Transform Your Teaching

What are the differences between gamification and game-based learning? How can one small “gamifying” step increase student engagement and make content stick? Join Rob and Jared as they define gamification, consider the underlying frameworks associated with gamification, and share some easy applications.
 
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What is Transform Your Teaching?

The Transform your Teaching podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Join Dr. Rob McDole and Dr. Jared Pyles as they seek to inspire higher education faculty to adopt innovative teaching and learning practices.

Narrator:

This is the Transform Your Teaching Podcast. The Transform Your Teaching Podcast is a service of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.

Ryan:

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Transform Your Teaching. In today's episode, Doctor. Rob McDole and Doctor. Jared Pyles continue our series called Have You Tried? By introducing the topic of Thanks for joining us.

Jared:

Today, we are diving into our first sub subject of our series, Have You Tried...? And we're going into gamification today.

Rob:

Gamification, not to be confused with game based learning.

Jared:

That is correct. We're going to give a definition of gamification and its various principles and how it relates to educational theory. And we are also going to distinguish gamification from game based learning, which before we started researching this, I thought they were the same thing. But au contraire, it is completely different. Well, completely, but they both deal with games, but how they handle games is a little bit different.

Rob:

Right. So when we talk about gamification, what we really are talking about is a process that uses game elements, you know, such as points, rewards, badges, like in competition during the learning process, and it establishes interaction and engagement through those those different variables. It's not the same thing as having the learning unit or topic actually be transmitted as a game.

Jared:

Correct. Yeah. That's game based learning. So game based learning would be things like Minecraft edu, which we see happen very often where, you know, instructors can build a unit inside of Minecraft and have students go through logic problems, computer programming, coding through Minecraft. You also see game based learning like Kahoot.

Jared:

There's several gaming what do they call them? Like classroom management gaming thing where you can you know, but it's a game in and of itself. Although I think, now that I think about it, those types of things would be gamification because it's not necessarily a game itself because you earn points level up based on how well or how much you behave in class.

Rob:

Right. But usually it's the context is still, like, totally subsumed in a game. Right. So you're you're you're delivering everything through a game context, whereas gamification in in the terms in which we're talking about are more along the lines of like badging for maybe solving a certain number of math problems that are of a certain style.

Jared:

Right? Correct.

Rob:

And you're not really participating in a game as much as you're, you know, getting points towards maybe a badge where you finally do 30 or 40 of them and you get you're great with double digit multiplication. Mhmm. You get that badge. Mhmm. So oftentimes, the two go hand in hand, though.

Rob:

Right. And I can see why it would be extremely confusing for someone. But the unit itself, the multiplication, and all that isn't necessarily involved in a game as a whole. It's just Right. You're using points and stuff to try to move that forward.

Rob:

Right. You know, I can think of game based learning. You you already talked about it, like Minecraft.

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

I've seen some in the k through 12 where teacher will bring students in, and they'll do kind of like an adventure based game where people take on character roles and and, you know, you maybe explore a topic through almost like a card based game and you're rolling dice and you're doing those kinds of things. To me, that's game based learning.

Jared:

Yeah. Gamification is more commonplace than we realize too. It's not just limited to education. You talk about rewards points. Like, the more we spend at Kroger, the more we get off on fuel.

Jared:

Right. The more you spend at Starbucks, the free drinks you get. Duolingo is big into gamification.

Rob:

Which would be more towards education obviously because you're learning a language, but still.

Jared:

But a common app that people are going to use. Like there's an app that we use with the band that every purchase we make at certain stores, get a one to 10% rebate that goes towards my kid's band accounts. Right. Helps pay for all the fees and stuff like that. So gamification is a very popular way, especially in our everyday lives that we use as a way of like getting incentives, getting benefits in that way.

Jared:

So gamification is more common than we realize.

Rob:

Yeah. I think it really is solidified in what we've talked about before in self determination theory, right? Where it gives you this idea of autonomy in the sense that you're trying to you're trying to have control and and choice over how many points do I earn. And there's kind of a goal or a challenge in front of you, and it's up to you to meet that challenge. And then, obviously, competence, when you meet that goal, it does give you this, I think, dopamine hit back where you're like, oh, yeah.

Rob:

I made it. Even if making the goal with air quotes. Right? Mhmm. Doesn't really mean anything.

Rob:

Yeah. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Jared:

Oh, I do.

Rob:

Yeah. But you still have this thing where you're like, why I did that? And for whatever weird reason, the mind dumps dopamine, I think. Yeah. And then the last one is kinda like, you know, relatedness in the sense that you have this collaboration and there's something for you to talk about with others.

Rob:

You know? Well, I got such and such a badge, and the others are like, well, I did this one. And and then it kinda gets into that competition leaderboards. And Yeah. Right.

Rob:

You know, even though most most sessions, they don't carry leaderboards. You and I both know that if you started doing a challenge, like, how many times can you sniff in this podcast?

Jared:

Oh my goodness, dude. My allergies have been so bad. I would win that competition in a heartbeat.

Rob:

Yeah. But if you say that to somebody, right, immediately, everybody focuses, and they're like, oh, I'm trying to do this. That happened this morning to me in my class.

Jared:

Say, share that story.

Rob:

So I'm using Mentimeter, and Mentimeter is great for interactivity. And and I have not been paid by the folks at Mentimeter.

Jared:

It's it's an alternative to PowerPoint that your students can log in and see the slideshow, but also you can have some interactive elements.

Rob:

Right. So it kinda replaces the whole interactive clickers.

Jared:

Yes. The clickers.

Rob:

Right. So I ask questions, and I've got two guys down front in my second section in my 09:00 class. Uh-huh. I've given everybody lollipops. And these guys, they're sitting there, they're answering the questions.

Rob:

They've answered the questions, but then all of a sudden I look, and then they're on their phones and they're just sitting there with their index fingers going up and down, up and down, up and down, tapping on the screen, tapping on the screen, tapping on the screen. And I look up and I see these little thumbs, you know, on the screen where when the students hit the thumbs up button on their thing, it sends these these thumbs up. Like emojis going up. Yeah. Like emojis going up.

Rob:

Yeah. And so

Jared:

the the projection.

Rob:

Screen. Yeah. So the entire class is seeing this, and these guys are just sitting there going boom boom boom. And I said I finally just stopped, and I said, what are you doing? And he's like, I've gotta win.

Rob:

I've gotta win. I'm like, what competition are you in? He's like, we gotta beat the class before us. Gotta make sure we have so evidently, between my first section and the second section, words were exchanged between some students to say, I got this many thumbs. See how many you can get.

Rob:

So my class turned into this other game that these guys decided to play.

Jared:

They were

Rob:

still engaged. Right? Sure. But they had chosen another game to play Yeah. And they were inventing that game.

Rob:

Mhmm. And so I'm sure afterwards, I said, you you understand it's not counting and you only get to vote once and all it's doing is just sending that up?

Jared:

He's like You're just wearing out your phone screen.

Rob:

He's like, it doesn't matter at this point. I'm already in it.

Jared:

What? Wow.

Rob:

So they both they both after answering questions because we had several other questions.

Rob:

They were paying attention. Yeah. You know? It's just they're I just look and I see them go tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap

Jared:

Well, you see that, like, that idea of maybe it was more of, like, hitting the thumb and then seeing the nice floating emoji. Maybe that was part of it as well, is like the dopamine hit.

Rob:

Oh yeah, I think that's exactly what it was.

Jared:

Like in Canvas, you can set it up to where when a student submits something, they get a nice confetti display on their screen whenever they submit something. So it's that kind of thing as well.

Rob:

Well, it's kinda interesting because this this, like, dovetails really nicely right into something that we've discussed and which comes into game gamification and why why you can use it and then sometimes be surprised about it like I was, and that's, you know, flow theory, where essentially what was going on in those students' minds totally blocked out so many other things that they could have been doing. Obviously, they're what I think Dr. Oakley would call race car learners.

Jared:

Yeah.

Rob:

Right?

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

And so having that kept their mind engaged with something that was repetitive, kinda like our teachers used to do to us when I was in k through 12 for those of us who were also race cars.

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

You know, it gave us these silly things to do. Fidget spinners. I didn't have fidget spinners. You know, squishy balls. Yeah.

Rob:

Just things to keep us occupied. So that's an example of gamification in my mind in terms of it connecting to flow theory, which is, you know, finding that sweet spot for an individual where they're they're zoned in to whatever it is that they're focused on and the goals are clear and they get immediate feedback. And so I think just tapping and seeing that, like you were saying Yeah. Also provided that. But at the same time, they were still engaged in what I was doing.

Rob:

They were still in the flow.

Jared:

That's interesting to me.

Rob:

Yeah. It was. I mean, because I did have a couple of them ask. One of them actually asked a follow-up question, you know, for me to provide him with some clarification Right. While he's sitting there, you know, tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

Jared:

Yeah. That's interesting.

Rob:

So it kinda, like, blew my mind. Right? But it then just kinda made me come back to this and think, oh, okay. Different learners. Duh.

Rob:

Right? Different brains. We've got our hikers and we got our race cars.

Jared:

Yep.

Rob:

He's obviously a race car. So You,

Jared:

You sir, are a race car.

Rob:

For those of you who don't know flow theory, you can check out Csikszentmihalyi, and I think that's around 1990. We'll have that in the show notes.

Jared:

Yeah. If you Google flow theory, it'll come up.

Rob:

Yeah. But, anyway, it's about engagement. It's about maintaining focus on a topic. Mhmm. Athletes experience this.

Rob:

High end athletes, high end, like, f-1 drivers.

Jared:

Yes. Yes. Right? Good connection there.

Rob:

They experience flow where it seems like everything slows down, and they can see everything in a sense. They feel like their senses are are in tune to what they're doing, and they're totally engaged in what they're doing. And it just it like theory says, it flows.

Jared:

Yeah. Actually, another theory is we were doing research for this episode that you and I had never heard of before. And actually, Chad GPT brought it to our attention called the Octalysis Framework. Right. From Yukai Cho.

Jared:

And then there says in it, he says there are, eight core drives that motivate people. And I'm gonna list these. Epic meaning and calling, accomplishment, creativity and feedback, ownership, social influence, scarcity, unpredictability, and loss and avoidance. And again, we'll put all this stuff in the show notes, but the way that you can apply it to gamification is that the, you know, teachers can take these eight core drives and emphasize them in different ways through different motivations. So, you know, accomplishment would fit into badging or leveling up.

Jared:

Social influence, there's your team challenges, your group work, stuff like that. And you could also do things like unlockable content or like the scarcity core that the theory or the framework talks about. So, you know, think about that to me is really interesting. The idea of unlockable content in an education environment.

Rob:

Yeah. Where in order to see that you have to perform some other thing. So we kind of get that a little bit when you use things like mastery quizzing. Right? On your content, one of the ways I've seen some faculty do it, and even here, we had doctor Baker in.

Rob:

Right? Doctor Baker talked about you had to do certain things before you could come to class. Right. And if you didn't do those things, you didn't come into class. So that's kind of an unlocking type of a Yeah.

Rob:

Feature. Like, you can't come to class unless you're but you could frame it in such a way where it felt more Scarce. Scarce and gamified.

Jared:

But you can take elements of SDT, the self determination theory, flow theory, and the Octalysis framework and kind of use them together to gamify your classroom. So you could probably pick and choose from different parts of this to, you know, create some sort of gamified environment. There are some cautions with this though, and the research will say that if you're this goes back to, and we've talked about this several times in this podcast, the extrinsic versus the intrinsic motivation. Know, gamification relies heavily on extrinsic motivation, and it can reduce intrinsic motivation, research will show, if you don't balance it out carefully. Because like those race car students in your class, there was some intrinsic motivation to click as fast as possible, even though

Rob:

As many times as possible.

Jared:

As many times as possible, as quickly as possible within a certain timeframe that they had probably created inside of their heads. You know, that's probably some intrinsic, but that's probably a bit of extrinsic as well. But it's it's difficult to find that balance, but it's necessary because if you rely too much on the extrinsic, you'll start losing that intrinsic motivation for students.

Rob:

Right. And I think right here as we're getting towards the end of our our conversation, I would also want to be clear from our perspective here at Cedarville, at least from my perspective, you know, from a theological, philosophical, biblical perspective, the way we view humans is made in the image of God is also going to change the way I see self determination theory. So self determination theory isn't just aimed back at myself. It's not reflexive. Right.

Rob:

It's actually focused outward towards others. Right? And so, Octalysis, like we talked about early on in our conversations before the podcast, we you know, at least for me, I see Octalysis as a a framework that sits underneath SDT

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

In terms of it's a SDT is more of an umbrella and these Octalysis variables are a part of what makes SDT.

Jared:

Right. I agree.

Rob:

And so I think some other things though that are missing there is understanding who we are, who God's created us to be, and others centered. And there's probably some things in there where we might, you know, we might think a little bit differently about that, like scarcity, unpredictability. There's some more nuanced conversations that I think we could have where we might say, no, we would reject that. This we would take and this we might redeem. Transform.

Rob:

Transform. Yeah. Thus, transform your teachings. Yeah. Too.

Rob:

Right?

Jared:

Yeah. Sure is. That was a good callback there So to our title.

Rob:

Yeah. So when we think of gamification, I think I just want our listeners to know Mhmm. That, yeah, we look at we look at what's out there, we look at the literature, we look at theories, but we do have a different lens in which we review and look at these things.

Jared:

Right. So practically speaking, the way that you could put this into your teaching practices, I think this is an interesting idea. Doing low barrier examples like progress trackers, doing XP instead of grades for certain assignments. Okay. Sorry.

Jared:

XP being experience points. Going to the RPG land that I love so much.

Rob:

Would you have something that takes away and adds? Like, you would have to spend No. No. You would just do adding? Just experience adding.

Jared:

So if you really wanna gamify it and you wanna go into role playing game land, you would have experience points and the harder tasks that you do, you get more experience points.

Rob:

But you would also have to have more experience points to do those harder tasks.

Jared:

You have to level up to get to that point. Right? So if you go back and do easy tasks, you're getting zero to none, but they're you're getting you're doing the tasks that would have helped you level up earlier. But why would you go back and waste your time on doing that? You wanna push for more XP, that stuff as well.

Jared:

So I think that's a really cool idea.

Rob:

I'd have to think about how to do that in my course.

Jared:

Yeah, too. I'd have to think about yeah, that would be interesting. Other ways of doing it are badging systems like Badger. Oh, Classcraft. That's what I was talking about earlier.

Jared:

Classcraft is that that takes like Warcraft but puts it into classroom assessment or classroom management kind of a thing where you get points if you, you know, raise your hand in class or you lose points if you talk out of turn, stuff like that. So none that's really more of a k 12 kind of a thing.

Rob:

And that's don't you think we're getting more towards, like, at

Jared:

all in that base? That's why earlier I was like, I feel like this is more game based. Yeah. But then the other ones are like team based challenges with rewards that you get, stuff like that. So as as a call to action of sorts, we would suggest starting small.

Jared:

Try with like one principle. Like, I think all of our suggestions are like start small. Don't do a wholesale

Rob:

renovation.

Jared:

Start something small, start with a unit, start with a week that you can maybe turn into, you know, some sort of leveling up system. I'm really intrigued by that. I wanna try that.

Rob:

Yeah. What's a behavior that you can think of in your class

Jared:

Mhmm.

Rob:

Jared, where you you know, maybe they're not doing a bad job with it, but maybe you wanna see if you can influence it in any way by just recognizing it, making it explicit, and then putting some sort of point gathering.

Jared:

Well, am doing something related to that. So I'm teaching intro to literature and I'm trying to make it as pop culturey as possible. So my lecture titles are references to pop culture from the last, well, the eighties up until now. So the last forty years.

Rob:

Okay.

Jared:

And I'm not explicit in what the reference is, but I'm giving students the opportunity when we have our break time to come up and tell me what the lecture titles are referenced to. And if they can do that, the first to do that gets a bonus point that I'll put somewhere in there. So that's trying to tap into the engagement, even if it's at the beginning, just a way of having them stay engaged and then to share. Now, what's stopping them from Googling lecture title? I mean, they could do that, but they're pretty vague and some of them are really easy.

Jared:

Some of them are rather difficult, but it's a way of keeping them engaged in a way to do that as well. So that's something I'm trying that's kind of a small little, you know, it it I use ChatGPT to help me with these. I said here are the texts I'm doing, here's what I wanna cover, come up with some lecture titles. And it did that for me, which I thought was really neat. So that's something you could do that's small, just to help also, you know, I'm also teaching a literature class, like I said, and, you know, I did a poll the first day and said, you know, I gave them options like my attitude towards this class is I love reading, I could go so and so, I hate it, or I'm just here for the credit.

Jared:

And over half were either I'm so so, or I'm just here for the credit. So if I can engage them in some way with just reading, and applying, and doing that in some sort of gamification system, I might try that. Even if it's just like, you read this, you took this quiz, you got this high of a score, you get this badge or something like that. Something to think of. I don't know.

Rob:

Well, I want to invite our listeners to experiment with this. Please. Like what you've said, try some of these. If you think of some others, please try them, but but reach out to us and let us know. What are you doing?

Rob:

Respond to us in LinkedIn. Send us an email. We'll have that here at the end of the show. Connect with us because we genuinely do wanna know. We wanna learn from others.

Rob:

Right. And we're gonna have somebody in Yes. Who is a fellow alum.

Jared:

Yeah. We've had him on before. He's a podcast alum and a Boise alum. Doctor. Daniel Singletary, who he had on before to talk about back channel communication Right.

Jared:

With other members of my cohort. And he did his dissertation on game based learning.

Rob:

Okay.

Jared:

And when I emailed him to ask him about coming on, talk about gamification, he said, yeah. I'll come on. But I first want to distinguish between game based learning and gamification, which I fully say, let's let's do it. Because I you know, you and I have both have been, like, wrestling back and forth with, well, does this fit with gamification, or is this game based learning?

Rob:

Yeah. It would be it would be great to have him come on, help even clarify some of our understanding. We have been looking at it.

Jared:

Yeah.

Rob:

We have been reading about it. We've been trying it in our own ways. Mhmm. And then in some cases, like myself, just stumbling upon something with a gut somebody up there just tap, tap, tap.

Jared:

So it's it's more relevant than we think, and it's more obvious and evident than we think. Right. It's just a matter of looking for it. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it.

Rob:

Yeah. I'm to it. Looking

Jared:

Are you looking forward to it?

Rob:

I'm looking forward I'm

Jared:

to really looking forward to it.

Ryan:

Thanks for joining this episode of Transform Your Teaching. If you have any questions or comments or you're trying something about gamification, please feel free to reach out to us at CTLpodcast@cedarville.edu. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn, and don't forget to check out our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog. Thanks for listening.