The game-based learning concept was enlightening to me. I guess I never thought of how many “games” there really are in today’s world. I never considered a buy so many products to get one free as a game, but that is exactly what it is. What stuck out to me the most was incorporating the concepts of “wanting & liking” into each lesson. As I said in my tweet, senioritis has set in at my school and trying to motivate the kids to finish the semester strong has gotten more difficult. The wanting and liking areas are where I see the gaming theories apply to my classroom and what I could do. I brought this idea up with one of my classes and remarked about the idea of not having grades any more, but levels – requiring each student to “level up” instead of getting grades. While the conversation was humorous at times in trying to come up with the names we could have for levels in an American Government course, some students commented that this was just a gimmick where the novelty of the level would wear off after a while and the levels would just be seen as grades. I thought that was an interesting insight and made me wonder more about how the game-based learning concepts could be applied and be effective. Perhaps (as with most everything in teaching) a little bit of each of the many ideas Priebatsch brought up could be used at various times to keep things different.
That is interesting that the students would eventually just view it as a grade. I guess that is where you would have to keep increasing the level of difficulty and use the techniques to keep the students challenged but not too challenged. I listened to a podcast during one of my 14 hours of driving this weekend and this economist, Brian Caplan, making the case against education. It was really interesting because he was talking about how we spend all this time learning things that we will never use but we get rewarded for it in the free market by employers. This link gives an outline of the talk: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/e370/IO7.htm and you can find it on iTunes. Anyway, I think goes along with the idea of motivating students to achieve and how do we change to system to increase student motivation.
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