This chapter explores the role of games in achieving high-level student learning outcomes in higher education settings. It explores the pros and cons of employing gamification in the classroom, the relationship between gaming and assessment of learning outcomes, and offers a few specific examples of materials to use in role-playing games. It will be tailored to first-year courses and gen ed requirements as befitting this book. It will be an end cap and engage those who are interested in pedagogy.
TopIntroduction
Gaming in education can be a profound way of conveying content to students and transforming their learning experience; it can also be just a fun way to pass the time. To achieve the first and avoid the second, educators must focus on learning outcomes and assessment. This should not be surprising as all good pedagogy begins with the consideration of what one hopes to achieve. If done with intention and clarity games can transform learning from passive to active, engaging students in higher-level learning. Games can offer new modes of assessment that are more inclusive and based on transformational achievements. Finally, games can add fun to classrooms.
Gaming comes in many forms, but is unified by “game thinking,” and the use of game structures such as “challenges, tasks, points, levels, badges, rankings.” There are those who would make several distinctions within the gaming framework. For example, there are digital games, role-playing games, and scenario games. For the purposes of this article, such distinctions are not necessary. Whether faculty uses online published games or in class role playing, so long as game aspects are part of the pedagogy, “gaming” or “gamification” is the correct term. Marion Festing and Tobias Schumacher make a more useful delineation when they distinguish “games,” from “serious games,” in their article, “Playing to Learn: Serious Games in Higher Education,” suggesting that there are differences in what is appropriate in the classroom setting. Such serious games allow for transformative learning:
Exposure to real-life scenarios plays a central role in the learning process, but some situations can’t be recreated in the classroom because they’re costly, unethical, or simply impossible to simulate. However, a player in a serious game can become president of a nation, meet anyone in the world, tackle wicked problems, travel to every country imaginable, and even build a rocket and fly to the moon. As a result, serious games can provide learners with exposure to a broad range of realistic situations. (Festing and Schumacher, 2021)
Wang Ziting adds that “there are multiple ways through which one can harness the power of play and introduce gamification into higher education to produce positive outcomes. Gamification could be applied in a wide range of situations, ranging from the digitally sophisticated to the casual, informal, and analog.” (Ziting, 2021) Games can also be very short or take the entire semester. Gaming attributes allow for higher-level learning activities by promoting active learning and personal investment in class activates. Gaming creates room for students to engage with existing material and then to generate their own content. The act of generation changes the nature of learning by forcing the student into the pedagogical process. This is not revolutionary. Original thinking is what every academic hopes to achieve; it is the making of a good thesis. What is different is active, in-the-moment decision making as well as the nature of the space where learning happens.