Making With Ayala

As I’ve been approaching researching gamification in educational contexts I’ve noticed that teachers approaching a game-design based approach to their lesson curriculum nearly all change how they approach grades from average to an additive approach. You start with zero and for every task you complete you gain “XP” which add up to your final grade in the class. This is a small change in the framing of how assignments are graded that doesn’t really change the way assessments work, but is an mental shift that many of these teachers claim really improves motivation amongst their struggling learners (case studies from Sheldon, 2020)(Powers and Moore, 2021). I for one find these case studies extremely persuasive; I know from my own experience how petrifying the fear of failure can be. Anything we can do to reduce that fear in students is going to help with motivation and engagement.

In one of the case studies listed in Lee Sheldon’s The multiplayer classroom : Designing coursework as a game, secondary school teacher Aaron Pavao has made his class assessments fail proof. Class tests are instead called “boss fights” and students keep at them until they get them right. This doesn’t mean that there’s no grades at all; every-time a test requires corrections the students lose a “heart” which are worth increasingly large amounts of “xp” which translate to a grade. When the students are on their last heart they finish the test as homework for 60% of their final grade. This means a student can’t straight up fail a test, and gives students opportunities to learn from failure. Student are pushed to keep trying after they’ve made mistakes instead of just accepting a lack of knowledge. Pavao made these changes to his grading system because he realised that’s how games supported learning.

When you are given a new tool or weapon in a video game, you are introduced to it when you first acquire it. Then, you are given a series of small challenges or exercises to learn to use the new tool. Finally, a boss appears that you must fight using your new tool. If you fall to that boss, you often respawn just before the boss battle and try again. You are not allowed to proceed until you have defeated the boss. It would be strange if you instead respawned at a point after that boss without first achieving proficiency in your new tool— I feel the same way about unit tests (Aaron Pavao in Sheldon, 2020, p.49)

I wish I had a grading system like this is primary school; I might not have given up on math. Pavao isn’t the only one to have noticed that failure in games isn’t final in the way it often is in education. As Powers and Moore argue, “failure within game-based learning experiences is designed into the overall instructional intervention, openly expected, and considered a necessary step in the learning process. (Powers and Moore, 2021, p. 2). The challenge is how to integrate failure into an educational system structured around success. Powers and Moore looked at 14 different articles on failure in educational gamification. They found that there’s a sweet spot between failure with no consequences and failure with serious consequences that appears to provide the best learning experience (Powers and Moore, 2021).

The trick seems to be to use the possibility of failure to tap into students intrinsic motivation to improve without putting so much pressure on them that they are intimidated. I think there’s a lot we could learn from studying how success and failure motivates and demotivates individuals. It could be the secret to more than just improving classrooms, but could give us insight into how to reach de-motivated individuals across the board, including those struggling with behavioural difficulties.

Citations

Grabner-Hagen, M. M., & Kingsley, T. (2023). From badges to boss challenges: Gamification through need-supporting scaffolded design to instruct and motivate elementary learners. Computers and Education Open, 4, 100131. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666557323000095

Powers, F.E., & Moore, R.L. (2021). When failure is an option: A scoping review of failure states in game-based learning. Tech Trends. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1007/s11528-021-00606-8

Sheldon, L. (2020). The multiplayer classroom : Designing coursework as a game. Taylor & Francis