Media Catalog
Gamification
Assets that leverage game mechanics
Boss Battle: Thriller
BrownX
In Professor Jim Egan’s literature course, Fantastic Places, Unhuman Humans, together with his Online Learning and Design instructional designer, Prof. Egan structured his course to resemble the narrative flow of a video game. “Game mechanics” wrapped the story, the choices, and the assessments that students encountered throughout the course, providing an engaging, contemporary feel to the experience. Each week, when students and learners culminated their knowledge to answer questions in “boss battles” from Cthulhu to zombie-Michael Jackson.
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Brown Undergraduate Online
In Professor Jim Egan’s course Fantastic Places, Unhuman Humans, Prof. Egan asked students to exercise their creativity in unconventional ways, as they were placed outside of their comfort zone of a conventional classroom. Assignments and readings took on the form of quests that concentrated on integral parts of the course’s story. Quests challenged learners to capture interpretations through art, produce data visualizations (graphs, word clouds utilizing easy-to-use online tools, network diagrams, etc.), and engage in battles with characters from the readings. This map is how students navigate the quests.
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Animated Course Trailer
BrownX
Professor Jim Egan created a character-based narrative experience for his “gamified” online literature course that uses sci-fi and speculative fiction as the means to explore what it means to be human. This video features an animated Prof. Egan stating the fundamental question of the course and setting up the story, including the characters and visual design that permeate the course.
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