Next, I showed a picture of silk factory workers from the 19th century during the Industrial Revolution era and juxtaposed it with traditional classrooms.  The old goal of education was to mass-produce assembly line workers to have one (the same) skill.  Learning looks very different today. In the kind of BYOD (bring your own device) era that we find ourselves in today, learning is about tinkering, creating things, collaborating, being entreprenurial, understanding systems, bridging cultures, and self-directedness.

Finally, I showed the current progress of three projects that target the three “boss-level” challenges described above.  Arctic Crisis, a multiplayer card game, addresses empathy and systems thinking by asking players to manage and protect Arctic species in an ecosystem from threats like industrialization and poaching.  Greenify, a mobile app, tackles the challenge of fostering sustainable communities through user-created real-world missions.  Finally, Scholar’s Quest/Science City Heroes is a gamification of education project that attempts to apply game-based principles to support a mastery orientation and better dynamics that support learning.

We touched upon several issues at the two-hour symposium, including whether games can improve student persistence, retention, and success and how games can transform curriculum and lead to greater student engagement and better learning outcomes.

Click here to watch the webcast of this symposium.

Of twenty-four submissions, six teams were chosen by judges to give extended pitch presentations for the Final Round.  The panel of judges represented academia, industry, and non-profit:  Dr. Joey J. Lee, Assistant Professor of Technology and Education at Teachers College; Dr. Charles Kinzer, Professor of Technology and Education at Teachers College; Scott Price, Senior Project Manager at BrainPOP; Anna Ly, Research Fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center; Samuel Ahn, CEO of Big Apple Education; and Pen-Pen Chen, Bilingual Speech and Language Pathologist for the NYC Department of Education and CEO of Penguistics Solutions.

The winning teams receive up to $16,000 in seed funding to partner with the TC Games Research Lab to design and develop the educational games. The lab will incubate the projects over the following year.  This event was very well received, especially as a means to bring together talented individuals all over New York City with similar interests and to mobilize their efforts to create successful educational technology projects.

One of my main research areas attempts to use gamification, the incorporation of game elements into non-game settings, as a strategy to help schools face major problems around student motivation and engagement.  It seems like a perfect fit — as gamification, when designed and implemented properly, promotes a mastery orientation, engagement, creativity, persistence, and better classroom dynamics such as collaboration and teamwork.

Over the past couple years, I have explored the use of game principles in the classroom, both at the higher education level and in urban middle school science classrooms.  The results have been promising, although some of the issues that arise may be surprising to some educators.  I’ve published this work in a number of conferences, including the Games, Learning and Society conference.

If gamification is to be of use to schools, however, we must better understand what gamification is, how it functions, and why it might be useful.  In a journal article Jessica Hammer and I published in Academic Exchange Quarterly, we addresses all three questions – what, how, and why bother? – while exploring both the potential benefits and pitfalls of gamification of education.

Click here to read the article.

I’m happy that my students in the Games Research Lab and I got a paper accepted in the upcoming ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013), the premier international conference on human-computer interaction.  This year’s theme is changing perspectives: “offering new visions of people interacting with technology.”

Given this conference theme, it’s appropriate that our paper, Greenify: Fostering Sustainable Communities via Gamification aims to provide a positive vision of how we can achieve sustainability.  Our view follows Ehrenfeld (2009) and Grant (in press) in that sustainability is the “possibility of all of life flourishing together.”  Based upon our review of the literature, it is important to frame sustainability as a positive vision that leverages autonomy, intrinsic motivation and self-determination and to leverage the social power of the group rather than the individual.

At Teachers College, Columbia University, the Games Research Lab has created Greenify, an online social platform designed to foster flourishing sustainable communities. Gamification elements facilitated the creation and completion of user-generated missions, encouraging interaction between geographically proximate communities of peers. Three elements were identified as necessary components to achieve sustainable communities: a healthy climate and environment, social well-being, and economic security.  This paper describes our approach in addressing these elements through a crowdsourced, gamified system. Implications for interaction design are also discussed.

Click here to read the paper.

It’s been a useful environment that promotes the values that I’m trying to promote for the course: experimentation, collaboration, tinkering, and exploration of the cutting edge developments in interactive learning technology and game-based learning.   In my game design course last semester, I experimented with using game principles and applying them to the classroom in order to foster a mastery orientation and 21st century skills such as creativity, problem-solving and an entrepreneurial learning mindset.  This time around, I’ve been experimenting with newer modes of communication and various technology tools during class, including a live Twitter feed for the class that allows students to ask questions and share links to relevant and useful resources during class discussion.  The whiteboards have been useful for collaborative concept mapping and allowing students to critique each others’ work.

So far students have enjoyed the space, and I would say it has fostered improved collaboration, common ground and distributed cognition.

With so much innovation originating from the mobile consumer electronics and online informal learning space, part of me wonders if this smart classroom prototype needs to project even farther into the future.  As gamification of education, augmented reality apps, wearable computing devices, learning apps, MOOCs and new models of education become increasingly mainstream, it will be interesting to see how this classroom will be able to support any changes in the coming years.

I would love for there to be some easier modes to display information from personal devices (something like Apple’s AirPlay technology), and perhaps some interesting new gestural interaction technology, such as the Leap Motion device.  More reflections soon as I have them.

Scholar’s Quest is an innovative project that uses quest-based learning, social networking elements and peer teaching and learning to help graduate students at Teachers College learn how to be successful. Students complete real-world missions and quests, earn “experience points,” collaborate with other players and share knowledge with peers in order to learn strategies for success and simultaneously making the school a more vibrant community.

A survey given to TC faculty identified the specific actions, traits and skills that faculty recognized as important.  In this way, Scholar’s Quest turned tacit practices into explicit, structured tasks.  Scholar’s Quest consists of quests including: How to get a great job, Navigating TC resources, The pursuit of knowledge/exploring research opportunities at TC, and Social aspects of graduate school including networking.

Visit the older Scholar’s Quest site or the Forbes article.  We are currently in the process of acquiring additional funding to further develop this project.

The part of the article that resonates with me is the end section in which Barseghian talks about a number of “recent trends that provide an increasingly positive area for learning games.” Classrooms may be much more amenable to game-based learning due to trends including: include the move to one-to-one computing; a ‘bring your own device’ infrastructure for learning; greater accessibility to the internet; and a wider acceptance of the value of games for education, including the research community.

Click here to read the article.

Lee’s work in the PoLAR partnership focuses on the design, development and study of innovative game-based approaches to climate change education and to promote real-world action.  EcoImpact Missions was designed and developed as an online social network gamification system that motivates adults to create and share among their peers practical, user-created real-world missions (actionable knowledge) on climate change.  Arctic Hope, a strategy and simulation game, teaches adults and children food web interdependencies and various threats to Arctic ecosystems.

The PoLAR vision uses novel educational methods, which Phase I demonstration activities and learning research show can motivate self discovery, exploration and better understanding of complex material.  PoLAR will look at incorporating these tools into both informal and formal educational settings in an aim to produce transformative development in climate change education.  In Phase II, PoLAR will further research into the efficacy of various approaches and platforms, including current and emerging technologies, based on scientific evidence, learning theory, and education practice as well as with consultation from leaders in the gaming industry, Games for Change.

Link to award details: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1239783