The difficulty of the game rises and falls in direct proportion to your deliciousness. You design yourself at the beginning of each game so that your avatar is a custom-made sandwich. The more delicious you make yourself, the more difficult the game becomes. As your deliciousness increases you must flee more enemies with better AI and special abilities than those faced by disgusting sandwiches that nobody wants. Your scores and achievements are awarded by how difficult you make the game for yourself and how far you get while running.

As you run, your bread becomes more stale and your wet ingredients make the interior of your sandwich more soggy. As your staleness and sogginess rise, your deliciousness falls. When your deliciousness reaches zero, or when you are caught and eaten, the level ends and your score is tallied factoring in your initial deliciousness and distance run.

Different breads, meats, vegetables, and condiments bring with them their own bonuses and drawbacks. A fatty sandwich runs slowly, but may become soggy more quickly, thereby lowering its deliciousness more readily than a well-balanced sandwich. Some sandwiches, like meatball subs, that would run very slowly could have bonus powers like meatball ejection to slow up pursuing predators. However, losing too many meatballs too quickly in this case would drastically lower your sandwich’s deliciousness and thereby shorten the duration of the level as sogginess, staleness, and meatball attrition do you in for good.

Character design would incorporate a nutrition-label-like UI so that players could see the calorie count and other nutritional impacts of the foods they choose to include in their sandwiches. Making it through even a minute of a level using a 1,000-calorie sandwich of unbridled yummitude could earn some kind of special award.

Multiplayer would be an awesome deathmatch between hungry sandwich shop patrons and user-designed sandwiches with powers (maybe shoe-dependent for people and ingredient-dependent for sandwiches) unlocked by experience earned in multi-player matches. Maps could be sandwich-themed spoofs on the best PVP arenas in gaming history. Maybe you could unlock side dish packs and drop chips behind you to stuff your predators so that they lose interest in you.

And let’s throw in some zany challenges – can you get a predator to eat you at zero deliciousness? At negative deliciousness? Can you, as a disgusting sandwich, prey on a customer and be eaten? Can a fried stinky-tofu sandwich camouflage itself as grilled cheese?

If this game was funded through a Kickstarter-like campaign, major donors could have pre-set sandwiches or secret ingredients or power-ups named in their honor. Minor donors could receive DRM-free copies of the game with coupons to local sandwich shops (No chains unless they underwrite the game, right?). I’m sure other rewards for other levels will come to mind – please feel free to post your ideas and wants in the comments. Gaming companies could pitch in some money and time in exchange for sandwiches named after franchises or beloved characters.  Run, Sandwich, Run! could bring the gaming world together.

There could be a sandwich-maker app for mobile devices that talks with your console or PC so you can design a sandwich on the train to work and then play it when you get home and also find local shops that could make the sandwich and deliver it to you at lunch time to test out in the real world. You could maybe take a picture of the real sandwich with your smartphone to import into your console or PC as a sprite for that sandwich.

Here’s what I wish for in the 11th Spring of my teaching career:

I want this sucker funded, developed, published, and loved with the profits going to the establishment of a school run on Valve’s Handbook for New Employees.

For that I would re-negotiate the CC permissions of this post and make sandwiches for a lot of people. For now, let’s just say the following license supersedes the site’s license for this post in particular:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

If anybody wants to play – or if any body wants to develop, program, or otherwise contribute – please let me know.

Clearly, I’ve been hitting the science fiction again. Also, the gaming.

Last night I finished a pretty stellar game – one advertised as the last in a series, if not the last in a setting.

It ended much as I thought it would, but it also bugged me in ways I hoped it would not.

First, let’s talk narrative. Each of us lives a narrative. It takes a significant amount of self-knowledge and work to shift narratives in our lives. Sometimes events jar our narratives and cause us to reconsider how and why we’re living. Sometimes events jar our narratives and just piss us off; enter the unduly unfair boss battle.

Scant moments away from the culmination of this series I played, I got caught in a boss battle I could not win without adjusting the difficulty of the game downward. I’m not really a casual gamer so much as a gamer who is aware of his tastes and limitations. In some genres, I am the equivalent of a grognard; in others, I am a tourist looking for adventure. Regardless of genre, I hate situations in games that are made impossible to “win” by a sudden ramping up of difficulty matched with my own mediocre mechanical skill. I played my character really well; my difficulty in passing this portion of the game did not come from my portrayal of the character or from the decisions I made during the course of the series – which are, ostensibly, the engine of the narrative – narrative being the engine of the franchise. I think it’s a bad design decision to make a gamer feel mechanically inept minutes before the end of a series in which that player has survived dozens of appropriately leveled challenges. The narrative pay off – the big picture, connection-making a-ha moment of the endgame – was, in my mind, needlessly delayed for me by a slog of a battle I reloaded half a dozen times before ratcheting down the difficulty of the game.

So, how many big picture, connection-making a-ha moments do we deny kids because they cannot defeat the inappropriately leveled boss battles we set in front of them? What could our non-readers learn from and do with all that time we confront them with impossible situations? How do we acknowledge that some kids – even our most “successful” readers and writers – could be creating amazing narratives for themselves without the undue influence of “rigor” (code for developmentally inappropriate), which, in our school system, is a kind of insensate systems intelligence unable to adapt itself away from the belief that some things are best left for the kids who read and write and sit still on time, dammit.

First, we acknowledge that critical thinking, imagination, playfulness, composition, design, and iteration are interdisciplinary skills that students can evidence in a variety of ways – even in ways we can’t imagine. Then we acknowledge that reading and writing carry some unique flavors of these skills, but that every other mode of expression does, also. You talk about word choice in creating imagery and symbolism in a novel; you talk about color and line in doing the same in a graphic novel; you talk about graphics, writing, voice-acting, and player choice in doing the same in a video game. Finally, we start building learning spaces rich with all sorts of texts and authoring tools in which it is easy and joyful to create a community and share connections, insights, and strengths between people, projects, and genres.

What else bothered me about the game?

Although many people have complained about the lack of choice at the very end of the game, I thought the options I had were fitting. They were choices that involved sacrifice. They were in line with the mood of the game and what had to happen; I’m not sure what others were expecting. I do, however, dislike games in which there are no consequences for players’ choices. This reminds me too much of school wherein differentiation becomes a matter of picking a teacher’s idea out of many of that teacher’s ideas. Not a lot of room for democracy, emergent behavior, or self-directed learning there.

What really bothered me is the presence of narrative elements held hostage in the code as unlockable downloadable content (buy a license) and bonus content that is released for playing other products from the company that published the game. The message here is that no matter how well you play the game – no matter which decisions you make or how much feeling you invest in the characters and story – you just can’t have some things until you behave the way we, the gatekeepers, want you to behave (as a consumer).

That is school. We will withhold access to the learning you want to pursue, dear student, until you pay us what we say we deserve.

Do game companies have a right to make a profit? Sure. Can gamers be critical about their purchases. Sure. Does school have to be a capitalist, transactional marketplace? No.

What we expect from our kids is unconditional compliance – which we blithely confuse with unconditional learning.

What we should be offering our children is unconditional teaching.

Except to maintain a culture of privilege, there is no advantage to learning in using reading and writing to limit students’ access to authentic and engaging learning. In fact, it’s inequitable to do so. Some kids arrive ready and able to pay their dues because when they enter school they enter an affirming, tautological feedback loop. Because they fit into the stories we at school tell ourselves about successful students, these kids get the teaching and learning all kids deserve – the independent work; the inquiry-based work; the collaborative work; the arts. For them, is “reading and writing” part of the place, or is it the place? The answer is different for kids who arrive at school with different skill sets. It shouldn’t be.

It makes no sense to me to use reading and writing to further disadvantage students who come to school without the cultural, mechanical, and neurological affordances that belong to the kids for whom we really run our schools. Reading and writing – where these kids are – should be part of the awesome learning available to them, not a teacher-imposed prerequisite to it. Call it the instruction or pedagogy gap. It’s endemic. I wonder if it can be excised from the system without killing the system.

At school, we hold the most motivating, student-negotiated learning hostage behind a firewall of reading and writing codes that require students to pay up with unreciprocated “respect,” hollow scores, and blind compliance.

Why are we here? That’s the question. The game question. The science fiction question. The school question. The teacher question. The life question.

Is it to make sure that all students can read and write in isolation?

Is it to make sure all students find ways to learn and express themselves in community?

Is it to accommodate a willful systemic blindness to those of our needs that school did not meet and that school cannot meet for our students and their children?

At the end of the world, I want everyone together fighting to turn the tide – not just the people who can read and write – because there will be problems we cannot solve, solutions we cannot see, and stories we cannot tell.

It is the principal failing and limitation of my teaching that I am so fundamentally invested in the story of myself as a reader and writer (and one easily susceptible to Western archetypes, at that).

I want to hear all of my students’ stories. I need to listen to kids who tell their stories differently the most. These kids aren’t invited to speak up or act out in traditional spaces, both literal and metaphorical. That’s why it’s so important to meet them where they are, no matter the odds, no matter how far out or alien the planet seems to us.

We think we are the heroes; in reality, for students fighting the hardest to hold on to their worlds, we are the impossible boss battle; we are the firewall to learning.

Macroinvertebrate ID by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Midwest Region

Jeff asked me if I’d be interested in learning more about the festival and writing about it. I was, so I am.

In particular, I remain struck by the list of speakers that Jeff sent me – the online list is here.

I love game-based learning. I love the arts. I want to get better at inspiring students to take on service-based learning. I’m a fan of student entrepreneurship and invention, STEM and otherwise, if things should really be disentangled anymore. And I’m a teacher. In reflecting on my interests and profession, as I look at the list of G4C speakers and their credentials, I am of two minds.

First, wow. What a gathering of smart. smart people, including many heroes of mine. I am profoundly gladdened that these people are coming together to figure out how play can help make sure that more and more children and adults across the world can lead lives in which play is less endangered and in which survival is more assured. I’m curious about the participation of some organizations like the World Bank and United States Department of Education – I look forward to following the #G4C2011 tag and learning more about the perspective and contributions of each speaker, organization, and company.

Second, wow. Where are the teachers? I don’t mean that rhetorically. I’m genuinely curious about why there aren’t more teachers presenting about the games-based work that they do with students. Where on the list of speakers are the John Hunters of the world? What obstacles exist in recruiting such teachers – or any teacher – to speak, and what obstacles exist in positioning teachers as viable participants in such technological, entrepreneurial and political conversations?

To put it another way: why aren’t (most) teachers a labor base for educational entrepreneurs, technologists, or politicians? Or, why aren’t educational innovators hiring away their favorite teachers?

There isn’t a tidy answer to any of those questions. Our reasons for staying in the classroom or leaving it are legion, and they make us feel like Legion as we mull over them.

I am convinced that public school teachers in the United States can change their classrooms, which may be a more Herculean task then changing the world. I am convinced that teachers can do a better job of partnering with businesses doing good. I am convinced that divisions can do a better job of creating information age jobs for teachers, as teaching, as we think of it and value it as a system, is becoming more and more obsolete.

As a professional body, are we not working on games – or classroom or school designs or cafeteria food – for change because we haven’t chosen to, or because we haven’t been invited to? Because the job keeps us from it? The job will keep us from a lot of things as time quantum teleports onward into our kids’ future.

So, let’s play the New Teaching Game. To play:

1. Brainstorm a whole bunch of ideas for new teaching in your classroom or our classrooms. The sky is the limit – brainstorm without boundaries and puzzle out practicalities later.
2. Pick a few favorites to explore further and sketch their outlines.
3. Pick your favorite idea that you explored, and make a prototype of it – some kind of model or artifact that represents it. Use your favorite app – pencil and paper, Minecraft, HTMLPad, Flickr, iMovie, clay, a 4-track, Legos, a garden, VoiceThread; you choose.
4. Digitize your prototype for sharing.
5. By June 30th, share out your prototype and any earlier work that you want to publish using the #newteaching hash-tag on Twitter.
6. Remix feedback and inspiration into new teaching for next year.

Show us what you want the job of teaching to be. As John Hunter’s first supervisor asked him, “What do you want to do?” Who do you want to be? how do you want to work with others? Consider this the Minecraft of teaching. Craft something new from the blocks you see, or change the texture pack, or run an inventory hack, or open up an AutoCAD mod – this game is not inside the game.

If teaching is to survive, how should it do so?

Teachers, students, parents, admin, entrepreneurs, technologists, politicians – learners – play along and please post links to your “moves” in the comments.

Inspire us to play with our work. And feel free to disregard my techno/gaming bias – share your vision as it you see it, with our without technology (or teachers).

I imagine a lot of us are proctoring tests right now. Why not dedicate a few paces to change and put together a move by the end of June? That would give us July and part of August to enact the moves that inspire us.

Join in and look out for #newteaching!

Minecraft Pixel Map by Andrew Mason

We negotiated the project in that I asked him not to play the single-player campaign in class so it wouldn’t be spoiled for me. Relationships come first in the games-based classroom.

The student wrote his design document about what he would do, how he would do it, why he wanted to undertake this project, and what he expected to learn from it. The second piece of writing produced from the project will be his review, modeled after online video-game reviews from the publications he reads when deciding whether or not to buy a game. On the way towards that project, he’s playing through the co-op campaign with different classmates as they complete their own work and have some time to sacrifice for games-based learning.

In watching students play Portal 2, and in looking back at our work with the Wii, iCivics, Minecraft, and experiments with works like Civilization IV, I’m beginning to think about somewhat formalized ways to use games to assess students’ learning and social behaviors.

I think it would be great to use games to help develop a learning profile for each student willing to play them.

Here are some of my thoughts:

• Take any first person console or PC game using a controller with dual analog sticks – or take the Wiimote and connect it to the off-hand nunchuck peripheral. Watch a student play with the controller. Is he or she able to use both sticks effectively to look around while moving, or does he or she primarily use one stick at a time? If he or she uses one stick at a time, which is it? Does it match up to the students’ right- or left-handedness? Does the student look at the controller or at the screen while looking and moving? How can this observation be used to assess hand-eye coordination and right/left independence? Can you find a student with musical or sculptural aptitude by observing their hands on a controller? Can you set up physical education activities and light occupation therapy practice for kid who experiences developmentally inappropriate difficulty handling a controller?

• Drop a gamer into Minecraft, or any sandbox game that doesn’t intimidate the player with its complexity (I’m thinking of the Civilization, Sim City, and Sims franchises here). Observe the student’s play. Does he or she immediately start exploring? Does he or she immediately set some kind of goal and begin working toward it? Does he or she ask for help with the rules or purpose of the game? Does he or she balk or become defensive or critical of the game when he or she finds out that there is no purpose or traditional rule set? Can you determine kids’ comfort levels with project-based learning and self-directed learning from observing them at play in sandbox games? Can you assess a student’s level of intrinsic motivation and/or dependence on extrinsic motivation based on his or her reaction to a game-like environment without traditional rules or score-keeping? As an aside, can you identify students with systems and architecture aptitudes from sandbox games?

• In some kind of level-based platformer or puzzler, pair up a student playing with purpose and a student playing just to play or to hang out with a friend. Observe how the two players negotiate their relationship. Who leads? Who influence the other’s play style? Who coöpts whom to play with or without purpose? How do the players resolve their differences in motivation and purpose? How do they problem-solve? Whose ideas are tried in what order and balance? Can you assess students’ aptitudes for leadership, collaboration, and problem-solving from observing such pairings?

I also have some slowly coalescing thoughts about hacking, which in this case means running or installing a program that lets the player assign his or her avatar resources and characteristics that are normally achieved through gameplay or not enabled in the game proper. My students routinely hack Minecraft to build what they want to build. Some run hacks to pad their inventories with the tools and materials they want to use. However, I’m most interested in the work of students running hacks to change the game’s texture packs and to make the game into something else. Using a hack called MCEdit, several students are now loading their Minecraft saves into MCEdit, which is essentially an AutoCad environment that lets players terraform their world and build large-scale structures.

One student wrote a design document and listed to audio copies of Greek myths and the Iliad while building a model of the Parthenon at a 1′ to 1 bock ratio inside MCEdit.

There’s a golden creeper statue inside.

But what happens when the best way to accomplish your self-directed goal inside a sandbox game is to hack the game? Is the future of game-based learning – and problem-solving and collaboration – in helping one another change the rules of a game to suit our goals? Has that always been the game for the elite at school and in society? How do we help students hack the right things? How do we agree on the right things to hack, because isn’t the Internet a hack for the way school is right now?

Hacking contributes to transparency, wider access to success, and a wider definition of what’s permissible in a system. It can also obfuscate, limit, and constrain.

Why aren’t we teaching it? What does a kindergarten hack look like? How can boys hack middle school? How can disadvantaged schools hack resources? How can we constructively, ethically, and legally hack testing, scheduling, and staffing? What other questions should we be hacking?

100 Cupcakes Game by Z Andrei

Over the past few months as I’ve planned and read for this #engchat, my understanding of how to talk about and use games for learning has most certainly benefitted from discussions with many friends and colleagues. Thank you all.

Here are the four questions I come back to regarding games-based learning and gamification in the classroom:

1. Which games should go on our reading lists? Why do the belong there?
2. What is gaming literacy and how does it overlap with the design elements of writing, inquiry, and project-based work?
3. How should our protocols look for curating and using games in media centers and classrooms?
4. Which elements of game design, gameplay, and user experience should we use in the language arts classroom?

I hope you’ll join us on the 21st in sharing your responses to those questions and in posing new questions to the community.

Game industry visionary Jesse Schell (@jesseschell) will be joining us, as will Bethesda Softworks’s Shane Liesegang (@OptimistPanda) – if he can get time away from his project. A few more invitations are pending.

If you’re looking for background knowledge on games-based learning, I wholeheartedly recommend Jane McGonigal’s (@avantgame) Reality is Broken. You can find past posts about our gaming #engchat here.

Before I head off to teach this morning, let me pass along two more links shared with me by Cindy Minnich.

• A WSJ article on using SMART goals in schools and sports.
• The Great Gatsby for NES.

Happy teaching, learning, and gaming.

• Are my kids collaborating on anything, let alone a multi-media project?
• Am I acknowledging and asking kids to use their non-print talents in my classroom?
• Am I admitting in my teaching that print speaks to other media? To the heart?
• Am I allowing students to specialize?
• Am I teaching my kids anything about programming or the problem-solving habits that go along with it?
• Am I balancing chunked instruction with lasting, uninterrupted time for discovery and self-expression?
• What amount of time do my students spend on print-based screen activities versus non-print ones? On replicative versus creative activities? On passive versus active ones?
• Will my students make anything that makes me cry or stare on wonder?
• Will the best three minutes of our time together be any kind of masterpiece?
• Am I caving again to what I think are the expectations others have of me?

I want to know....by mod as hell

Another way to put it:

What is digital literacy and what will it teach me about teaching?

• Bibliobouts – team-based citation and media-literacy game.
• “Could BiblioBouts, an online sourcing game for academia, offer lessons for media literacy?” – a Nieman Journalism Lab write-up of Bibliobouts.
• An Edutopia write-up of last year’s Games for Change festival.
• “Games are lessons, just less fun” – a post from Dean Groom on tapping into students’ functional literacies from games.
• Globaloria – a social network for web-based Flash game development; looks like it’s aimed at states, divisions, and schools ready to develop their own materials
• Learning Games Network – an effort to connect teachers and developers in making and using quality games for learning.
• Star Logo TNG – a 3D Scratch?
• Two takes on Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, one more optimistic than the other.

And here’s the classic end-credits song from Portal, “Still Alive,” just because. Why not ask kids to write songs about failing forward from the POV of video game characters, those brave denizens of digital purgatory?

Thanks to edReformer (@edReformer) and Bethany Nowviskie (@nowviskie) for many of the links.

We carry around really idiosyncratic and sometimes competing notions of games. When we hear someone talking about games, some of us think about children’s games. Some of us think about board games. Some of us think about sports. Some of us think about card games. Some of us think about collectible card games. Some of us think about dice games. Some of us think about d20 games.

I think that our experiences with games are as varied as our experiences with school. Moreover, our experiences with games produce really visceral reactions when we’re asked to think about using games in the classroom.

Some of us think of games as rewards, Some of us think about games as sub plans. Some of us think about games for learning, but because we have such different notions of what good learning looks like, we have different notions of what good learning games are. Somebody comfortable with a Jeopardy-style review game might not be ready to teach an entire economics unit – first time through – using just Monopoly. Somebody comfortable with teaching an entire economics unit through Monopoly might not be comfortable with letting students compose an informational text inside of a video game engine using sandbox tools. Somebody comfortable letting students compose informational texts inside of one video game might not be comfortable letting students write a book report or critical essay on the single-player plot or multi-player politics of some other video game.

We can make such distinctions based on teacher experience and professional sense. Teachers who don’t look at games as learning aren’t likely to use them as such. Teachers willing to use games for learning aren’t likely to use games with which they’re unfamiliar. Teachers familiar with many games useful for learning make choices about which to allow in the classrooms depending on their curricula, students, purposes, and community standards.

Moreover – and there’s no nice way to say this – teachers who don’t like their students or who disparagingly equate engagement with babysitting won’t use games – or any other form of authentic work or radical differentiation – for learning.

That being said, let me share with you what I’m talking about when I talk about games for learning.

Primarily, but not exclusively, I’m talking about video games and sandbox or toy-like apps.

Specifically, I’m talking about games that allow and encourage players

• To set their own goals.
• To discover their own problem-solving strategies through trial and error.
• To establish their own conditions for success.
• To communicate with specific vocabulary about their accomplishments and frustrations.
• To teach one another – in pro-social ways – new behaviors that help in mastering the game and/or creating and learning with it.
• To evaluate their decisions, other players’ decisions, and programmers’ decisions.
• To learn the cause-and-effect relationships between in-game objects and their behaviors.
• To learn basic programming with sandbox tools and visual programming platforms.
• To draw comparisons and distinctions between the game and real life.
• To form their own opinions about real-world problems and events depicted in-game.
• To engage in inquiry-driven reading and writing before, during, and after game-play in response to the learning associated with the game.
• To demonstrate learning through the creation of something new or mastery of a specific game mechanic.
• To learn to read a variety of in-game interfaces as informational texts giving them feedback on what they need to do to accomplish their goals.
• To provide in-game evidence of self-directed learning following a design document written and workshopped as a kind of experimental design before game-play.
• To provide post-game evidence of content-based learning through writing.
• To wonder how to read code.
• To wonder how code is written and transformed from text to experience.

That’s a big list, and I hope that some of my past and future posts provide clearer examples of what I’m talking about, I hope also that this list inspires you to ask questions and bring recommendations to the comments below and to our March 21st #engchat.

Gaming for learning is a design process that unites the enjoyment of mastering a game with the enjoyment of mastering learning.

Gaming for learning isn’t about letting kids play Angry Birds on their smart phones during class so long as they’re quiet (unless, you know, the kids are plotting parabolae or something), and it shouldn’t be dismissed as such, either,

Game designers concern themselves with fun in ways that educators do not; however, the primary aims of both public education in the United States and the game industry are exactly the same:

• Both industries want their consumers to adopt new behaviors. Games teach through gameplay and feedback; schools teach through teaching and feedback. While games depend on the player to learn from them, schools are largely set-up to depend on teachers to teach.
• Both industries want repeat business. Game designers want their games to sell so that they have the resources and justification to make new games to sell to their fan base; schools want their graduates to excel so that they are given the resources and vindication to educate the next generation like the last.

While I can see the game industry slowing down console development to speed up game development and maximize profits through the synergy of new peripherals with old hardware, for now the game industry clearly has the edge in what I consider to be one of the single most powerful learning innovations of our time:

Fun.

How powerful is fun? I think about my students who struggle to memorize the times tables, but master new games in moments. I think about my students who still don’t routinely or accurately capitalize, but have no problem with the grammar and syntax of button sequences. I think about my students who struggle with reading comprehension, but deliver encyclopedic summaries of games’ plots, systems, and characterizations. I think about my students who have resisted self-starting school work for year, but who embrace new challenges in games and routinely teach others the strategies and tricks they have discovered. I think about my students who rush through writing, but spend hours tweaking the characters and levels they create with in-game tools.

We could argue that games appeal to students because they are auditory, visual and kinesthetic, but we’ve all tried auditory, visual and kinesthetic activities that have fallen flat because we stopped designing at that modal level of differentiation, relying on novelty to carry the day. Game designers go a step further and ask how the auditory, visual and kinetic (and sometimes textual) can be made fun, especially when games rely on players to find novel applications for a finite set of sounds, pictures, and gameplay mechanics.

On March 21st, 2011, I’ll host an #engchat on gamification – or perhaps “applied gaming” – in the language arts classroom. Gamification is the application of gameplay mechanics to real world tasks in an effort to change human behavior by taking advantage of our need for fun. Companies use gamification to change consumer behavior through fun. I’d like to ask how teachers can do the same.

I recognize and acknowledge the extrinsic ends of gamification, and I hope that we discuss how to reconcile the use of gamification in schools with the intrinsic motivation that we know drives the most personally meaningful learning. For what it’s worth, I see my students initially attracted to games by ads and word-of-mouth, but I see them stick with games and game culture out of a common, intrinsic drive to master games that they evaluate as worthy of their time. I’m really eager to talk about the ethics of fun and game-design in classroom design and management, as well as in unit- and lesson-planning. How different are achievements and badges from grades? How are they used differently? How is feedback delivered in-game different from that delivered in a traditional class? I think we’ll find that beneath some rather superficial similarities, the how and why of game-based assessment and motivation differ greatly from traditional practices in public schools.

What we do is not fun. Why is that? What can we learn from games if we decide that our work should be fun? Should school be no fun, not ever? What about the language arts classroom? What’s the difference between using games for learning, like using iCivics and Monopoly for a Civics & Economics class, and designing class and/or school to be more game-like? Are game-development and programming acceptable forms of authorship in school? Is playing a game an acceptable form of readership if the student produces response, review, and/or criticism? If so, how should schools curate games and/or resource their authorship?

Check back at Classroots.org for related posts over the next few months, check out this #ncte11 proposal on gamification, and join us on March 21st, 2011, for an #engchat on game design in the language arts classroom – no language arts jacket required.

For readers interested in learning more about gamification from the pros, check out these links, too:

• Avant Game: gaming for a better world with Jane McGonigal.
• Bruce on Games: Bruce Everiss’s industry-analysis blog, useful for thinking about how games are distributed all around, but seldom through, school.
• coding conduct: research and presentations on “persuasive design” and gamification from Sebastian Deterding.
• Design for Learning: Dean Groom’s blog on games, virtual environments, and learning.
• Epic Win and Mindbloom: two examples of gamified life-management apps.
• Foursquare and Gowalla: two examples of location-based gamification apps.
• Game Dev Story: a fun little app that captures a very rough sketch of the gaming industry, it’s decision-making, costs, and career paths.
• “Gamification Needs to Level Up — Here’s How”: an article about next steps in gamification (and maybe learning design).
• “Happy 2011: Celebrating frontiers in Game Design”: a great post from the awesome Lost Garden blog about where we are in gaming.
• Gamepocalypse Now: quick posts about gamification examples and resources from Jesse Schell.
• iCivics: an example of blended, game-based learning mixing civics games and traditional curriculum; Do I Have a Right? is a student favorite.
• Progress Wars: a satire of gaming – and role-playing games in particular – that sums up arguments against gaming.
• Tom Barrett’s games-based learning posts on his edte.ch blog.
• Wikipedia entries on Flow and Gamificiation

And here are a few app, game- and level-authoring resources:

• The Android Developer page.
• Atmosphir, an online 3D platform game maker.
• The iOS Development Center from Apple for mobile apps.
• Kodu from Microsoft
• Little Big Planet 2 homepage.
• Part 1 of Kevin Hodgson’s cool “Making a Video Game” series.
• Scratch from MIT.
• Wikipedia list of games with level editors.

For anyone interested in our experiments with gaming in the language arts classroom, you can read more about them here.

Have fun reading, learning, exploring, and making.

Please add your favorite games, examples of game-based learning, and gamificiation-in-the-classroom resources below, along with any questions, comments, and/or rebuttals you have!

Game Dev Story puts you in charge of a game development company. You develop games and fulfill contracts in pursuit of industry awards, as well as the cash and research points necessary to recruit and develop workers and to license and develop more games and consoles. I enjoyed the game immensely, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t completely portray the complexities and operations of the game industry. Nevertheless, Game Dev Story does at least introduce its players to the kinds of decisions developers make regarding game mechanics, genres, and consoles. Plus, it’s full of puns and malapropisms, just like me.

How would Lesson Planning Story or School Management Story play by comparison? Would anyone even want to make either of those games for an audience in the United States of America? Would either game be released in the United States as anything but a satire?

Would you produce such a game knowing that you would have to trade off accurately portraying the complexities of public schooling in America in return for introducing players to broad tensions we face in running schools and designing learning opportunities in classrooms? How far could a little gamer education go for public education in our country?

What can a funny little app teach our casual gaming citizenry about education?

If you’d like to explore making a school or lesson development story – if that last question excites you – let me know. I’d contribute art and/or writing pro bono. We could at least launch a development blog for some vaporware.

it’s easy to visualize a classroom overlay atop Game Dev Story. It’s hard to imagine players in the United States of America caring, but perhaps that’s a shame a popular iPhone app could address.