Do any of you think a Boardgame could be gamified for learning?
JMull98's forum posts
@mrbojangles25 said:
@hillelslovak said:
Knowledge is worth it on it's own, I dont really see the need for everything to be fun. Learning how to throw a left hook is not fun. You learn it by throwing the punch thousands upon thousands of times. You increase your grammar by reading a lot, and drilling yourself on new words. Everything is like that. The thing that makes games fun, for the most part, is the fact that they dont take a ton of practice to play. Real knowledge is the opposite.
I agree with this in general, but there are varying types of knowledge.
If I am learning something for a job, and it's not something I really value outside of work, I don't really care how I learn it provided I retain it and I learn it quickly. If a game or something along those lines helps me do this better than sitting in a seminar or class for 20 hours, then so be it.
I'm really struggling to learn Excel, for example, but I can somehow learn to fly the A-10 in a super complex flight sim in a matter of days and use all the various keyboard commands it has. If they "gamified" the learning of Excel so I could somehow master grids, keyboard commands, and so forth in a matter of days, that'd be awesome and I wouldn't really give two shits about how I learned it. Though I must admit, I think 70% of it is my lack of self-discipline; if I spent one or two hours a day just fartin' around with Excel in my spare time at home, I'd probably be proficient with it in a week or two.
Conversely, if I am learning about art or music or something I might actually be interested in or care about, I might actually want to seek out traditional forms of learning, and not use a more "gimmicky" method. I would want to read books, listen to experts, sit in classes, and go to museums and seminars.
Yeah Excel stinks. I'm taking it as part of a CIS course at my college and we've been going over how to make bar graphs and charts. I agree that the self-discipline part is exactly my problem. If I want to spend the time to get truly good at something, I need to want to succeed at it first. The few things I've truly felt passionate about succeeding in are hobbies and games.
Right now I'm working on a class assignment with a group of students like myself who are supposed to create innovative ways to stop the Achievement/Opportunity Gap that is happening in America. While I was researching I came across this site: https://www.classcraft.com/ as a resource for a potential learning alternative.
I feel like similar programs like this are a good start to making a gamified program work but there needs to be MUCH more depth. It's basically like Kahoot! (if anyone has ever used that before) and a mix of RPG-tropes and templates. Much deeper depth is required to create a truly worthwhile program. There needs to be a community built where students feel welcome to ask questions from their teacher and peers without judgement, can interact with and learn to compromise different views and opinions, develop an interest to the material as students recognize and acknowledge the meaning behind their choices and etc.
@N30F3N1X said:
@jmull98 said:
I kind of want to talk more about this point^ Knowledge to me is inherently necessary in videogames. It might not come across as much in a game like Mario that requires insane repetition to get good, but something like a Professor Layton puzzle game is good game design to use logic and thinking to bring the characters through a convoluted yet fun story. PL was one of the few games that really got me excited to tackle a math problem or brain teasers. I felt in that environment that my choices truly had meaning and I could attempt to try the problem again, rather than run away from it like I and many other students continue to do.
Knowledge and understanding are two different things, and learning requires the latter as well as the former.
I could tell you atoms have quantized energy levels and then you would "know" that, but unless you did a course in electromagnetism you wouldn't know the reasoning that makes the hypothesis of quantized levels necessary and you wouldn't understand how this hypothesis eliminates the ultraviolet catastrophe problem that physicists were facing just over a century ago or why it is necessary for this hypothesis to be true for us to have lasers.
Now, you could say "why not just add all of the necessary bricks together", to which I would answer, good luck with that. You'd need to make a 200+ hours game just to explain calc 1 alone.
A fair point. I'm not disagreeing with you, I agree that creating a good much less FUN experience for a gamified course would require a game that can span the time of a semester. That is, if my intention were to create a program that doesn't take advantage of the already existing school system. Numerous programs like I've mentioned a few times are becoming more prevalent in classrooms. The game is purely necessary to make the first step of education, getting students ready and engaged in their studies, much easier. I want to use gamification as the platform to make learning more fun. Maybe make playing cards for students to go about exploring real life with augmented reality to try and uncover real answers, REAL understanding.
@Arkhalipso: I definitely feel like we share a lot of the same views. More than any textbook or class assignment my vocabulary expanded most when I played RPG games like Golden Sun on my DS.
Just in general to those of you speaking out about how gamification is not a type of style you'd be fond of in the future I'm really just trying to discuss the idea as an alternative for students who struggle to find learning fun. Like you have mentioned creating a game that sets up to be the base model for learning can prove to be detrimental:
A) It creates a divide in the classroom between students who prefer traditional methods and those who seek to pursue learning through other means.
B) If the medium for learning is compromise (bugs or glitches) effect play it also hinders the student from being able to learn.
C) Frame of mind (as mentioned before by someone) creates a type of gap between students and lesson plans but at least with technology games can compensate for such things with well delivered patches. Anything is better than the current mess teachers expect us to use like MindTap, TopHat and such that require so much money to set up after the subscriptions and access codes have been bought
@N30F3N1X said:
@hillelslovak said:
Knowledge is worth it on it's own, I dont really see the need for everything to be fun. Learning how to throw a left hook is not fun. You learn it by throwing the punch thousands upon thousands of times. You increase your grammar by reading a lot, and drilling yourself on new words. Everything is like that. The thing that makes games fun, for the most part, is the fact that they dont take a ton of practice to play. Real knowledge is the opposite.
I agree with this.
A game can be divulgative just like shows like Bill Nye's or other "science" on television - they can tell you what happens and give you a vague idea about why it happens, but you can't really "learn" things from it because learning things requires a different kind of concentration and frame of mind.
I kind of want to talk more about this point^ Knowledge to me is inherently necessary in videogames. It might not come across as much in a game like Mario that requires insane repetition to get good, but something like a Professor Layton puzzle game is good game design to use logic and thinking to bring the characters through a convoluted yet fun story. PL was one of the few games that really got me excited to tackle a math problem or brain teasers. I felt in that environment that my choices truly had meaning and I could attempt to try the problem again, rather than run away from it like I and many other students continue to do.
How about this to get the ball started. If you could use your favorite videogame to make studying more fun, how would you do it? For me, I've always been a major Pokemon fan since I was little. It teaches natural selection, how environments cause animals to adapt to different surroundings, basically a lot of biology/ecology could be taught using Pokemon to make the mechanics of evolution and adaptation more instantaneous for the reader to understand.
I've been trying to figure out a list of games that could be listed under a header of subjects such as this so it can help me think of styles of play that could help certain subjects. Currently I'm trying to work out an idea where I take a Mario Party-esque twist on existing study methods.
For quite a while its been made clear to me and some friends of mine that education isn't all its cracked up to be. We live in a time where students (myself included as a current college student) aren't truly getting what we need out of our education system. All other aspects of life like medicine, technology, literature and the sciences are all constantly evolving. In education, the only thing that has changed are the tools that we use within the classroom setting: tablets, SmartBoards/SmartPhones, Senteo Clickers/MindTap/TopHat (programs that require students to waste hundreds of dollars per semester) and etc. without really creating a change to how students relate with and comprehend the information.
Education also fails to allow students to learn as they'd like. After 12 years of feeling like a slave to a broken system, there's too much of an emphasis of learning for the sake of job security rather than a job that will ultimately make us happy. Practically all students shove out old information just to soak up new forms of information for tests and exams that come later on. We students aren't LEARNING. We are tested purely on memorization/comprehension skills to prove to our teachers that we get logic, not that we can make what we learn applicable to the real world and our daily lives.
I want to try and pursue gamified learning in my life, taking videogame elements and other mechanics to encourage a more fun method of learning that can impact students of younger to older demographics.
I'm hoping if my message resonates with anyone, you can all help me take the first step in tackling this important issue by creating honest discussion on this thread with your ideas and thoughts. I'm hoping with so many videogame lovers on this forum it might prove insightful for me to generate new perspectives.
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