And my peers in high school education would blame an addiction to video games or a lack of practice paying attention for long periods of time for the students' lack of interest in educational content. However, I would argue that even my generation was this picky in what would keep its attention.We grew up on television. We required visuals that matched the audio we were receiving. We required anecdotes or narratives to break up the spans of direct instruction we were processing. Teachers that met these needs created by our form of entertainment, either intentionally or unintentionally, were seen as great. We claimed that we understood these teachers better and that they really knew how to connect with us. And those who were unable to mimic our entertainment in the educational realm were often viewed as ineffective and poor educators, at least by the students.
Sometimes, teachers would come up with ideas that were truly amazing in terms of making us learn in a kinesthetic fashion, or putting us in groups that made us stretch both intellectually and socially, or some other idea that was generally outside the box. But from my recollection, to be seen as a great teacher over the course of a whole year, a teacher would need to mold himself to the way students were being entertained in that day.
And although I was never a part of the generation before me, I would venture to guess that teachers had to convey ideas in the style of an older version of television and magazines. And those great teachers I had probably made the jump to a newer style of television and entertainment pretty easily.
And I am sure that I wish to become a great teacher in my day, I must mold my classroom to the style of entertainment my students are consuming. After careful examination, I have come to the conclusion that my students are entertained by two different styles of entertainment. The first would be video games, either the "serious" gamer kind of game like World of Warcraft or Call of Duty, and the "casual" gamer variety like Bejeweled or Farmville. The other style of entertainment my students find interesting are the videos they find either on their selection of cable channels or on YouTube.
And what qualities define the entertainment of my students? Choice, a tolerance for failure, and a design of small addicting activities. Let's look at these concepts, my argument for why I need it in the classroom, and how I might be able to incorporate these design styles into my classroom:
Choice:
For the gamer, choice is seen not only in selection of games available of every genre but also in the activities available once in the game itself. A consumer has a wide variety of apps and games to choose from in his quest to vanquish the boredom in his life. And even after he has entered the game world, he typically has a variety of tasks from which he can choose to engage himself in. For example, a user who chooses to play World of Warcraft could spend his time going on quests and killing things all by himself. Another player playing the exact same game could spend hours running a dungeon (a set of tasks designed for a group of 5 to tackle together each playing a specified role) with a small group of 4 other players or upgrade to a raid (a larger task for 25 players still with the defined roles) where he can play with up to 24 other player. One player may ride around on his raptor looking for herbs to pick or ore to mine while another may be killing wolves just for their skins. Another might choose to play against other players in controlled 20 vs. 20 match, while another player may fly around the world looking for other players to fight (who may be engaged in another activity listed above.) Still another player may spend all his time in a safe capital city crafting equipment to sell to other players or use his money to play the auction house much like a real world trader would play the stock market. And that's just one game! What's more is that I could have picked from any number of games my students choose to play and still presented just as many options of play. How am I supposed to compete with this level of choice offered to my gamer students?Furthermore, my students who are not involved with video games will spend countless hours choosing what entertainment to watch. Gone are the days of 5 channels available to a viewer. Now if a student chooses to watch his entertainment, he has probably at least 150 unique channels, on demand videos (either provided through his cable provider or a subscription service like Netflix or Hulu), and if "nothing else is on" YouTube will certainly meet his entertainment needs. Again, how am I supposed to emulate this style of entertainment?
Well, I have very little control over the choice of content I can offer to my students. In a course like Video Game Design or Computer Science, my students have already learned the basics of programming in... Computer Programming, so I can offer them a variety of activities to pursue, and they will gladly chase down these "quests" and learn something. The interesting concept I have found though is that the more freedom I give my students on what to learn, the more they learn. On the down side, when I give them that freedom, I lose control over what they are learning. In these courses, students will often choose to chase down topics that I would like them to learn, and everything goes well from that stand point. Even when a student starts to venture into useless territory, I can suggest topics with as little intervention as possible, and the student will redirect his focus onto something more beneficial. However, very rarely, like once or twice a year, that train goes flying off the tracks full speed in a no-man's land, and there is often very little I can do to bring that specific student back to the rest of the class without breaking the preset model of the classroom. It is a design flaw, and I am consistently seeking ideas on how to correct this flaw.
In my other classes, like Algebra 2, Statistics or even Computer Programming, we as a class are on a cruise of learning together. We will all leave at the same time, we will all port at various stops at the same time, and we will all arrive at the final destination about the same time. Just like an entertainment director for a cruise, my goal is to provide as many choices to my passengers. I can provide choice on how many people a student can work with. I can provide choice on the method they can learn material (video tutorial, question and answer session, do it yourself worksheet, reading a textbook or online article). Additionally, I can offer options on how large of assignments they choose to tackle. They could do a large number of small tasks to show mastery, or perhaps they may prefer to show all their knowledge in a single test, or they may want to take on a large project that would let me know they have an excellent handle on the concepts we are learning.
A Tolerance of Failures:
Here's where video games really shine in appeal. For almost all video games, a player is assigned a task, and very rarely is failure an unacceptable. For example, a player may try a level of Bejeweled 100 times without fear of a significant consequence. Yes, the player may have to take a little bit of time to redo the level, but he will gladly spend some additional time working on the game to make sure he can get it right. And even in the old days of Super Mario, a player that falls into a pit or gets touched by an evil turtle immediately begins the level again. Often, video game designers strive to find ways to immediately get a failing player back to playing the game.Even television addresses this desire. The best example is Dora the Explorer or other preschool programming. These shows will ask the viewer to respond, sometimes even yell, his answer to the current question. They can yell the wrong answer all they want, but in the end, the host of the show will announce the correct answer and explain how the answer is found. The viewer that got the question correct will spend the next minute feeling great about his correct answer, and the viewer who got it wrong will spend a minute learning how to get the correct answer. Regardless of the viewers ability to get the answer correct or not, the playing field quickly gets leveled, and they all move on to the next question. No score and no put downs about how bad you are if you do not get the right answer.
The adult version of this design principle is often addressed in reality television. Survivor will present the viewer with the question of who he would vote out. The Bachelor asks the user who should be kept around another week to see if she is the mythical one. And even House Hunters will ask the viewer which house the buyers should purchase. And regardless of your answer, the show moves on and the viewer is either correct in his answer or learns something about the world around him. And on YouTube, video creators are often ending their videos with questions that the viewers can "hash out in the comments." Some will even spend a few minutes each episode commenting on the comments and validating/debating thoughts presented by viewers.
Overall, my the entertainment my students are engaging in has a high tolerance of failure. Many of these activities will actively engage their brain and require thought and problem solving skills they are unwilling to use in a classroom. So what makes their entertainment so special? Why can't I get the tenacity and the brain currency students gladly give games? A tolerance of failure.
In the current model of school, students are actually asked to do similar activities that the entertainment asks of them. A history class asks students to analyze what actions they would have taken at some point in history in a similar manner to how Survivor would have asked the viewer what he would do. An algebra problem will require a user to devise a strategy for solving just as a Call of Duty would ask a user to devise a strategy for completing a level. And there are only two distinct differences.
First, a student engaged in entertainment will know almost immediately if he succeeded at his presented task. In a school setting, once a student has taken a test, he may have to wait a week or more before finding out what score he made. By that time, his brain is already completely disengaged, and he no longer cares about the problem that stumped him so thoroughly before. As a teacher, I need to design methods where my students can get immediate feedback on assessments that matter without just giving out the answers. Furthermore, in a high school setting, telling one set of students the answer to a quiz they just took, sets the rest of the day up for cheaters as students will take the path of least resistance and pass the answers along. (Which they do all the time in video games, but very few care as games in the end do not matter.)
Second, if the user did answer incorrectly, the entertainment is really good about immediately putting the user back into the entertainment. If a user got 60% of a level correct in a puzzle game, the game says "Good job on the 60% you got right. Now do it again and do better. You could get it all right next time!" In a school setting, if a student gets a 60%, we tell him that he is a failure. He can try again, but the most he can get right next time is 70%. I'm not arguing that I want to offer infinite retests for full credit as I am sure someone will take advantage of that. However, I do want to offer a system where I can tell a student, "Great job on getting 65% of the test correct. Here's what you missed. I know that you can make adjustments and do better next time."
I have been able to tackle this task in a small way in my math courses. At our school, daily grades (quizzes for me) count as 70% of a students grade. In my class, quizzes are designed to be difficult. I want a student to take a quiz and know exactly what he knows and what he doesn't know. Tests, on the other hand count for 30% of their grade and would mean very little except that I have a deal that is quite appealing to my students. I allow the test for a chapter to override the quizzes for that chapter if the grade of the test is better. So if you as a student made a 50 on a quiz but a 95 on the test, that 95 can potentially count for 100% of your grade. (That's 70% plus the 30% for you non-mathy people).
In my Computer Science course, I have started giving students a 0 at the beginning of the nine weeks, and students will do the work of the course and watch their grades rise. Students are told that their final grade will be scored out of 1500 points. Then if I give a student a test that is out of 200 points and he gets 60% of the test correct, I tell him "Congratulations! You earned 120 points on that test. Let's see what you did wrong and get to work on getting more points." instead of "You failed with a 60. You can retest on your own time if you like."
I haven't figured the whole tolerance of failure out completely, but I'm hoping to open up this conversation with my peers and see what ideas they throw out there.
A Design of Small Addicting Activities:
Finally, modern entertainment has built into their design small activities that become incredibly addicting. The investment of another level of a puzzle game like 2048 is small, and the player is convinced that the time cost of playing another game is so minimal that there is no harm in playing another round. And HGTV is the master of this in the realm of cable television. They will show a string of the same series over and over again. And a viewer will sit there and think, "Oh, another House Hunters. I might have time for one more. Oh, it's starting now. I guess I have time for one more." And he's hooked. Poor little addicted viewer.And yet no student will sit and think to himself "Hmm, perhaps I should do just one more math problem. What's the harm?" How can I as a teacher design a course that will create a drive in a student to do just one more math problem? How can I create a classroom setting where the student has a drive to figure out problems on his own, where the bell ringing is just a sign for his body to move to another class, but the problems he encounters in my classroom? How can I create problems so that a student would gladly choose my work over the myriad of entertainment at his disposal? How can I organize my seating, my website, my assessments, my lessons into a giant trap of engagement that few students would have the willpower to resist? How can I create an addicting classroom that is addicting to both advanced and on-level students?
And this is my sticking point as a teacher, at least for right now. It consumes my mind as I drive to work, watch students on hall duty, or even wait in the line at the drive-thru. For without the other two concepts: choice and a tolerance of failure, I am fully aware that I have no hope of creating this last piece. And yet, if I could make a classroom that was filled with addicting activities, my job of motivation as a teacher would be done.
GG barrett GG no rm
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