Gamifying Education - How to Make Your Classroom Truly Engaging - Extra Credits
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- Опубликовано: 4 июл 2024
- Rewards and incentives in classrooms don't have to be cheap tack-ons for the sake of "gamification"--they can empower students to take charge of their own educational goals.
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(Original air date: May 4, 2011)
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Игры
Sekigahara -> Extra Credits -> Monarch butterfly.
Shoot.
Dave Starr
I couldn't find it...
Kaiwala23 Awwwn...
Well done
Genious !
"without agency its almost impossible to feel motivated"
...ughh school took away all my agency, I know what you mean
Wait, what?
It's a visveral reflection from the video.
Yeah, this is part of why I hated high school. You're finally given the option to choose what things you want to learn about, and then they go and add to the number of required classes so you can't take things as far as you want. They give you a credit system to work with, then arbitrarily frown upon anyone who graduates without wasting a full four years in school. It's like a broken MMO without any meaningful story points.
@@griffiansword373 "Hey students, you now get to choose your classes! Except for English, you are required to take that. Also History, and Math, and Science, and Gym, and one of your personal selections must be a foreign language and the other has to be an art. Don't you love having choices?"
"That's not choice, that's an enforced curriculum with extra steps."
B.O.F.H. And religious education is now required
While I was watching this I saw a glimpse into the future. I looked in a 4th grade classroom and I saw cooperation, teamwork and nobody really felt sad that they had a bad grade, just wanting to try harder to beat their friends. Even the kids that would be falling behind and feeling devastated would see the higher graded kids like they just tried more than them. If this works, this world would be in the best shape it has ever been.
Amen
+McMing33 3 (McMing) Thanks be to all Gods humanity has ever imagined for that. May it continue into their later schooling.
+Aidan Caughie god is not real
*****
Well then, thank nothing too. Thank everything. I don't care really. It's just... thank something, if you want.
+901pro gamer
Learn to pick the place where you start debates.
In that case Edinburgh University's system is outright insanity. On some assignments they actually penalise you for getting questions wrong. You get one point for a correct question, zero for no answer and MINUS one for an incorrect answer.
Some one who tried their best can do worse than someone who didn't try at all!
I guess we do have an extremely low student satisfaction here.
PonzooonTheGreat I would not do the ones I don't know... And just cheat the system...
Pete Detrick Most of Edinburgh uni assignments are just exercises in Google search anyway...
How do you fail that class?
Pete Detrick I didn't fail but I imagine that you could by losing hope.
The one person who has -0.3 gpa
Im about to train to be a teacher and this idea is gold. Im going to be teaching Computer Science and i am already working on an MMO style skill tree based on the syllabus :D
***** you might want to take a look at this www.classcraft.com/
+Bruce Collier Good to see education modernizing. Now if you'll excuse me, I must study for Common Core... -_- (yea right)
+565balou Thank you sir. That program sounds awesome and I'm probably gonna try getting my teachers into it :D
+565balou
In my opinion that game needs a lot of more work.
Basically it's just quiz with a different backgrounds.
+Bruce Collier Hows it going?
I used to go to a private elementary school, and we actually had a barebones version of this idea.
1st - 2nd grade we recieved 'credits' for successfully completing homework and tests (there were actually kids who were forging fake credits believe it or not, it was hillarious especially since the teachers kept track of the money they gave out), which could be used to buy things such as aditional bit of time before a test or even being able to be on the couch during recess.
Now, around 3rd and 4th grade things got a lot more interesting. We had these 'world maps'. 3rd grade we were collonising islands, in order to be able to build a ship you needed a certain ammount of the credits mentioned above. Then in order to be able to sail with it you had to have an 'elder' with you. In order to do this we did actually had to go to the local retirement home to do some chores. We usually went in larger groups for the duration of three weeks in case anyone missed out. Then once we took over an island we got a paper which we had to build a city out of through buying buildings for the credits. Simmilar thing was during the 4th grade though not done quite as effectively as during 3rd grade.
Sadly around 5th grade they lost it and were no longer able to do things like these, some things happened and it practically killed our class. But still it did work once, it could work again.
Kk
@@crazybbob k
Sekigahara, japan, emperor of japan, monarch, monarch butterfly.
+Seth Xeider OOOh.
+Seth Xeider You forgot your sentence links.
Tied him
Nick Ted How about...
During the battle of Sekigahara Jaoan was a Monarchy. Monarchy - Monarch. Monarch - Monarch butterfly
and you can even skip the second step
Sekigahara - Monarchy. Monarchy - Monarch butterfly
Sekigahara, emperor of Japan monarch, monarch butterfly
As a teacher, I can confirm that incorporating games REALLY helps kids not just learn content, but learn to enjoy it. I've taught science to fourth and fifth graders for years, and I try to turn every concept I teach them, many of which are not taught until much later than elementary, into a game. And they always eat them up and learn the material, often shocking other educators who wouldn't think of teaching the concepts I taught them, and seeing virtually the entire class know and understand them. Here are a couple games I've found particularly successful and what they taught:
COVALENT BONDING IN CHEMISTRY: If you ignore charged molecules and exceptions, this is an easy topic, though it usually isn't taught until high school at the earliest. I taught my students in a lecture the basics of how atoms make up molecules and what a covalent bond is, then gave them a sheet full of many different covalent molecules. I split the class into two teams. I would randomly choose a molecule on the sheet, shouting it out for all to hear. The teams then had to recreate the molecule with their bodies faster than the other. Here's what I mean: Every student would be an atom, and each of their limbs a potential bond. They would hold another student's wrists or ankles to form a bond between them, until they formed the correct molecule. Once the team was done, they would have to shout out the name of the molecule they just made, further cementing that into their brains, and if they did it right, they get a point. Students quickly learned that hydrogen forms one bond, oxygen two, nitrogen three, carbon four, etc. One girl even came up to me on the last day of class that she had learned during this game that she loved chemistry and would pursue it more in middle school, which I think is the best compliment a teacher can get.
DNA TRANSCRIPTION AND TRANSLATION: Another topic that students usually don't learn unless they really pursue biology, but is inherently simple. In lecture, I taught the class that DNA is something that holds the information that essentially makes up your body, and how that information had to be transcribed into mRNA and then translated into amino acids and proteins. I taught them how transcription worked; A --> U, T --> A, G --> C, C--> G, and how they could use a table to turn trios of RNA bases, or codons, into amino acids. Before class, I assembled 20 index cards, each with a picture of an amino acid, but NOT its name, and a letter, with no repeats. Before class, I hid them around the classroom. I also printed out 20 sheets of paper, each with a picture of an amino acid and its name. I put the students in groups of three or four, and gave each a unique list of 21 nitrogenous bases of DNA. I instructed them to transcribe that into RNA, then translate it into seven amino acids. When they thought they had an amino acid correct, they would go to the front of the room, find it, and draw the structure. They would then go on a scavenger hunt to find that amino acid in the classroom. Once they found it, they'd record the letter on the index card. The first team to correctly assemble a string of the correct seven letters, signifying a protein, wins. Many students had trouble starting out, but by the end, it was second nature to the entire class.
I'm not going to list any more, since youtube comments are not things people want to read all day, but if you are a science teacher and want to see if I have any more games you might want to use, feel free to shoot me an email at mbofenka@andrew.cmu.edu. Even if you're not a science teacher and you still want tips on what to think about when making games (pro tip: symbolism in games is your best friend), email me anyway. I'd be happy to help!
Why isn't this idea used all over the world already?
It's bloody perfect, the current school system sucks ass.
Troll4ever31 ._. Exactly
Because systematic change is sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow as hell
Because all of the leaders of the educational system think that video games are terrible and that ideas influenced by video games are also equally terrible instead of looking into it or at least trying it.
Truman Mutzelburg to put that in a more positive (but longer) tone, the people in charge of the education system are not properly aquainted with the medium, and therefore have no interest and because of their lack of knowledge in the area, are possibly more easily influenceed by the more radical (and false) anti-video game generalizations and misconceptions.
I'm a math teacher and there are many game sites to make math learning and drills more fun (some are a lot more fun than others). all of them require more equipment than I have access to for my students and many of the better ones cost $$ of which we have none. I also do not have the skills or time to make games myself but I do use some of these ideas in general lessons - a lot lower tech though!
"Okay class. Your homework for today is to play levels 2 and 3 of SRG. Remember: if you don't know a word in the game, look it up! Have fun, class dismissed!"
That's how I learned everything I know
What's SRG?
What is SRG? If someone is still active here...
WHAT IS *SRG* FOR THE LAST TIME
WHAT'S SRG I NEED TO KNOW OR I WILL DIE
XP points instead of grades: I've had numerous classes which give you points instead of grades, and I never felt a difference. Most students are smart enough to figure out the maximum score they can get, which means they get back into the same mindset of "I lost points because I made mistakes". You said it yourself the grading system is essentially the same as A-F, just you get 100-1 points instead. How is that better?
Class-wide achievements: a double-edged weapon at best. Sure, it might encourage cooperation, but it will also encourage peer pressure. That one kid who has trouble with maths and is keeping you from that trip to the amusement park? That one kid who can't study that hard for whatever reason, possibly out of his control? That one kid that might just not be that smart, and can't perform that well even with help? Yeah, everyone's gonna hate that kid.
Concerning grade vs xp, I think that a point that the author didn't explain enough are the principle of cumulative xp and concret goals. If the "levels" have tangible rewards, they become goals to achieve; it gives a stronger incentive than "just having A+". Since xp is cumulative, even a passable grade gives a bit of progression toward this goal, and gives a kid a sense of advancement; yes, he didn't gain as much as he could, but he still did gain something and his goal is still accessible.
I think that the issue of class-wide achievement and peer pressure would be a problem, but there is ways to limit it : Class-wide achievement not be tied to one specific kid doing better, or all kids managing a minimum grade; it is strongly dividing, and will pit the ones who passed and the ones who failed. Class-wide achievements based on a special xp won by helping others...
Aralicia Vel-Moran Better yet; the "Helping Hand" (New codename) XP should be spontaneous- in order to prevent people being nice in order to _just_ get points - people will do almost *anything* for a reward, just saying. :P
It's the job of the teacher to craft the system to benefit the kids and if problems do arise then you just tweak it a bit
Basically, if you get an A on your first test and a B+ on your second, you feel bad since your average grade has dropped. If you earn 95 points on your first test and 85 on your second, you still might be a little upset, but it seems less bad. Logically it makes no difference, but psychologically it does.
The problem is, these grades are usually divided to find an average score, which completely defeats the purpose. That, or the students are too used to the old system to recognize the change.
Either way, I can see how 90 + 70 sounds better than A + B. It gives you this sense of progression, that no matter how you did, the total score will still increase, and the gap between last time and this time suddenly doesn't seem as big. Of course, you can't just completely ignore bad grades, since you'd see how you're falling behind.
Which leads me to the next best point made in this video. Since the lessons have been gamified, there are tons of possibilities for simple and short games that still rewards points, as opposed to the occasional tests nowadays. If you ever find yourself falling behind, just participate in some of these games and you'd soon shorten the gap!
I do have to agree with you on Class-wide achievements though. The methods they've suggested might just isolate some of the weakest students in a class, since sometimes it's hard to find a person willing to help and good at doing so. Instead, I suggest School-wide long-term competitions, in which classes compete for something, like territory for example. It's an interesting way of comparing classes all while generating stimuli and provide a chance for students from different classes to interact.
Got one: Battle of Sekigahara ---> Sengoku Weaponry --> Gunbai war fan (butterfly shaped) --> Butterfly --> Monarch butterfly...
It may be in the same number of moves, but do I get credit for going down (specific) instead of up (general) ?
in my classroom you would!
Wow
Rather than awarding points or allowing all students credit for a question in exchange for outstanding achievement of a few, take advantage of those handful of students who understand the material. Since they obviously don't need as much repetitive work to understand the material, allow them to skip homework assignments in exchange for helping other students pass their in-class work before a certain time limit. I know I hated understanding math concepts early on in a class, knowing full well that there was no sense in putting effort into that class session because I'd still have to do the homework that night anyway. If I had a shot at more free time at home, I would have jumped at the chance to help someone else get it.
Random fact: If you start from ANY wikipedia page and simply click the first link from that page (not including parenthesized or disambiguation links) you will eventually end up on Philosophy. Always. Philosophy is at the root of absolutely everything.
+MrKingmeander If someone can find any page for which this is not true, please let me know.
+MrKingmeander I'll letcha know: Stereographic Projection.
EDIT: LINK: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereographic_projection
Japan - Japanese language - East Asian languages - Language family - Language - Communication - Latin - Latium - Rome - Comune - Administrative division - Country - Political geography - Politics - Governance - Geopolitics - Geography - Greek language - Indo-European languages - Europe - Continent - Land - Earth - Planet - Astronomical object - Entity - Existence - Ontology - Philosophy.
Wow
Undertale - Earth - Life - Oraganism - Form of life - Anaylitic Philosophy - Philosophy
+MrKingmeander Holy shit I did it fr batman. Now to do it for philosophy.
Being someone who fairly recently graduated high school and may very well be heading to college in the near future I simply cant not chime in on a few things brought up in this video and in the comment section.
So here's my take, I was never someone who got good grades, it was very common to see C's and D's as my final grades for classes that otherwise didn't simply require you to simply be there to get an A. I can tell you from experience that having a low grade didn't encourage me in the slightest to do any better, it only made me start not giving a flying fuck, and the few smart kids who rant at the teacher for getting an A- rather than an A provided exactly 0 motivation for me to do better, the only thing I thought was "The system is clearly working for them and not for me." So as the video brought up, some kind of system that's built around the best kids doing their best and getting rewarded and that somehow encouraging everyone below them to do better is a rather ideal way of thinking. It would be awesome if it worked like that, but it simply doesn't.
To me, what needs to be done is to look at this from the perspective of an individual student, because the current "one size fits all" paradigm is doing nothing other than working for one group of students and against another. The idea of a grading system that counts up starting at 0 and all you can go is up to the maximum points you can get and you gain levels as you continue to get points is a good idea, that would've probably motivated me 9,000x more than just seeing a low letter grade. This however feels like the only good thing brought up in the video. I'd have loved to have had even just that kind of grading system. The mindset should be something like "my current score is X and I need Y more points to get to level Z, and this assignment/test/quiz/whatever will only help me get the points to get to level Z."
As brought up in the comments though, the whole reward system would need to be thought through carefully so that the kids at the bottom aren't just simply leeching of the success of 3 or 4 kids to get them to pass the course. The idea of rewards is good however and should be added or yes, the "level up" grading system is just a glorified version of the old one. My idea is that, as brought up in a comment I saw, that instead of just one person reaching a certain point to reward everyone else, it needs to be something like say, 10 or 15 kids reach this point before everyone is rewarded and the number can be adjusted according to class size. The idea of free bonus points is grounds for kids leeching of the success of others, any point rewards granted as a result from the last suggestion I brought up would have to be minimal and such goals would have to be granted in a style of "we can't do it without you" kind of way rather than just hoping and praying enough kids manage to reach that said goal.
***** Idk what kind of classes/hw u had but most of the grades in public hs comes from your homework. Doing well on tests is a result of actually doing and understanding the hw. Not doing well in a class can therefore be traced back to pure laziness to do hw. Not saying youre lazy, since i dont know your situation, but thats pretty common.
Even if the subject is of zero interest to you, its all a matter of whether u want a good grade or not. If you dont care about a good grade to begin with, then no amount of rewarding grading systems will help you learn because you will just do the lowest possible effort to pass. That is not the same as learning.
axdurian2 You provide an interesting prospective, however here's the punch line. Science classes were typically my least favorite classes, and I most often got C's in those classes, yet with History, which is my favorite subject, I typically only got D's. So in a subject that I have almost no interest in, I can somehow get better grades than in a subject that just happens to be my favorite. I'm not sure, maybe I'm just a strange exception.
***** I'm a college professor (I teach game design actually). To suggest that a professor would "look at this from the perspective of an individual student" is absurd. I am more than willing to help out any of my students individually, but I'm not going to spend time on kids that don't care. If you are not motivated, that's fine. The world needs educated and uneducated people alike. Your motivation should be your prospects for the future. In all honesty, kids today don't care about their future. They expect everything to be handed to them and with so many helicopter parents around these days, it often is. Someday though, mommy can't help you anymore and you'll be left to your own devices. More then likely it's at that point your eyes will open and you'll long for the days of high school...
***** I just want to say that I completely agree with this. But personally, I just think that trashing the grading system (A, B, C, etc.) and replacing it with this "level-up" system isn't going to change anything. All the students are going to be awestruck at how different and "amazing" the new system is for maybe, I don't know, about 4-6 weeks? Then they'll realize that it's literally no different from the previous system, except this one counts up exclusively. All that will do is discourage people who have a low score from getting higher ones, because they feel like they're too stupid to be able to get a higher score. This whole comment could just be my bias against school talking: I just think the system is broken and non-balanced. I'm autistic and proud of it, but that just means I can't handle very much school work at once. Even with a resource class to do school work in, which has the secondary effect of downsizing my homework income by an entire class so that I only ever get homework for three classes, and an extra hour and 20 minutes to work on that homework, I still get completely swamped by the homework income I have. This is why I've even been contemplating dropping out of high school once my 11th grade school year ends this July, because the workload in high school is just way too non-balanced for all students, and so the students that have unbelievable potential but minimal work capacity get failed out of school and never get any good jobs, even though there's more than a 75% chance they would excel the hell out of those good jobs if they got hired for them. But they won't get hired for those good jobs. And it's because high school doesn't have a balanced workload, so if that student applied to one of those good jobs, the CEO would see that he failed all his grade 9 classes three times in a row, and then reject the application without a second thought. So I don't care about what happens in my future. I just know that I don't need a high school education that's going to try to force 3 times too much work down my throat. I can educate myself online at my own pace that I know I can handle without stress. It would also eliminate the huge quantities of stress caused by deadlines, and don't get me started on deadlines, or you'll be here reading about them until September 3035.
Bobby & Fluffy Also, as a side note, here I say "this one counts up exclusively." Well, for some reason I feel that teachers will botch that concept and somehow figure out a way to deduct XP/points/whatever-the-hell and make it 100% identical to the current A/B/C/etc system, thereby solving absolutely nothing whatsoever. That's just my speculation, but I just have a strong gut feeling where that is how teachers are going to use this level-up system.
This sounds so positive and rewarding, we NEED to make life like this :D
I will chain my teachers to their chairs till they do this
+Ender Shane I think most teachers are by choice of profession unsuit to develop such a system.
by far the best episode
Best episode YET :)
What are You doing veré Byf
Love your videos btw
I'm a kung fu and tai chi instructor that is still in my own training, but will one day be running my own school and classes. I was actually thinking of this video earlier today to help start making plans for how i will conduct my classes when i first start doing it. The problem that martial arts has initially is that kids and most students want to kick ass like Ryu, but fail to realize that getting there takes tons of repetitive work that doesn't seem to kick butt. So i was thinking of experience points and stuff like that would help them have a sense of progress while working to become more profecient. I mean, in a lot of video games, you have to work on fighting skills and leveling up already so it would make a lot of sense that way
How'd it go?
People knock on participation trophies, but I'm a nervous wreck who will basically give up and go through the motions when the 100th kick is somehow even worse than the 99th. The "exp" system tells me that even when I'm getting tired and sloppy, at least I'm still kicking
Personally I think we should all take a page from Egoraptor's sequelitis vid for Megaman. The player, or student, doesn't want to be talked down to like they're an idiot, especially when they know a lot, if not more, about the topic at hand. When you play a game, you hate the tutorial acting like you've never played games before. It's very similar in school. The teacher doesn't need to act like I've never heard of science, they should reward me for knowing more initially.
+CrazyKirby97 Yeah, start out small at first. This doesn't mean assume that they need to be walked through everything, but make it so that they can find it out on their own, and adopt their own use for it rather than telling them what to do with it.
I need this. School has gotten so bad that I need counseling and might need to take Prozac.
Same.
+That one guy without a profile pic
same here.
sadly it's too late for me. and i'm recovering from depression. i was suicidal during school time and i have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
school needs to change, ffs!
+Taki Reizen I didn't actually get suicidal, but I did have some depression thoughts, oh and also, school needs to tell people more that verbal aggression IS BAD, god sakes so many parents think there minds will be filled with agency, forever
matthew fanous
well, you are lucky... once you're in the suicidal-though-line, it's really REALLY hard to get out...
don't do that. That is a bad. That is a very bad
An idea for one of those ARGs, using a programming class as example.
Say it's the first day of school. You're giving a presentation to your class on the class rules and procedures when (on purpose) the ActivBoard (we have those at my school, they usually call them Prometheans) starts glitching out. You pretend to go get the IT department and while you're out of the room, a link to a website appears on the screen (the website is the ARG). When you get back, the link disappears so you have an excuse to pretend not to know about it (this can be achieved using a phone app or something).
Suppose the link leads to a homemade website that requires the student to fix code in order to unlock secrets (they can fix the code via an FTP server).
Sound like a good idea?
SnappGamez Yeah.
holy shit, not bad at all.
Sweet idea. I immediately assumed this is an intro class for scrubs so I laughed at the idea of them knowing how to FTP or what that stands for.
David Carlson The teacher could use a separate FTP server to have them turn in assignments, which would teach them what FTP is in the classroom.
A point system like in harry potter? 10 points for griffindor
+stijn louis just for each class/ student individuell! (depend on how you implement it)
yes, just yes
My third grade teacher divided her class into the four houses. I was in Gryffindor.
Joe Penton best. teacher. ever.
agreed
OH, MY, GOD... I have an idea, what if every student had a creature avatar, like some kind of Pokemon or somthing. And it would start off looking like a blob then the more experience (from the system at the start of the video) you got the more customisation options you would unlock. The higher level you are the more evolved the monster would be. Each subject would have it's own element, for example math could be water element, science could be lightning element, English could be earth element, sport could be fire or physical "element" and maybe history be air element. Other subjects would have elements too but I'm not going to list all of them. With the different elements you could have different customisation/evolution options... So math would give you more water like features to your creatures (hey that rhymes); like fins, bubbles and a blue'er colour. Then closer to the end of the year, a kid who was really good at science and pretty decent at math would have a thunder storm monster with lightning and water elements. For the skills part you guys were talking about, the monster would get different attacks or abilities each time you levelled up in a subject, that you could use in different games: You could have a monster racing game, a battling game, a Platformer game and a uuuuh showing off game... Like where you let the monsters dance or perform or something. For the racing game example, you could have the whole class participate in the race and try to beat their other classmates.The experience would be split up into two types; one which would be apart of each subject and every level you got the more customisation and skills you got for that subject, the the other which would be an overall experience where at each level your monster would evolve (the subject levels would come quicker than the overall level).Alright I'm done here! Also thanks for reading everything.
+Zuezazon Ooooo... yeah! Someone needs to make a website or something or maybe a wiki (I think there's a gamification wiki already but it's pretty formal and stuff) where people can organize ideas like this so they can be found more easily. For now I'm just gonna use a Word document.
+Zuezazon Just read this. I think you are on to something here.
I know this is kinda late, but khan academy does nearly all of that !
+Anita Flay I kind of originally got the idea from Khan Academy, from the elemental monster dude guys. But yeah, It would be a more interactive/advanced/customisable version of that.
+Zuezazon They have programs like this. I use Classcraft with my students and they are able to customize their avatars as they progress through the assignments, and likewise, the game. In doing, so students can feel a deeper connection with the narrative of the game and suspend disbelief more directly.
Interesting. The first part reminded me of Khan Academy. It doesn't have grades. It has mastery. If a player is good at solving certain math problems they gain experience or mastery. One starts out with zero and they just improve from there. Gaining mastery earns some in game rewards, like badges.
+Luspear Soram Oh yeah! We alerady have this.
Sorry for being off topic and so incredibly cheesy.... I regularly return to this video to relive one of my most beautiful memories.
So the day that episode came out still on the excapist, Flo asked me to watch it with him. Usually I was pushy to sit down and watch extra credits, this time it was him - but that was not too unusual. And once the episode finished, I started talking right away. This episode was amazing and I wanted to get it to my mom, who is a teacher, but doesn't speak english well enough and I started to elaborate, how I could maybe translate... he had to point to the screen and then I cried for 2 hours...
I am grateful to the amazing people of Extra Credits (and of course my husband) for this memory.
Entering the tiny room and seeing my husband's eyes light up at the reception and seeing our kid smile for the first time now accompany this proposal in the Best Memories Ever Box. This led to so many beautiful things in our lives. Sorry for being so cheesy, but right now I am tearing up again from all the joy and so grateful for the people and all the good things in my life.
Thank you, Extra Credits. I'm getting Flo some flowers today!
Battle of Sekigahara -> Emperial Japanese Monarchy -> Monarch Butterfly
You got 5XP less than normal; it's spelled 'Imperial'. Otherwise, good! :)
damn son
How about battle of selfishness -> this video -> monarch butterfly :3
PlanetDanJT Many educators feel self-important, and are willing to debate the point endlessly. This video provides a way for educators to spread the importance to students as well as entertaining a greater level of importance with their students. Monarch butterflies are invoked as an example, along with the Battle of Sekigahara and the Imperial Japanese family (it wasn't *actually* a monarchy as by this point in Japanese history, the Imperial Family had less privilege and power than the military or civil rules, such as the Taiko or Shogun. Said 'royal'-like status did not occur for the Imperial Family until the Meiji Revolution in the 19th century).
TheAsvarduilProject The question is... did you learn that from a game? :)
In New Zealand, we have the NCEA system. We have a set amount of "credits" we need to gain by the end of the year. You gain these credits by doing assessments throughout the year. From creative writing in English, to making a game in Digital Technology. Basically everything you do in class, gets you points to help you pass the year. There are end of year exams, but they just give you extra credits. You don't even need to do them if you've already got enough (which is often the case). Your work is marked as either "Achieved" (just did the work), "Merit" (did the work and did it well), or "Excellence" (Fucking good job son). If you just get an achieved but want to do better, your teacher will give you feedback and ideas on how to improve. You then get your work back and some time to improve it, and you can re-submit it later to try for a higher grade. If you get a certain amount of credits that are Merit or Excellence, you can get an endorsement at the end of the year, which is basically a certificate and a badge to say "I do well at school". Looks good when you're getting a job or getting into University. It's a pretty good system! You can't earn credits for other students by doing well though XD.
Thank you so much for this video, it really got my head FILLED with different ideas and ways I can make my classes I teach even more interesting. I currently teach video game design and development classes for middle school to high school students, so it would only make sense to further gamify the class!
Alec Martelle we dont have game topics in the north of britain because the goverment hates us and we have no money
I'm really sorry to hear about that :( If you ever would like to learn a few things, I'm sure I could show you!
As a kid still in school, I can say that I would love to have an education like this. It sounds like so much fun, and would get me very motivated in subjects that are normally boring.
this would work great in schools
why are we not doing this?
+anamarvelo
Because we're basically still living in a futuristic version of the 19th century
Diskhate then where is my steam punk dirigible to take me to see the queen in england
+anamarvelo some schools use minecraft, they should use universe sandbox 2, it would teach them alot about space
Sirbeary - and it would make it fun so itwould stick
+anamarvelo because tradition. Crappy, crappy tradition.
ok, this will sound hilarious to most of you, but I am a german 15 year old dreaming of becoming a teacher and MAN this video was great. Especially in 10 years or so, when games will be far more common in everyday life this might work extremly well.
THANK YOU GUYS from Extra Credits and don`t you dare stop making videos!
Greetings from Hamburg!
One of the things that I found most important in this episode was the aspect of cooperation.
As someone who is fairly introverted in school, I find that having more people to cooperate on homework with is very beneficial to learning. I find so often that other students, by having no incentive to help me out with a problem I'm having, puts the students who are good at a subject out in front with good grades, and leaves me at the back who is bad at the subject without any help from others.
in a world where this works, life would be beautiful.
Sekigahara, Japan, Monarch of Japan, Monarch Butterflies.
I think my favorite part of what you say here is the group goals, encouraging people to cheer each other on for the better good of the group. Definitely a lot better than having the people at the bottom of the class resenting people at the top. And I guess my other favorite part was the proposal at the end. Awww. :)
Only one teacher did something like this at our university, thankfully we had him in the anatomy/Pathology portion. He basically made small exams before every main exam that let you gain points towards the score for your main exam with no penalty for failing. Thanks to those I could go to every exam without feeling like I was unprepared because I'd already answered a bunch of questions, and every time I was wrong I'd know what to study harder on.
Jumping between links to find confections as an actual exercise would almost be something to dream of. Seeing how we often in school did things like that when we didn't feel like working.
This is so encouraging! I started learning to make games for this purpose. Thanks for shining light on this. I hope to make a dent in this area and change the way we teach
I'm currently in college to become a teacher and I must say this video gave me some wonderful ideas! In a way I feel like the mindset that one must keep when learning, and playing video games is that of a sense of wonder and discovery. That childlike awe of confronting the unknown and having meaningful progression to your goals! Thank you so much for this food for thought!
I have also downloaded the transcript and given you credit when I quoted you in my master's level paper on Gamification. Your work will help me to make this change for students. Thank you!!
Sengoku Perior -> Colorful banenrs -> colorful butterfly -> butterfly
Christian Erazo I think you mean monarch butterfly not just butterfly
Wait a minute, WHAT DID SHE SAY!??!?
"Yes!" :D
+Daniel Floyd :D
Hallelujah!
I discovered this channel a few hours ago and just watched dozens of your episodes, you guys rock :)
I started studying for a teaching profession last year and obviously I'm still focusing mostly on the topics I'm going to teach, but this video gave me some brilliant ideas on HOW to teach already. Thank you very much!
I've been directed to this video by a number of my friends who have heard about what I'm doing in the classroom.
I'm far from figuring out the most ideal way to do this as well as 100% adoption rate but this year is my first attempt at "Skinning" my class in terms of Gamification.
Here's a short overview for those who may be interested / want to discuss.
- The class is a science class (Physics).
- Homework is assigned, but almost never graded. Students get quizzed on their homework/last class content every day.
- Student quizzes are mostly optionally collaborative. So they may work with each other for better understanding or work alone as they usually may.
- They can redo quizzes for full credit by reflecting and showing they've learned / ready to take steps to it.
- The class itself operates on a lot of groupwork, very little lecture, and promotes discussion from probing questions.
To that end, I've skinned the class by calling the quizzes, "Quests". Students are like party members in an MMO game that are trying to complete said Quest. They are worth XP and the leveling system only moves up due to this, akin to what the EC video mentions.
As a long-time gamer myself, there are many analogies and links to different elements from different games. The system is most exciting to High School Freshmen. The system either goes way over uninitiated gamers' heads or people who don't care for skinning education. It is understood what we are all talking about when we use both layman and gaming terms interchangeably enough. The system in my class seems to be a popular topic of discussion outside of my class and has many people excited about the prospect of tangible improvement aside from grades (aka the students play along so much, I don't actually know if they're thinking about A B C etc. anymore).
Let me know what you all think! I'd be happy to develop more with you all and discuss!
siggyx4scythe please do. I think this would work great in the classroom. Do you use any websites for resources?
on the thing on tangents: it works. long story short, my love of swords turned into facination with hidtory in general
+Jayden Crowe That's cool. I enjoy medieval weapons myself.
+D MAS
Yeah, they're pretty cool. I'm as much into the combat as I am the history XD it's thrilling (and risky when you can't afford protective gear like me and my friend that does it as well).
I'm not into real history much, but I tend to get invested in game's history. So, you mean like sparring?
+D MAS
I'm not much into playing games, I just like them for their aesthetic and some for the well-thought out lore.
And yeah, sparring. Only with more loosely defined, unwritten rules that basically consist of "be careful, don't grievously harm or kill your opponent, and don't use sharp weapons".
Mainly because me an my friend that also does this are more or less fine with small wounds and/or some bruises. I'm a bit more tolerant to pain, so I don't mind it at all. (I also tend to use lightweight quick weapons like Smallswords, jians, and rapiers so I'm able to pull my blows better).
That's interesting. I find swordfighting to be much more interesting than just shooting someone, though I guess guns are fine too. I don't have too much of a preference, I just don't like heavy blunting weapons like maces and hammers as much. Lazy as fuck, though so I do none of that sparring shit.
I want to say a big thank you to the Extra Credits team for this episode from long ago. I am using the topic of this video as a jumping off point for a research paper for my grad class on ethics and technology in the classroom. I plan to talk about Reality Ends Here and Classcraft as examples as well. I can't remember the last time I was this excited or motivated to do a research paper. :)
I use your video while I teach teachers about gamification. I am passionate about making this change and I am using your work to help make this happen. Thank you!!
a few years ago we had a school wide alien themed arg. it was awesome
Give us more details about it! What did u have to do?Any examples?
we came into school and it said HELP in big letters on the field. the teachers told us that there were suspicions of an alien landing in the forest near by. the different classes did different things so I don't know everything that happened but we went to the forest and found a piece of paper with a weird language on it and we had to decode it.
please be our education minister here in britain
Oh God guys... You just gave me an epiphany on how to ensure my daughter retains information! Her being a gamer like he father (but thinking differently), I know that this would be the most gratifying way to challenge her without her feeling like each wrong guess is a devolution into mediocrity. Thank you so much!!!!!!
This reminds me of a quote from the Hunger Games (yes, I know that it's cheesy but it is kind of true): "Hope is the only thing stronger than fear." - President Snow
You're welcome.
you know what also makes a good game? not being forced to play it. that sould be the final goal: school being a game you play for your own entertainment and couriosity.
agency shouldnt only be a tool for education, but the reason for participating.
and shitty schools should just be abandoned if they don't manage to encourage learning (as opposed to memorization for arbitrary demand).
On the contrary, 'shitty schools' are the schools that require the most attention, if they are abandoned then all of the kids in that school's catchment area will get a terrible education or will be forced to move school and possibly move house. some people simply cant afford to do that.
I agree that kids should not be forced into playing these games but that would mean the teacher will have to teach two separate classes, with one using the games and one using the current standard. Instead, psychological techniques shown in the video 'The illusion of choice' could be used to make the children _feel_ like they are not being forced to play them. Remember it's the _feeling_ of agency that will encourage rather than the agency itself.
People need an education to get a career that later on they may want but at the time just want to get out of school. People learn better at younger ages so making schools optional could result in people leaving early and rejoining when they can no-longer learn efficiently, drastically reducing the worlds functionality.
awsome6326
people don't hate giving attention, and games prove that pretty well.
learning isn't always happy and easy, but games aren't either.
people like being challenged, challenge just isn't the point.
and education is not "for getting an carreer". it's so sad and diappointing to read this. education should enable and empower people to understand and deal with the world, not for believing and following what you are told.
it's this mindset that creates the enormous shortage of artists, scientists and entrepreneurs, and way more dependent workers than we could possibly need.
the public school system was designed to create factory workers, and it's failing society more and more.
sofias. orange I'm afraid you miss-understand my point regarding education being optional. Education is not for the purpose of getting a career i agree with you there, however, there are some highly intellectual jobs that require a piece of paper to prove your education. Many employers wont even consider hiring you if you don't meet the necessary set of qualifications, but some children don't understand this and would much rather get out of going to school if they can.
...and to show my viewpoint on education and artists, I have a pretty brag-able set of qualifications in engineering but I am currently ditching them to become an indie games developer. For any future jobs I apply for I intend to show a portfolio of achievements instead of the qualifications that, while they are good, I feel are not an accurate representation of my ability in my chosen field.
seikgarhari - butterfly effect - butterfly
+Arist Channels links?
+Arist Channels That would still be 4 links not three like you've written because you forgot that after you're on the page for "butterfly" you still have to click the link to the "monarch butterfly" page to get to the end. So you haven't beaten them, also the (*direct*) link between Seikgarhari and the butterfly effect doesn't even exist.
It makes me so happy that so much legitimate thought is being put into these ideas. Somehow i know going though school would have had a lot more meaning to me if these systems in place. call me crazy but seeing such work being put into these ideas brought tears to my eyes. Not normal tears of sadness but tears of gratification that someone cares enough to try to bring a better change to the table where no better options have been provided through my whole life.
There's definitely some good ideas here - it'll take some work to actually adapt any of them to any school system, but it's certainly worth exploring.
Maybe I was taught by tutors when I was little and the ideas you put is what I had experienced in my early childhood. When I emigrated to the US, I still managed to go to a 'magnet school' where they taught effectively.
However when I reached high school; let's say it was not the environment I was used to and it was an ugly learning experience...
Agency is what I thought I lacked yet the things I learn in games is how I tackle the day to day tasks at work. Working at a warehouse is awesome, if you think of each job for that shift or the whole day as a side-quest or a puzzle; I get to do tetris all day and get paid for it - at least that's how I get through the day.
I think of my job as a "dating" sim, but like a "customer" sim, and an idle rpg where l get to pick what upgrades for the shop will maximize my income with the fewest points spent
Sekighara, edited the article to include a link to monarch butterfly.
Having seen this video about 5 weeks ago, I've implemented this with/in a Level 1 (low) ICT group that is mostly aspergers and austistic. Without a shadow of a doubt it helps the class stay engaged and willing to pick up new information. I can't go into the depth that the video describes above, but I have used elements of it already.
When you started to talk about kids with lack of agency, I completely recognized myself in it. I'm starting my 3rd year of university tomorrow, and have no motivation whatsoever and no long term goals in life. That sucks, but I'm happy that I can finally classify where that lack of motivation comes from. Good vid
Just to be clear, a kid has to learn motivation by having enough agency that it feels like it matters in their life. Do not forget that video games are also a tool for the escapist that just can't face their actual life anymore, it's the goto for some of the ones that run away. But that just makes me a naysayer, right? Crap.
+noddwyd Your agruments are contradicting your own point. You basically say that children with no agency, will turn to gaming to get said agency. Using parts of game design (gamifiying) in education, gives kids the agency they get from gaming, in school. That's one of the main points why gamifying education is a great way to go.
It doesn't make sense. Correct. It's a confused mind that does this.
+noddwyd It's possible that rather than escaping a from a life where they feel a lack of agency, they are attempting to find a life in which they do have that agency. I don't think that the people who "run away" to video games do so out of a genuine preference for the virtual over the real but are simply seeking that which they feel they lack in the real world.
But you do point out that a vital part of the implementation of this idea would be the translation of the agency that kids felt in games to a feeling of agency in life.
+noddwyd I really need motivation, no matter what I do or what I want my fate will always be decided by someone else (more likely the ones in power now)
Brilliant!
One of my professors used the points system you described and I found it much more satisfying as a student and easier to intuit where I was and what I needed to do to ace the class.
This video makes me so happy for some reason.
I'm soing a research paper on how can video games improve certain skills, or how can they help us to acquire skills, and this video is so useful. Thanks!
I remember learning about the choose your route game on a forum. Some poster told everyone to go to the Wikipedia home page, click the random article button, and then see how quickly we could get from our starting point to the article on Jesus Christ. I think my record was three intermediate links.
***** This game is also commonly done with Adolf Hitler. The wikipedia Hitler game.
I may need to analyse this format some day.
Game theory
nostalgia critic
extra credits
and even gaijin goombah to a degree
all have a goal in mind at the start, but teach you about things in the process.
A good video shows you the links
A great video, shows you how the links work so you can use the same logic in the future
willky flame I just subscribed to your channel in case you do.
Leif Ashryver please don't
even if I do make a vid
which I wont
it would be on a different channel
willky flame I agree completely. To take that a step further, I believe that any person who is trying to tell you something -- a teacher, author, or expert -- should always explain their logic; if they don't, they enforce the habit of accepting information without understanding or confirming it.
It is amazing how allowing students just a few simple choices gives them this agency and helps them to learn how to learn. Thanks, you help me to understand why my approach to teaching my students works. Teaching programming also helps. It's a great place to learn how to fail successfully. Basically, you will get it wrong a lot of the time in the beginning, but if you use those experiences as learning opportunities instead of seeing yourself as a failure, you get stronger and before you know it, you get it right! and you learn new ways of doing things in the process. Mistakes are just part of the learning journey. I guess its your attitude that matters most. Learning in this way simply helps you to have a McGiver attitude to life - that way, you always win!
Fantastic video. Thank you so much. Please keep doing these. I'll keep watchin' em.
Wow, I didn't expect to see all these negative comments after watching this video.
Neither did I. I believe this video was very insightful
That is AWESOME. I would like to gamify my college classes at USP. Would USP allow me?
I love this video, I really do, and there's so much to comment about it, I have a few friends working at a social project that has the bare bones of a gamefied schooling, teaching kids how to speak english (I'm from Brazil) and how to dance and play instruments, and this? this is exactly the kind of thing we need, complexity on a subtle level that makes each student want to strive to be better and bring others up with them since when everyone is doing great, each indivudual also gets rewards. I'll link this to them right now and if it interests anyone who happens to read it I'll come back to it to tell you how it goes. Btw the marriege proposal at the end was adorable
I was asked by a leader in a youth group how to help out some of the older members that where struggling in school. I could not put my finger on the answer, not all of it anyways, watching this episode gave me another part to the answer I could not figure out. Thank you and keep on making these videos. I've been finding them increasingly useful.
How can I cite this video? I'm interested in using the information within in a presentation. Thank you!
Not only are they super informative, but these videos are hilarious! I loved the picture of "two very disparate fields" as two farm fields that looked quite different XD
Do you know which format your works cited needs to be? APA or MLA?
As a teacher, I am not entirely sure how I feel about this. While it may be effective in a controlled environment like elementary school, I don't think the potential gains would carry over past that.
The problem with this sort of approach is that it doesn't teach kids how to learn. It teaches kids how to have fun; while they may learn in the process, the learning is tangential. Making learning fun and easy will undoubtedly result in more learning early on. I have no doubts about that. But I'm concerned that the extra advantage won't last in a less-controlled environment, when learning will not go hand-in-hand with fun and easy. If the kid doesn't know how to handle difficult boring learning later in life, if the gain in elementary school doesn't last, is the temporary gain today really worth an inevitable loss later on?
I say this because I was a child prodigy. I was speaking fluently before most kids my age had spoken their first word. I was reading before my brain had (in theory) developed enough to allow me to read. But I'm not in a language-related field today because *none* of that lasted past high school. And the reason none of it lasted is because college-level learning was my first experience with difficult learning, and unlike my peers who experienced difficulty in high school, I had no idea how to handle it.
In my subsequent experience as a teacher, I have found that trying to teach kids that learning is easy not only robs them of the inherent wonder of learning, but makes them feel stupid when they inevitably have a hard with difficult learning that they have been told is easy.
For example, scientific notation makes numbers seem easy. 7 x 10^17 looks like an easy number because 7, 10, and 17 are all easy numbers. But 7 x 10^17 is also seven hundred thousand million million, which is also 5x the age of the earth ... measured in *seconds*. So when students understandably have problems with incomprehensibly huge numbers like that, they feel stupid because they've essentially been tricked into thinking it is just three easy numbers. And students that feel stupid give up and stop trying.
Another example is teaching schoolkids that objects of different mass fall at the same speed. Then when they learn about Galileo, they think that Galileo just had some common sense and all his contemporaries were just stupid and dogmatic. The reality is, Galileo's contemporaries had a mountain and a half of evidence that objects of different mass do not fall at the same speed. It's a physics fact that air resistance has a larger effect on the acceleration of less massive objects, causing them to fall slower than more massive objects. Removing these extra factors and proving Galileo's claim took specialized technology that wasn't developed until two centuries later. Two freaking centuries! That is astonishing, that is truly mind-boggling, and students have no appreciation of that because it's been drilled into their heads from so young that they take it for granted. What should instill in them a sense of wonder, instead makes them yawn with boredom.
I can give more examples, but in short a lot of methods of learning similar to this have just been a constant source of frustration for me because they frequently stop working in the college environment (which is where I teach). So, I would be very skeptical of this method until any gains are proven to carry over to later in life, because lots of others that sounded just as good on paper have tried and failed.
Smiley Learning is not always easy or fun, and I expect I could find several examples to prove this to you, such as learning about the superlinear Dirichlet problem and its solutions.
Regardless, turning learning into a game doesn't teach children how to learn on their own. The archetypal game espoused in this video is a highly-structured team environment with pre-defined rules, limits, and goals, and it is created and controlled by the teacher. That is as different as can be from unsupervised, unstructured, solitary free time. Heck, those two environments are more different than WoW fetch-quests and PvP, and people get laughed at for saying their awesome fetch-quest skills will make them pro at PvP. If free time is where most of your learning occurs, it doesn't make much sense to advocate for the game approach.
Smiley It seems like you are confused here.
You are talking about integrating games into a curriculum. There is a large amount of research that has been done on that topic. I would totally be on board with that. I even wrote a thesis on how physics simulations could be improved with a little bit of tweaking to turn them into games, to encourage students to run more than just one trial and see the effects of all the different parameters.
But this video is talking about turning school itself into an MMO.
I played WoW for about 6 months around when it first came out. I ignored every single piece of text/dialogue aside from "find X amount of Quest Item A." I never did a non-quest follow-up visit on a previous quest recipient to see how well things were going. I also flat-out skipped any quests that were too hard or time-consuming. And from what I could tell during my brief stint as a WoW player, my approach to WoW was very typical.
^ This is not how I want my students to approach tests, let alone real life. Yet this is what the MMO framework encourages.
ferrishthefish When the "quest" itself requires you to learn though they will have to do just that: Read up on topics, do research and then put it all together to solve it. While the system might be that of an MMO the task at hand requires thinking and research instead of the usual "travel to X and find Y" or "left-click 10 wolves until they die". The quest itself is pretty much "research X" so there's no way they go from quest to quest without using their brains even a bit.
While I don't think it's a good idea to turn all school subjects into games (languages are probably too difficult to teach properly in a game, except for vocabulary) I see great potential in this idea. How well it will be executed is another story. "SpaceChem" and "Universe Sandbox" should be good examples of games that are both fun and educational so it certainly can be done, all it needs is proper integration into the lessons.
Azumongo I think you are also falling for the same trap as Smiley. *I already believe integrating games into a curriculum can help learning.* Games can totally be used as the pre-college versions of labs or recitations, where students can get a more hands-on understanding of the topics we are covering in class. But using specific games to teach specific topics is extraordinarily different from turning the curriculum itself into one giant MMO.
Not all students have fun in MMOs. Only about a quarter of my college friends played MMOs, and for most of them it was pretty low on the priority list. I personally consider my 6 months of WoW to be 6 months I'll never get back. Plus, part of the appeal of an MMO is that you have the ability to choose what quests you do and when you want to do them, instead of being forced to do the same ones at the same time as everyone else. If you just take regular homework and call it a "quest" instead, you haven't increased the appeal (I, at least, wouldn't bet that students have sufficient positive association with the word "quest").
Not all students will perform well in an MMO-like environment. Even if all the students love MMOs, plenty of students require a more rigid structure to motivate them. I wouldn't bet on a classroom of pre-college students being mature and responsible enough to keep themselves on track without the cohesion of a more traditional classroom. Left to their own devices, they aren't going to all progress at the same rate. I can't separately walk 30 different students through 30 different topics in the same day.
Not all students will gain skills that carry beyond high school. Even if all the students perform well in the MMO-like environment, that doesn't make them smarter; it just means they perform well in an MMO-like environment. Many skills that work in MMOs don't work in other environments, and teaching students to rely on these skills can actually hurt them once they inevitably enter a different environment. Yes, it's possible that some students will get that "spark" and become self-learners, but calling homework a "quest" doesn't encourage self-learning any more than calling it "homework" does. What it does encourage is trying to do all the fun "quests" first and all the boring "quests" later, which will wreak havoc on students' motivation when they inevitably run out of fun ones.
The more I think about this, the worse of an idea it sounds.
ferrishthefish While I do agree with you on some points there, I have to disagree with you on your overall argument. What has been put forward is not about turning schooling into an MMO-like but a reworking of how schooling and learning is represented. You should take note that the video is more about the psychology of learning and motivation more than changing existing teaching techniques.
Using Extra's example of changing the grading system to a points system, if you always use 100 points (to make my point easy) you are effectively showing the exact same information that a percentage system is showing. What this has done however is change a negative representation, starting with 100% and removing marks, into a positive representation by starting at zero and gaining points. Going into psychological theory essentially you changed a negative punishment (taking away something good) into positive reinforcement (gaining something that is perceived as good). On a basic level what this does is reward the action of studying instead of punishing the inaction of procrastination. With further incentives like the ones mentioned by Extra in the video above this can create strong reinforcement that learning is good, and depending on the methods used fun as well.
Again on a basic theoretical level, humans and other entities react better to positive stimuli than negative ones and that is the major change that is being suggested here. As an example, when training a puppy you don't kick it every time it disobeys a command, you reward it when it gets the command correct. This is a very basic and extreme example and there are other theories that will be better fitting, but the principle is essentially the same.
Hello from the future! :)) Thanks guys! I'm a UX designer, currently trying to figure out a gamification system for a new project involving education, and your video helped me a lot!
Hello, I used some of the concepts and quotes in this video as well as a few of your other videos for an argumentative essay on why video games and video game aspects should be brought into the American Educational System and the difficulties it would face being integrated into that system. The video's have been very helpful to me and I just wanted to say thank you, so thank you very much!
:D
This system sounds very good - far better than our current educational system.
But here's the 1 flaw: how will colleges accept the best students without the A-B-C-D-F system?
the ones with the highest average points
Walker Heard That would still cause stress and stuff, but that would still be better than what we have currently.
But with people like Susan Greenfield and what-not criticizing gaming, and millions of adults thinking that gaming is bad for children, I doubt this will become mainstream until at least 2050.
The beauty of the level system is that it doesn't require any change in how the system works outside of the classroom.
With a little number shuffling it's easy to work out how many points an individual assignment or test can contribute to the final "average". Assuming you know how many assignments there will be that is. After that you just set up the "levels" such that an A+ is level 20, C- is level 10, etc, but when reporting things through official channels you use the traditional system. All that changes is how the data is presented to the students in the classroom.
finbar163 I think that the harder your level is, the harder your assignments will be, and the lower your level, the easier your assignments will be. This would make getting an A very hard (which is why most school districts would reject this), but it would make getting a D or C very easy. This is a good thing for both above average and below average kids. Below average kids obviously want their assignments to be easier, so they can get closer to the average spectrum. Above average kids, contrary to popular belief, want it to be harder to get an A. People like me and some of my friends (I have a 4.0 GPA BTW) think school is too damn easy, and this kills motivation for us in schools. Making assignments harder for smart kids will make them more motivated in school.
Oh yeah, and another thing: we need to find an alternative to letter grades. Maybe you can have a certain level in each class, and you can present that to your colleges and whatever in your resumes - completely scrapping the letter grade system. This will make students much less stressed out. However, because society is run by many ignorant fuckwits, this won't happen until at least in the next 35 years.
I believe they said in the video (and the real-life example showed) that the A-F system would still be in place, but the children would be directed to think of it differently. The student who got 10,000 exp would still have an A+ on their report card and the student who got 7,500 exp would still have a C on their report card in a class where the base number of exp given that semester was 10,000. The point is to stop children from thinking of themselves as starting at 100% and going up or down as they do poorer or better, but to think of themselves as having no experience, and growing toward a better level of understanding and mastery of the subject.
Battle of Sekigahara
Japan
List of Life Sciences
Insects
Monarch Butterfly
2C3D I feel like it could just be pretty easy to just link from topic A to subject A, to school, to subject B and then topic B.
Hi there Extra Credits, I just wanna say this video is awesome and your channel is brilliant. I would also like you to know that I discovered this video through my University, Victoria University of Wellington. It was shown during our orientation day for Engineering and Computer Science students, the orientation day had a huge emphasis on game design and development so the video fits perfectly, not to mention the fact that it opened our eyes to the education system. Thank-you.
I've literally started to introduce technology-literacy into the classroom and I'm formulating ways to make the English language more attainable to students of the techno-era and this video has answered so many of my questions as well as made my creative juices flow... I hope that I can create something that is cross-curricular. So thanks for the tips.
This sounds like a lot of work. Give me a text book and what i need to know and I'll get A's I hate when im given work that doesn't improve any skills that will actually help me in real-life!
I can see where you are coming from. To be honest, if school had been more like what was described in this video, I would have taken more interest and found a path I really liked and wanted to move toward. What they are getting at is to find a way to improve interest and learning across the board. Most of these methods described would teach more life relevant skills than pure memorization. Every one learns differently and using these ideas could improve interest from more students.
Shaymeralexander I get what your saying except the life relevant skills part. you jumped from taking interest which is the want to learn to being to lazy to go far enough to learn more. Even the greeks knew that when we reached a time where we no longer learned to learn... that is when we would fall.
Reading/memorizing stuff out of a book won't exactly help you in life either.
Sean Fronteras If i am memorizing and learning how to code or do math or any other advanced thing it will.
Andrew Plummer Not necessarily, memorizing stuff isn't as helpful as improving your learning skills. You can memorize all you like, but there's an extent to how much information your brain can hold until it becomes harder to memorize stuff. Instead, if you're improving how you process that information rather than simply storing it, it would be easier to process new information and learn how to use that in a shorter amount of time.
I think that the leveling idea is along the right track, the addition of personalized targets and examples of famous individuals for each level may help students better equate what they think would be the right level for them, such as Frank Lampard or Julia Gillard. Great video :)
I've been thinking about this since I was 12, so it's great to see all the enthusiasm for this idea! I would love to see more in depth coverage on the subject.
Hey extra credits! You guys have something awesome going here so i want to spread the word about it during my game design class presentation. Don't worry, i would totally credit you guys for it. Keep up the good work! =D
Battle of Sekigahara -> Samurai masks portraying demons -> Japanese tatoo arts portaying creatures -> Animal Tatoos --> Monarch Butterfly. :)
I just found this video in one of the lists of 'related' videos that appear beside my usual video-game oriented RUclips session, and boy am I glad I clicked it. Having a channel related to two topics will net you a lot more subscribers, it seems.
Totally using that links activity in my classes, good work EC!
I always thought about gamifying educations as the implementation of boring education video games, but you really opened my eyes for that and I think it would be pretty sweet to implement this into the education system, i´m sure it would help (by the way I´m a student and I would love to see some classes like that it would definitely help engaging me).
I certainly hope more people watch this video and consider the points you've made!
Brilliantly done, and awesome ideas there. If I ever find myself teaching a classroom, I'll definitely assimilate some of it. :) Definitely one of the largest diamonds in this sack of gems called Extra Credit, keep it up! :)
This idea is not a new one, but definitely the best one for education. I remember growing up playing math games such as the JumpStart Adventures series of games (My favourite being Mystery Mountain), or logical training games such as The Zoombinis. Hell, I STILL play The Zoombinis sometimes for fun, it still holds up as a great game.
The desire to make modern, eventually VR based, educational games is what has motivated me to start learning about game design, coding, art asset creation, and creative writing for storytelling.
CGPgrey brought me to this really amazing channel. from now on i'm one of your loyal subscribers! thanks for this great idea!
Do you guys have a podcast? I really like the way you touch upon different aspects in gaming and it's not just your opinion, but some of it is backed up with research you've done. The theories, such as this one, is highly enlightening and interesting! If you don't already have a podcast (in which some of these videos could be transcribed) I strongly suggest doing so!
as a homeschool parent, this is fascinating, but then it occurred to me that this is just a great way to exist in life, the universe, EVERYTHING. Gamify it is going to be my mantra for the next few weeks, as I figure out how I can apply it and see what results I get. Great info, thank you so much!
I just realized something. Class dojo does some of this. It starts everyone at 0 points, and you can add points for things that you make (say, you can create a positive for handing in homework, and everyone who hands in homework gets a point) and you can take away points for bad behavior (using the previous example, you can make a negative for failing to hand in homework on time). I have seen this used in a couple schools, for example, a grade 4 class used the points as a currency and auctioned off prizes at the end of semesters. A different school changed the avatar for getting a certain number of points, and the higher your avatar's level, the better prize you get at the end of the year.
wow really like what you guys doing, I got a new degree and am about to start teaching and I was thinking "man the grading system needs to be changed badly, will try my best to change it" this video gave me a huge leap forward, keep it up guys ;)
This so good I'm actually including some of these ideas in a speech to a bunch of educators!
I just started binging on your content recently. I wish I had a system growing up that gave some kind of incentive to learning. I'm 26 years old, and have always disliked school. I just recently quit college because after 8 years of attending, the only thing I ever achieved was disdain for formal education.
I have a Video Game Music class at the University of Michigan, and it's fantastic! It's run almost exactly like what you've shown in this video.
...
I wonder if my professor watched it...
this made me cry tears of hope! lol, teaching for several years pulls on ya- but hey this is encouraging!
This explains so much why I am so much better than most of the other kids at school. I consistently get high grades, without doing all the work, and never feel stressed about tests or stuff like that.
Its because I walk in thinking that I have an F until I do something. That simple psychology has helped me tremendously in school, and thanks to you guys, I can now imbue others with this knowledge.
TLDR Im not a freak I just learned the secret to life.