What on earth is "gamified instruction"? Does it mean using games to teach a lesson? Well, yes and no, but mostly no. I learned about gamification when I attended the TIES conference in December 2014. In the school year 2013-2014, my tutoring students were engaged enough. We were making progress. Some of them were skipping whole lessons or even units based on pretest results. We did not need any help.
However, on my second year of tutoring, they changed the curriculum drastically. There were no more pretests and no opportunity to skip the lessons that students already were proficient in. There were more assessments. We were given a script to follow in teaching the lesson. It had become more rigid and more boring. If there is one thing that math doesn't need to become, it's more boring. So after attending the TIES conference, I decided to change up my tutoring sessions. I technically could not change any part of the curriculum, but no one said I can't make the whole process fun.
I wrote about the first few weeks, and uploaded a PDF to my TeachersPayTeachers.com account. Feel free to download a copy here. You will need to have an account to download it. It costs nothing to create an account or download my PDF.
Gamified instruction does not mean that you are including games in your instruction; it means that the whole instruction process becomes a game of some sort. In a nutshell, I allowed my students to create an avatar/logo, an alter ego name and a (useless) superpower. In an effort to maintain anonymity for those who wanted to stay anonymous, I typed up their names and superpowers. In the photo below, you can see some of my students' avatars on top and their superhero names and powers in the bottom of a long strip of paper. In the middle of the strip are their badges. For every lesson finished they earned a badge to put up on their strip. I taught in pairs, so for some students, only their partners are aware of which strip is theirs. I found it necessary to offer secrecy to those who were not confident of their skills or afraid of being judged by others because of their lack of progress.
I did spend a great chunk of my winter break creating the badges. I knew that it was possible to create badges the easy way through Credly, Schoology (especially if you're already using it anyway), Badge Maker, and other badge-making websites. However, even before we started, I had one student ask me, "What if I found the badges online and printed them out myself?" I found this question very unsettling, although I was not at all surprised that this student asked that question. I told her I was going to make it from scratch, which I did, using IconMaker for Mac. The badges I created are shown below:
Most of them were lesson-related. Some were to encourage students to save up their reward cards for more significant prizes. A few were to acknowledge that they finished the monthly STAR assessment they needed to go through in addition to the 1-3 assessments after every lesson.
Because "assessment" has become a negative term, I called our assessments "quests". Our lessons were effectively practicing for the quests. Their scores in quests became XP points for leveling up. If they fail a quest, they'll have to use another life to try it again after more training. The change from "assessment" to "quest" resulted in a great change in attitude. We needed to repeat "quests" very few times, and all of a sudden, it mattered to get the best score possible, not just pass or survive.
It can be challenging to have students who have the mindset that they are just not good at math. I highly recommend taking the time to gamify instruction, if it will help students get engaged. Sometimes we just have to give the students something to be enthusiastic about.
I am thankful for having had the chance to listen to Jane McGonigal speak. Here is her TedTalk about gaming. If you don't want to watch the whole thing, at least skip to 3:25 and listen to the next minute or less about what is significantly different about how problems are tackled in games and in real life. This is why I gamified my teaching.
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