are working in a blended learning model. Can you describe the amount of time spent working independently, in groups, 1:1 with a teacher, etc. in the classroom?

AP: One third of the time in a given day, students are directly with me or working on things I am more closely guiding. Even here, there will be students working in a leveled manner. I am always monitoring the whole class. I do a lot of walking, observing, querying and assisting (only when needed).

SC: In the video, you said that personalized learning increases proficiency levels beyond expectations and standards. How can we redefine student outcomes and/or raise the bar of performance expectations with personalized learning?

AP: Let me try and if this is not clear, let me know. I have an opposite point of view.

Educational theory (Zone of Proximal Development, Lev Vygotsky) and common sense tells us that no one can learn things that are deviations away from where they are. Schools everywhere get assortment of students with range of strengths and weaknesses relative to an expectation/standard. If you put these two facts together, it is clear that not too many kids, no matter where they are on the continuum of learning, can be made to learn; whether through desire, laws or externally imposed expectation (standard/proficiency). Schools have tried this for generations and gotten back misbehavior (naturally) and are spending expensive resources, starting with learners future, principal time, behavior management staff and disruption to learning of the rest of the students.

Most of all, teachers doing this thing the society understands as ‘teaching’ is counter to how everyone learns, yet school leaders are making every sort of decision that perpetuates that product of the agrarian/industrial era. What needs to be redefined is not standards or proficiency of students so much as what the adults – leadership and foot soldiers in education, should be capable of doing and expected to deliver. If you look at things this way, you will see that in our system of education, most of the adults from policy makers, school boards members, superintendents, administrators and teachers don’t pass the threshold of proficiency in designing an environment in which existing resources are allocated in a way that is compatible with how students learn.

Monkey Tales Software Suite

I purchased the suite of Monkey Tales games to use in a school setting, in the Individual Tuition Unit at YTS Boys' Senior School in London, with the first game purchased at the end of last term. (June 2013)

The pupils found the game engaging, and wanted to play it frequently. I started off using the game intensively, as it was helping students engage with maths; who usually do minimal work in a standard classroom environment.

I found myself having a problem with the game however - as an educator, I require data on progress and useful feedback. I could find no way of objectively measuring progress, as the games in the series do not record this data, as far as I can see - which sums students were getting right, which ones they were getting wrong, their overall progress. 

In contrast I have been using the Big Brains Timez Attack software, as this provides me with the data that the school admin requires, and a clear parameter for measuring the progress of each student. 

Without this data, I cannot justify use of Monkey Tales as a 'strong' tool, as I have no way to objectively measure student progress at the end of each session from within the game.

I also found that the 'game' sections between the maths exercises took too long - our lessons are short - 40 minutes - and the number of minutes of 'maths time' in a 40 minutes gaming slot was simply not enough, and this meant I ended up stopping students from using Monkey Tales, and only make the game available during 'free periods' when students can do unstructured learning as they wish.

Monkey Tales, from my perspective, would be better of the 'maths' sections were more frequent, and if there was some way to collect and print out/record the data generated as the students progress through the game series.

Overall, however, the software is excellent, and is very popular with my students. They definitely feel deprived by not being allowed to play this game series more frequently.

I now use it as 'reward time' for when students reach a particular target level in their learning.

Huge Library of Interactive Learning Resources

I recently stumbled across an enormous library of learning objects online.

This digital library of interactive learning materials was developed primarily by or for faculty of the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS).

"Wisc-Online is a digital library of Web-based learning resources called "learning objects."

The digital library of objects has been developed primarily by faculty from the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) and produced by multimedia technicians who create the learning objects for the online environment. At present, 335 WTCS faculty members have authored learning objects.

The Wisc-Online digital library contains 2555 objects that are accessible to all WTCS faculty at no cost and with copyright clearance for use in any WTCS classroom or online application.

Learning objects are designed and developed by a team of instructional designers, editors, technicians, and student interns.

Much of this material appears to be a good complement to that produced by

 Mr Henry Anker, and it is all available for free.

Wisc Online also offers a Game Builder, so a teacher can create very specific

 lessons that can be gamified.

Increasing Learning through Games and Student Self- Selection of Activities

I am rapidly expanding my suite of subject related shockwave flash games.

The bread and butter of the 'work' we are doing at present  in English centers around Mr Anker's tests, which focus on Californian State Standards and Common Core. (USA). These are a little dry, although the students still stay on task with them.

I have noticed that the students perform much more strongly when they are given choice of what to do - this goes against my natural instincts - but every now and again, I have a lesson, or a section of a lesson, where I allow the students to self select their activites. They gravitate more to the maths games than the language based ones, so today I placed a restriction: any game, but it had to be in the 'English' folder. Moans and complaints........What, can't we play 'go-gopher'? (A co-ordinate hunting game that the kids are currently fanatical about).

The students at first gravitated to the stories I have in SWF - I only have a small selection of these animated stories - and after that, moved on to more inter-active games - one team of two started to play 'homophone football", and the other a similar language based shoot-out game with a football theme. After each question, they receive immediate feedback, and then the chance to kick a ball at a goal.

I am amazed that they never tire of this game....if I were giving a pen and paper exercise with the same learning materials, they would soon start another game, called 'throw the eraser', or another called 'I lost my pen', or 'I really need to visit the lavatory', or another game I call 'stalled on the runway'.....or "hey my keyring is suddenly really interesting! lets look at it!"  Or just start chatting to a neighbour.

(My classroom is social, but most of the conversations relate to the work being done - "How do I do this?" "Help me with that, I'm stuck!" Instead of one teacher in the room, I suddenly have a classroom full of teachers. It is wonderful to behold. There is very little task-avoidance conversation. )

 These boys would certainly not spend an entire lesson doing paper based grammar exercises without some rather intensive and unpleasant (from my side of the fence, and theirs) intervention to keep them on task.

These days, I seldom get requests to leave the room for the lavatory, and when a kid goes, they fly out the door, and come charging back to class really fast.

As I said in a previous post, most of my classroom management problems these days, since I started introducing learning games, centre around getting the kids to leave the room for a following lesson or break time.

Robert Torres - transforming the classroom with gamification

Digital Voice Recorder

Today I bought my first digital voice recorder to use in my classroom. Once again I owe this initiative to Ananth Pai's classroom setup.
Reading around the topic, I came across this recent piece in 'The Guardian' that touches on this subject.

I work in a small room - so the students would need to step out into the corridor to make their recordings - necessitating a portable system. Originally I had thought of getting directional microphones for the computers.

Portable recorders are better, as they introduce more flexibility.

 I want to trial this with reading activities - get children to record their reading, then play it back and analyse it with them, and then get them to re-record, until I am satisfied with their competence.

I will use peer-review and my own assessments, and each piece produced will be graded and recorded in the student's file.

I plan to in this way extend the amount of reading aloud that takes place in my classroom, and structure it more forensically.

I currently use the old  McGuffey series of readers - these are good, as they contain a wide range of materials, and incrementally progress to a high level. The students have these as pdf files on their computers, and in addition I have one hard copy set.

Information Points:

USING DIGITAL VOICE RECORDERS IN THE CLASSROOM

 (IOW CONFERENCE 08)

Kathleen Holton led this excellent session on using digital voice recorders (DVRs) in the classroom. Kathleen found that pupils didn't know how to revise for the oral element, and decided to take a more proactive and hands-on approach. The school purchased 9 Sanyo ICR DVRs, which have a good quality internal mic, as well as a battery recharging pack. The great thing about these DVRs are that they record as an mp3 file, which makes them easy to upload and for the pupils to use.

USES & PRACTICAL POINTERS
-Record the conversation naturally, with teacher correcting mistakes. Pupils will benefit from hearing the mistakes when they revise.
-Introduce with KS3, to maximise improvement for the GCSE exam
-Practise dialogues in class then go out into corridor to record
-Start with name, so not confusing for the teacher when they upload
-When saving, change Track 1, etc, to pupils’ names
-Next lesson, start with their recordings.
-Build a positive culture for listening and evaluating – positive praise e.g. for not pronouncing stuff that shouldn’t be pronounced
-Use recordings for departmental moderation e.g. ‘Is this an A? What is a variety of structures?’
-“Evidence at KS3” folder can be easily kept
-Recording dialogues = good for oracy
- Recording a play reading - group work, collaborative work.

Learn Latin with Interactive Exercises and Games

Vocabulary Level One

Guess that word - Latin Roots Guessing Game

Cases and Meanings Game

Noun Declensions Level One

First Declension

The Fifth Declension

Fifth Declension Activity

Third Declension Neuter matching game

Declension Quiz

Minimus Vocabulary Level 2 test

Romulus and Remus text with games and exercises

Vocabulary Tester

Vocabulary matching game

Vocabulary Jigwords 2
Mr Tabney's Flash Exercises
Vocabulary Jigwords 1 Ecce
Vocabulary Jigwords 2 Ecce
Vocabulary Jigwords 3 Ecce
Vocabulary Jigwords 4 Ecce

Vocabulary Tester AS Level

Latin Comprehension Test in Latin

Hunting for Flash files

I seem to spend a lot of time hunting for interactive learning resources these days - and recently discovered that I could target my google search much more accurately by using the command
filetype:

e.g.

Apple Annual Report   filetype:pdf

Google will only return pdf files, and not news articles about the report.

Or:
animated story filetype:swf

This search string will return flash animations of stories of various types.

Offline access to a website

As I cannot go online at work in the classroom setting, all the resources I use have to be accessed offline.

For this, I have found WinHT Track , an open source piece of software, to be invaluable, as it enables an entire site to be downloaded for offline access.

For example, the site called Maths Dictionary - which also contains exercises and flash demonstrations of mathematical concepts, can be downloaded in its entirety for offline access.

I intend to build the use of Maths Dictionary into my lessons and will experiment with various ways to use this resource.

Mr Henry Anker's 'Tests'

Mr Henry Anker has produced a suite of materials that I have adopted into my curriculum.

These are a suite of tests in SWF format, so I am able to run them offline in my classroom.

I am restricted in that I am not allowed to have the students access the internet, in accord with school policy - however many SWF format games can be saved and will run well offline - and I discovered Mr Anker's materials were suitable for this application.

Each test is aimed at a particular aspect of either the Common Core, or is tailored to the California State Standards.

I find the tests are invaluable, as they give me an objective measurement of ability within a very narrow set of parameters.

I record the initial mark each student gets when doing the test. Once they have run through the test, they are free to revise the test as often as need be, and collaborate with students who may be ahead of them, until they master the material, and obtain 100%. After that, they proceed to the next test in the series.

The syllabus covered by Mr Anker is broad, and my students have been making rapid objective progress.

Interestingly, they refer to the 'tests' as 'games'. They don't relate to them in the same way as they would to identical pen and paper work.

More importantly, they do not object to doing them, and relish re-doing them - really enjoying the progress towards that magical goal of a 100% score. These are students for whom 100% in any test would have been a rare and unusual event - in my classroom, no student progresses on to the next level until they reach mastery of the level they are currently on.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon with the comprehension tests - the student needs to read a short text, and then answer a number of questions. If this has been an identical exercise on paper, most of the studnets in my room would have disengaged from the task without considerable 'classroom management'. Here, the students read, and re-read the materials freely. Sometimes I stood behind a student, and had them read the story to me aloud. They got annoyed when they made errors. 'Can I do it again?' is a question I am no longer astonished to hear. If this were a pen and paper exercise, handed in and marked and returned a week later, this would never happen.

I have had students re-do a comprehension exercise four or five times,  re-reading the story multiple times, to reach the desired goal of a 100% score. The look of satisfaction on their faces when they get to that point is amazing to see.

Mr Anker's tests have become a central part of the curriculum in my classroom since I discovered them.

An unexpectedly popular pair of games: Game Over Gopher and Monster Bus.

Two SWF (Shockwave Flash) games that I started to run offline in my classroom in November 2013 have proved incredibly popular with my students - to the extent that I am able to use them as 'reward time' - one of them is based on use of Cartesian co-ordinates, and is called Game Over Gopher ; the other is an addition game that includes decimal addition, called Monster School Bus, or 'MonsterBus' for short.

Both of these games build important skills. Kids who would cover a piece of graph paper with doodles, and maybe do 5 minutes of work in an average lesson, stay 'in the game' , actively learning for the entire session. Extracting them from the activity is a major challenge - in a traditional classroom, a large part of management is trying to elicit engagement.

In my classroom, I have been having to develop a different skill set - strategies for eliciting disengagement, so that my students leave the room for break-time or a follow on lesson.

These games were developed at the College of Education, New Mexico State University.

Ananth Pai and the Gamified Classroom

Ananth Pai's pioneering work in implementing a hybrid learning strategy in the classroom was very attractive to me, as I struggled to find ways to create a learning environment where my students could truly progress.

Ananth Pai's classroom website is called Team Drill Head.
I have watched these programmes with great care, and started to implement these strategies at YTS in the Tuition Unit - effectively a mixed ability classroom with 8 to 10 students.

A useful summary of the current state of things in this field can be found in a recent article by Gabe Zichermann, a driving force behind the gamification summit.


There are a number of videos by Mr Pai online - the one above is a useful short introduction.

I first came across him at a presentation he made to the Gamification Summit.
This is the video to watch:

Ananth Pai: Gamifying the Classroom from Gamification Co on FORA.tv


Another more recent video,useful from a teacher's perspective, is this one, given at the MAAP conference in 2013:

Gamified Learning in the classroom

Since the end of last year, I have been reading extensively about gamified learning, and how it might be of use in my practice.

My set-up is as follows - I teach groups of 5 to 8 students at a time, drawn from different subject areas and year groups. Primarily I work on literacy and numeracy, or subject specific support.

Last year I experimented with the mathematics software produced by Larian Studios, called Monkey Tales.
I discontinued this series, as although the students liked the games, and I could see the utility in them, they did not produce progress data - which I need to be able to justify their use in the classroom.
The research on this game series was encouraging however, without hard data for my record keeping, I have stopped using this series.
Another problem I had with this series was the length of time spent gaming between each set of maths exercises - in my context, where the lessons are quite short, the percentage of each 40 minutes slot spent in non-productive time was too long to justify the use of these games. I was disappointed, as the students took to this series with delight.

I allow them to use this series as a 'reward' for hard work on the highly effective, but less popular
Timez Attack software. Timez Attack does what it says on the tin - I have students who have started off knowing only 15% of the multiplication table, after a few weeks building up to 50% - students who, according to their initial assessment, would not ever be expected to achieve this level of mastery using conventional teaching methods. I expect that after 12 months of regular use all the students will have reached 100% mastery of their multiplication tables, and some will have mastered division as well.

I have recently added DimensionM - Evolver to the armoury - although it is too early to say much about it. The student I wanted to use it with reported massive headaches the following day, on both occasions he used it. This particular student was also unable to use Timez Attack software for the same reason, but had no problems with Monkey Tales. As my unit is not internet enabled, I cannot use the full suite of software produced by this company.

I have also been using my Seamonkey web browser to download swf flash games, for later offline use.
view>page info > media then select the swf file, and save it to disk.

For mathematics, I found Monsterbus is a useful swf game from the Learning Games Lab at New Mexico State University. Monsterbus builds proficiency in decimals and basic operations.

For basic pre-algebra (cartesian co-ordinates) Game Over Gopher, also from the Learning Games Lab is useful. Both of these games are popular with the students.

I have also used Dragonbox with some success, but am limited to the PC Windows version which is only available at the lower level. I have one student who is disnumerate, but who excelled at this game

Another suite of materials that I have found particularly useful, are Mr Henry Anker's tests, which are interactive and available as swf files. These tests do not technically qualify as games, although, interestingly, my students still refer to them as games - possibly because they are interactive. These tests are useful for both mathematics and language work.

These can be used effectively for assessment, and also to build skills and proficiency and broaden subject knowledge.

As each test gives an objective assessment, they can readily be built into a classroom environment.

If you are generally interested in the gamified classroom,I would highly recommend this blog
and this series of videos