Schools Archives - Gamified UK - #Gamification Expert

I often hear people say that school is just a badly designed game. I have to agree. I also hear a lot that part of the problems is people chasing grades rather than mastery and that grades should be dropped. I have to partially disagree.

I totally agree that school should be about master, not grade chasing, but I don’t agree we should get rid of grades, just redesign them. For me, grades are the wrong way around. The assumption is that we start at an A* and we either maintain that or the grade can fluctuate wildly assignment to assignment. If we were to follow a more game-like approach, we would consider progress and experience points rather than ever changing grades.

Each challenge that is set for the students would be assigned a maximum number of experience points that can be earned. These points would accumulate over the term, creating the equivalent of a final grade at the end of the year. For example:

XP	Grade
1000 or More	A*
800	A
600	B
500	C
400	D
300	E
200 or Less	F

There are a number of reasons that I would suggest this. The first is that it makes it easier for students to track their progress over time. They know how much each assignment is worth and how many points they need to get to achieve certain grades (assuming you have to convert back to them). This means they can more easily set themselves goals. To make this easier still, at the start of the year you give them a level map or progress chart that shows when each

To make this easier still, at the start of the year you give them a level map or progress chart that shows when each assignment

will be set and how many points they are worth. This way they can tick them off as they go. They are then able to tell where they are and where they are going. To add to the fun (learning should be fun after all), you can add side quests to earn bonus points or special unlocks (like earn a week off homework if you unlock the secrets etc).

Map 500x356 School Grades Are The Wrong Way Around — The Epic User Journey

I am not talking about creating a whole fantasy world, just a different approach to mapping out how you grade the work of students. You don’t even need to change the need for a final A,B,C grade, if you create a conversion matrix. Obviously creating full fantasy experience would be cool and, as it is beginning to appear, beneficial.

The key is to give them a sense that they are working towards something and are always able to see where they are and where they are going. Transparency also is important. Grades are not very transparent, but seeing you got 80 out of 100 possible points for an assignment is much easier to understand. Knowing that you need 1000 to get an A for the term adds another level of clarity.

Chatting to my daughter today and she was telling me about the latest incentive/bribe scheme the school was running to get kids using RM Easimaths – a gamified maths app. The app, by the way, is brilliant.

The set up was this. Most hours on the app gets a prize…

So, anyone know where this is going?

I’ve written about his in the past

The first thing that happened was a couple fo kids got caught out logging in to the app and just leaving it running for hours and hours. The rules, such as they were, did not prevent this as they were looking at a quantitative analysis – the number of hours, rather than qualitative for example, number of questions done per hour of use. Anyway, they put a stop to that, to an extent, but still were only really measuring time, but with a few sense checks in there. Score one for lack of understanding.

The second, rather brilliant part of this plan, was a secret target that no one knew about. The teacher set a target that only she knew that all the kids had to try and reach as a minimum number of hours logged on the app. This actually isn’t a bad idea, it plays into curiosity. The problem is that when the kids are already aware of who has destroyed them time wise in the game, they just are not motivated to worry about the secret goal.

The third and final nail was a comment from my 9-year-old. “It’s sad actually. RM Easimaths is really good, but most of the people in my class were only playing it so that they could win the prize” Once again, overjustification effect rearing its head.

This all goes back to measuring quantity over quality. What would have been better would have been a more complex set of qualitative metrics. How many questions have you answered vs how many hours? How many did you get right? How have you improved over the time you have played. You could have a prize for the person who has improved the most, the one who was consistently good, the one who answered the highest percentage of questions right compared to the number of questions they actually answered (so you can’t just answer one question right and say you had 100%)

I do get it. Teachers and schools are under pressure to get results and I also appreciate that most truly care about the education of the kids (even if the government and various governing bodies are only interested in numbers). However, just bribing quantity of activity is not enough to create good engagement or learning. It creates competition where there doesn’t need to be any, it creates negative behaviours and it demotivates large sections of your audience. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – stop using rewards when you don’t understand the unintended consequences!