Using Serious Gaming Techniques for Long-Form Writing: A Thought Experiment

In my last post, I enumerated several advantages for serious gaming in the classroom.  I like the ways that serious gaming taps into the social and competitive instincts of students, and I‘m excited about the rich data that can be mined from a well-designed serious game.

I get stuck, however, when I try to think about how to capitalize on these benefits as a writing teacher.  Here is my best idea (so far) for how to set up an online game that would maintain the standards I expect in my students’ writing, but take advantage of the perks of serious gaming.  WARNING:  This does not cut down on teacher grading, but that is not the point.

THE GAME: 

Students are in charge of a real online blog, and choose the topics they would like to cover.  Every student chooses a professional handle to protect anonymity.  Each news cycle, students are grouped into three or four groups, and given a writing assignment aligned to their ability levels.  Two students in each group are assigned as editors.

Students write a piece, using a clear rubric to guide them.  Tasks maybe informative, argumentative, investigative or creative.  Then, after a mini-lesson on a particular writing skill, they edit their piece.  While they are writing, editors should be learning proof-reading skills and practicing on sample texts.   Again, these lessons are geared toward a certain targeted skill. After students finish, the editors need to submit their edits, which are graded.  Students then have a second chance to revise their pieces.  The editors choose one piece to run “above the fold.”

At this point, the teacher grades the pieces and assesses the editors’ edits.  Any piece receiving above a certain grade is published, although the editor’s picks get special attention.  Students who fail to reach this grade must revise, and if they meet the grade subsequently, their piece is also published.  An important aspect of gaming is the ability to immediately address failure.

The cycle begins again.

AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT:  At certain points throughout the year, after students are familiar with this process, the students should use the process for even more authentic assignments.  For example, a local non-profit might ask for a piece to be published on their page, or the school may use the students’ writing in a brochure for parents.

TROUBLESHOOTING:  Of course, a kid may drop to the bottom of the proverbial pond here, and wallow in the weeds.  In that case, I would give that student an individual assignment that needed to go to press and could not go until he or she had got it to a certain standard.  Repeat until the student is properly engaged.

Any programmers out there want to design this?  Does it already exist?  Beyond a blog, I need an interface where students see their progress and receive immediate feedback.

Serious Games in Education

             Let me start with this: the best educational environment I ever experienced was outdoors.  Four friends and I once started a kingdom on a half-acre beside a stream.  Each of the citizens had a political position and an economic enterprise.  There were four shops in town: Spears for Sale, Sword Fighting Gym, Dance Studio, and my own venture, Advice Hut.  We quickly realized we needed a better balance between concrete and abstract industries and turned cooperatively toward making houses.  I remember an entire day spent reconstructing and repairing roofs until they could withstand our rain test (a Mason jar of stream water poured over the roof).  My nostalgia for this type of self-guided exploration into basic human challenges has made me a latecomer to the world of virtual efforts in education, but here’s the thing:  that project was so engaging because it was a game.

            Serious gaming is a pretty quiet idea at the moment, and it’s easy to see why educators are wary of embracing games wholeheartedly.  Designing a truly educational game is very difficult, and misguided attempts are legion.  Consider Bronchie the Brontosaurus, who needs to save a city from dust while protecting his own health by answering questions about asthma.  This, and so many other games, show that adding a fun character and absurd plotline to regular old multiple-choice questions is an expensive waste of everyone’s time.

            But, the Wright brother’s first airplane did not fly either.  These beta-duds should not cloud a very exciting vision of games in the classroom.  According to Jane McGonical, the same students who may feel that they are “not good at life” are going home to solve complex tasks when playing World of Warcraft. She says in her 2010 TED Talk, “I believe when we’re in game world we become the best versions of ourselves: the most likely to help at a moment’s notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long as it takes, to get up after failure and try again.”  Each of these points would change the culture of our classrooms for the better.

            Firstly, our students should be transparently competing and cooperating with one another because this is how we develop personal potential.  To achieve what he did, Julius Caesar needed to ally himself with Pompey and also to undo Pompey.  As a teacher in a large school, my likelihood of being promoted instead of other teachers depends on my ability to collaborate with those very teachers.  The same tension exists in a multiplayer game. For example, in Civ IV your country’s safety depends on your finesse at foreign policy, which is a balancing act of flattery and intimidation.  As students create a record of success or failure, they should be able to see their performance compared to some of their peers.  An authentically competitive and social environment spurs our brain into action, and there is no reason to be scared of this.  With strategic grouping and a reasonable regard for everyone’s feelings, making games social will tap into a natural human desire to compete and develop personal strengths, and teach students that to succeed in a competitive environment requires the ability to collaborate strategically.

            Secondly, games inspire a level of resilience and determination that the traditional classroom so often enervates.  Every teacher knows a student’s typical reaction to failure and works hard to create multiple systems designed to fight discouragement.  The simple fact that games let you try again immediately after receiving feedback changes the culture of the classroom and requires much less effort on the part of the teacher.  Games create a failure-based model of learning; students learn by immediately addressing the sources of their own failure, something very difficult to achieve when trials of tasks are separated by even 24 hours.

            Furthermore, games inspire interest in topics currently removed from a teenager's daily life.  There is a strong strain of pedagogical thinking that puts the student's interest at the center of the curriculum, but there are serious limitations to this approach: namely, it is not an efficient way to expand the student's often quite provincial picture of the world.  Games create a reason to care about problems outside of a student's experience.  Once a student in invested in a context, they are more interested in learning facts that will help them master that environment.  When I began to read the debates surrounding Brooklyn’s new basketball stadium, my mind cast back to decisions I had made as a twelve-year-old about whether to build a new stadium while playing SimCity.  While SimCity 1994 was probably a grossly underdeveloped system by today’s standards, I understood some basics:  stadiums are costly up front, but bring new energy to the city.  By being given the chance to think like Bloomberg, I developed the critical skills of an informed citizen.  For this reason, the problems introduced through games should introduce students to the world’s biggest, most important problems.  McGonical says, “Gamers are willing to work hard if they are given the right work…Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions, to human, planetary scale stories.”  Games about nuclear escalation, global warming vs. international development, or big-scale financial struggles can all provide a contextual backdrop that creates urgency and can facilitate further learning.

            And now, my favorite argument for games in the classroom.  Data bonanza!  We have the ability to track every decision, written response, and answered question a student makes while playing a game.  Imagine a game in which a student needed to balance the needs of elephant and human populations in an African village.  They were required to explore the physical landscape as a scientist, observing and testing hypotheses, and also interview residents and experts.  At the end, they needed to construct written solutions using the evidence that had found.  If each successive task is tracked, I can see where each student excelled or failed, and also look at my class in aggregate:  where did most students’ understanding break down?  I can adjust the complexity level of texts in the game and determine a student’s reading level.  I can also sort the tasks by standard and gauge which standards I need to focus on in my lessons.  Games can group without moving the desks.  Once skill levels are established, World of Warcraft matches your mission with similarly skilled players[1]; new games could use the same strategy in the classroom.  Finally, I am building an electronic portfolio of student work.  I do not leave my classroom with a foot-high stack of papers, one of which will inevitably be misplaced, and which will require hours of data entry in order to become a flexible resource.  Instead, I walk out with a single portable file full of qualitative and quantitative data that I can sort through online or at home as I plan my next lesson.

            Of course, we should not get carried away.  Compared to nature, man-made virtual contexts will always be limited in scope.  Regardless of how realistic a virtual environment becomes, there is always a point where our own brain limns the inner logic of this constructed world, and good gamers take advantage of this knowledge.  One friend I have has discovered that in the world of Civ IV, as long as his military power is even marginally above the computer players, he will never be attacked.  But here too is a learning opportunity.  Anytime a game is used in a classroom, students should be expected to critique the logic of the game.  Where did the game mirror their understanding of the world?  Where did it create an artificial and misleading logical system?  Is it true, for example, that a strong military always prevents attacks?  These meta-conversations require high-level critical thinking, and happen quite naturally as students become frustrated or master a good game.

            To be sure, there are dangers to over-gaming, and we don’t want to raise a generation of computer addicts.  At some point, students should take their eyes off the monitor and begin to engage with the messier real world.  Indeed, if I could take all my students on backcountry camping trips, I would.  As someone originally inspired by genuine problem-solving challenges such as community organizing and growing a garden, I strongly believe that technology should never determine our goals.  But, the benefits of serious games in the classroom address goals we already have as teachers.  Ever since Dewey, we have been trying to create authentic buy-in by immersing students in realistic contexts instead of teaching them disembodied facts. Everyone now recognizes that data is integral to instructional planning, and schools and teachers are expected to collect and use lots of it.  While we should be careful not to put the carriage before the horse, we should not turn down an opportunity to drive our carriage much, much faster.

Recommended Link on Games and Education:  

NYTimes Video on the Potential to Make Gaming the Core of a MS Curriculuum

Jane McGonical's TED Talk Page

Using Games to Teach Students Financial Literacy

 Next Post:  Could gaming be used to teach long-form writing?  How might we create a virtual world that created an urgent desire in students to improve writing strategies and rhetoric, and truly revise their own writing?

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[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html