Digital Play

Can we teach while playing? Yeah! It's time to gamify our lessons!

A few days ago, I watched a webinar by Graham Stanley on digital play and a concept he's developed, that of gamification, and I've played a few games he's got on his website, like Spent and Something Amiss. I have to say I liked the overall idea of gamifying the lessons but not the games I tried out.

First, I played Spent, which I found to be a very interesting "social experiment". If you were living on the breadline, and were faced with apparently trivial decisions like doing the laundry or not, do you think you could last a month without running out of cash? This is basically the argument of the game. Before and after playing it, I tried to imagine what kind of students would I make play the game and what would the aim of playing it be. I guess that, apart from vocabulary, you could work on giving instructions, if you were to divide the class into teams of two, who take turns to guide each other through the game. But I felt the richness of the game lay in the social component: considering the other, when the other is not in the same conditions as we are, change your POV, become that other in need. That is, I think, a topic that would be really useful to tackle with every group of students here in Argentina, since it's a reality we can see round our corners.

 Then, I gave a shot at Something Amiss, which belongs to the "leave-the-room" genre. I must say I hated it. I did not think it was easy  for students to play it and probably most of the lesson would be wasted while students tried to figure out what the important clue of each room is and what to do with it. I don't think I'd use it with my students. Actually, I did not finish playing the game- I got bored halfway. And I thought, if I got bored, then probably my students will do so as well, or maybe they won't, but how can I engage them in this game if I didn't like it? When you're not happy with with lesson plan, it shows and I try to avoid delivering lessons I don't like or I'm not comfortable with.

However, these negative reviews don't mean that I wouldn't include digital games in my class. This just means I have to keep on searching for an appropriate game that complements whatever topic I might be teaching. As I wrote in a previous post, TPCK (technology, pedagogy and content knowledge for those of you who don't remember) is a great model for teaching, and the aim is to find the balance between these components, but by no means can we let technology take over. We can play if it suits our needs, not adequate our lessons to any game we liked. Graham said that the best way to choose a game is to ask students what they usually play, and if, once they're playing, they're not engaged, then you make the game a peripheral part of your lesson. He also said the game should be a small part of the learning process, something students can even do at home. These are important items to consider, because they are inkeeping with not letting technology override pedagogy and the content itself.

In case you're curious, here's a screenshot from Something Amiss:

And one from Spent: