The Video Game Curriculum

Video games are able to motivate people to play for hours on end. Sometimes, video games can be so captivating, they would cause death. I'm sure you've heard a few stories about that during the World of Warcraft era. These same people who may spend 30-40 hours a week on a game, would not give a rats ass about school. So here's a proposal, set up the classroom like a game. There is a decent amount of research that goes into how video games motivate their players. I will allude to only a few in this blog.

Where to start...

I think the first thing is to allow students to create an identity in you classroom. In a science class, when you walk through the door you should be a scientist. You could have them put on lab aprons and prepare goggles (because wearing them every day for an hour would be annoying.) Explicitly explain to them that they are scientists and should act like one. Overall, this may be tough in many schools and the students may not play along. It's worth a try.

Structuring the course will be difficult. The first thing people are most worried about is their grade. I think a grading system that would best work is something that resembles a progress bar. There was a Ted talk I watched about how app developers love putting in an progress bar for any reason big or small. For a classroom, it give the students a visible goal, and they're able to visually see their completion and mastery of the course. The use of a progress bar would be a positive change in the current classroom norms. Most teachers believe that telling the students that they all start with A's is, in my eyes, bad practice. This tells them that your grade will only get worse. There is no room for improvement. There is only punishments for not providing perfect work. Instead, a progress bar mean that the students start at the bottom. The only way to go is to go up. You cannot get a worse grade that you have at the beginning of the school year. This process would use positive reinforcement based on the amount of effort and work put in. More work put in would result in a greater addition of points. Little work would mean some points.

A con of this practice may be that a student must always calculate the points needed on future assignments. A pro of this would be that the student must plan ahead to reach a certain goal. This brings another con which may result in students reaching a minimum goal and stop working overall. They were able to reach their minimum C so why should they come to class anymore if they passed the class. Hopefully the classroom culture developed by this gamification of the curriculum will engage and motive the students to the point where the previous con would not arise.

The curriculum should be heavily scaffolded. Great games keep you in a pleasantly frustrating experience. This would mean the units were just the right difficulty. So like the Zelda series, once link receives a new item, the game forces the player to use the new item in order to immediately proceed. Throughout the reminder of the quest (usually a dungeon) the puzzles are focused around the new item. Only until the end will the environment call for the player to integrate multiple skills and items. For the classroom, this means the basics must be met first before you can pull them together for a more challenging skill. For the class, the units will be structured as in any class but there is a strong need for feedback to know what's working and what isn't as well as the help when needed.

One of the difficult ideas is that students may need to work at their own pace. This divides the classroom environment from a community into individuals. I do not know how to challenge this dynamic other than allow collaboration for boss battles (tests). There are many schools who have moved to an online curriculum where the entire curriculum is structured and posted online for students to complete at their own pace. When I came across this, I found this to be a perfect tool for a video game structured classroom.