A lot of the posts this week have focused on money. Teacher's salaries and tuition are both very important things, but there's another crucial component to education: the student.As you may have seen on the About Us page, I'm studying to become a game developer. This gives me an interesting view of things because when I learn things, I tend to tie it back to "How can I use this to make more awesome games?" When it comes to education, though, it's the other way around. Games can make education more awesome.
Video games have gotten fantastic at the psychology of play, trying to get the gamer to do something continually for months on end. Pay-to-play online games need this principle to survive. If you don't like the game, you stop paying them for it and they stop making money off of you. Games have perfected many psychological tricks such as skinner boxes and reinforcement schedules to make games rewarding for the player. I think the real challenge for video gaming is to use those techniques to do some good in the real world and I think that starts with education.
The first thing I'm going to talk about is Alternate Reality Games. The basic premise of an ARG is that it's a game, usually on a website, that implies that there's more to this world than we know, a secret that's just dying to get out, and you're the one it needs to be told to. There might be numbers at the bottom of a webpage that, when translated from binary to ASCII, code for a URL. Going to that URL might show you a countdown. You don't know what the countdown is for, but you figure out that it's for a couple days from now at 2PM. At around 2:10, you check the website again and find that the "government" has taken it down, but wait. In the source code, you find a comment that says the truth will be revealed and has a ten-digit number. You call that number and a recorded voice tells you they need your help decrypting a signal and...Well, I'm sure you get the point. It's exciting and makes you want to find out more. Perhaps more excitingly, with the combined power of the internet, codes way more complicated than converting binary to text could be cracked.
This has huge applications in education. What if, instead of having to write a paper on the Renaissance, you had to crack codes based on important historic facts? What if there's a secret hidden in history that you can only figure out by researching? The best part is that this doesn't even really rely on extrinsic motivators. The most powerful draw to this idea is the fact that figuring out stuff and feeling smart is awesome. Every time you enter the right password (which would hopefully be more interesting than "Name Henry VIII's fourth wife"), you get that rush of endorphins. That high that says you won. It'd give a sort of instant gratification that's rarely there in most school assignments. It would reinforce the idea that learning stuff for learning's sake can be awesome. Yeah, it would be for a grade, but once you got into it, it would be so much more than that.
Another game-related idea that I think could be implemented is a little more cheap: competition. Qwizdom is the first thing that comes to mind of this sort of thing already in action. The basic idea is that you get controllers for each of your students and program in the questions. After that, there are a bunch of pre-programmed games that the students can play. Maybe it's a racing game where the faster you put in the right answer, the faster your car can go. Maybe it's just as simple as grouping people into teams and playing Jeopardy in the classroom. Either way, the result is that kids have more fun and they have more of a desire to do well.
Or maybe you could have a review website where you upload homework assignments. Maybe you only assign 15 math problems out of the book, but you add in a bunch more from the same chapter. Maybe you even add in some for later chapters, but the key is that for every question they answer, there's a 10% chance they'll get a coin. Coins accumulate throughout the year and they can be redeemed for things like homework passes or extra points on an exam. They could even been redeemed for physical items like school supplies or maybe candy. I know I'd spend more time on assignments if going beyond the minimum actually had some sort of tangible (or at least measurable) reward.
There are a lot of things wrong with education today, but I think one of the main ones is focusing on creating a minimum knowledge base instead of focusing on cultivating a desire to learn. As a great philosopher once said "All the fun parts of life are optional." Teaching shouldn't be about getting you to memorize facts. It should be about getting you to go beyond and to realize what kind of awesome stuff lies out there if you have the motivation and intelligence to reach for it.
For more information on ARGs, feel free to watch Extra Credits' episode on the whole deal, which I admittedly stole a lot of the optimism from.
First off, as a student, I would love these ideas and would really enjoy the ARG as a fun way to learn. That being said, most students don't think that way about classes that they aren't already interested in, I don't really see any of these being sustainable solutions to getting students motivated to learn.
ReplyDeleteFor most students, the ARG would become more about, "Hm. How do I get past this roadblock?" and less about actually learning and retaining the information. Most students would only go as far as finding the fact that they need, ignoring the rest of the information, and plugging it in to get the result. It's a nice idea for giving students an opportunity to explore information related to the basic material, but it really only works if you're dealing with a class where the students already care about the basic material.
The other examples you gave are kind of textbook examples of extrinsic motivation, and those are useful in tiny, infrequent doses, but if a class becomes dependent on them, you run into a lot of failure to be motivated to actually learn.