In today’s social media world of 280 character limits and Tik Tok video clips capping out at 60 seconds, how best can educators effectively reach their students for an hour long class? How does one take the curriculum and content of their courses and make it engaging to students who are thinking more about Minecraft, Madden, or Among Us than reading, writing, or arithmetic? In recent years, there has been a growing movement in classrooms at every grade level across the country: game-based learning and gamification. How does gamification and game-based learning affect student engagement and academic success?
In Room 102, we are going full tilt into the ever-growing educational revolution that is gamification and game-based learning. Like so many classroom teachers here, there, and everywhere, Mr. Moriarty has long used some element of gamification in planning lessons and activities. The incorporation of game-based learning and gamification is not a wholesale substitute for traditional models of classroom education, but rather an effective tool to enhance academic achievement and success, as well as broader social and emotional learning needs. In his May 2018 TEDx talk at Texas A&M University, André Thomas noted “games are a medium, just like books.”
Data suggests games as a medium is one that, when purposefully and meaningfully incorporated and intertwined with other educational components and mediums, can be a tremendous asset. As “a learning intervention,” gamification and game-based learning “used as part of a holistic instructional design process that seeks to maximise opportunities for all learners.”
We often use the element of play and various game mechanics in kindergarten, to teach our young, before ultimately shifting toward a teacher-centered compliance-based method of teaching as they reach the ages of 6-8, billing this model as “effective education”.
The goal is perhaps best explained by Katie Salen, one of the founders of Quest to Learn in New York City, that classrooms ought to be built around an approach to learning that “draws from what we know games do best: drop players into inquiry-based, complex problem spaces that are scaffolded to deliver just-in-time learning and to use data to help players understand how they are doing, what they need to work on, and where to go next.”
If any parent, guardian, or community member has questions, concerns, or would otherwise like to talk more about gamification and game-based learning, feel free to reach out and we'll make that happen. In the meantime, rather than many more paragraphs explaining the concept, showcased below are a few solid videos to give you more about this as well as some of the books Mr. Moriarty has read in his work and study of this solid pedagogical principle.
There have been some really great books written in recent years about gamification and game-based learning. Each of the books showcased in the image carousel at left have been read, studied, and explored by Mr. Moriarty. In some cases, Mr. Moriarty has even followed up with discussions, chats, and other communications with a handful of the authors of these books.
Additionally, there are a number of academic and scholarly research papers and case studies read by Mr. Moriarty to ensure we're not simply playing meaningless games, but rather making purposeful, well-designed, engaging, student-centered, and rigorous activities and lessons based on science, psychology, and data.