From the desk of Mr. Walters

A Short Rant on why WotC needs to enter the Educational Gamification Space I hate to beat a dead unicorn, but I just wanted to write a short (tumblr-sized, but who uses tumblr anymore?) post about the secondary education gamification space and why Wizards of the Coast should throw their hat in the ring.   A void in the space We all know that the elementary folks have Class Dojo , and until early 2019, the secondary folks had  Classcraft . At what I would consider the height of that service's popularity, they made themselves more elementary-friendly and, as a result, way less relevant in the secondary space . I don't know how they're doing as a company, but no one I know even talks about  Classcraft  anymore. You can read more about the changes  here  and  here . A player that's already in the game... Participation in tabletop cooperative role playing games like D&D has been shown to help us  develop social skills , prime our brains for ...

So, my last post focused on including girls in esports and my willingness to take a hard look at my own mistakes and failings. This post focuses on engaging boys in school through gamification and a company we all love's unwillingness to do the same...  on to glory! The success I decided to roll out Classcraft in all of my classes two years ago, and I have found it to be surprisingly effective. I've shared here in the past how not only do students take the health and experience of their characters very seriously, but they also strive to help their teams and classmates in general. One thing that continually surprised me was how much students crave XP (or experience points). Remember, what I do with Classcraft has had no effect on student grades whatsoever. Yet, I've been able to attach points loss / gain consequences to my behavioral and procedural expectations via XP and HP . While these points don't matter in terms of students' grades, they do matter a grea...

Back in 2010, when the concept of gamification was new to most of us, I remember trying to add game elements to my classroom. I remember being further inspired to do so my amazing TED talks from Dr. Jane Mcgonigal in 2010 and Gabe Zichermann in 2011. I remember discussing it with others in a group lead by Jeff Mummert . At that time, we felt like we were building gamification experiences out of duct tape and baler twine. Occasionally, we would discover a tool we could “splice” on to our classroom, but more often than not, our IT departments would block that tool almost as soon as we began using it. Most gamers today are a combination of player types. Today, we are blessed to have myriad gamification tools for education available. Some of my favorites are Classcraft , ARIS , and Edmodo’s Badges , but there are a lot more. All of them scratch a specific gamification itch. Some scratch many. None, in my opinion, cover all bases. The Premise I’d like to propose that the most suc...

Recently, I decided to roll out Classcraft in all of my Seventh Grade classes, and I have found it to be surprisingly effective. Not only do students take the health and experience of their characters very seriously, but they also strive to help their teams and classmates in general. One thing that surprised me was how much students crave XP (or experience points). What I do with Classcraft has no effect on student grades whatsoever. Yet, I can attach points loss / gain consequences to my behavioral and procedural expectations via  XP and HP . While these points don't matter in terms of students' grades, they do matter a great deal to students, who are ultimately more concerned with the game than their grade anyway. They get so excited about equipping their avatar with custom stuff, and many of them are becoming XP hungry. There are many students who are serious gamers and are used to being able to " grind " for XP in a game. In the way that I...

Okay, so I don't know Charlotte Danielson , and I cannot seriously make conjecture on her leisure activities, particularly in the realm of video games. With that out of the way, I wanted to explore some of the ways in which the use of simulations, games, gamification and game design relates to and can exemplify the four domains of Danielson's Framework for Teaching and learning . Today, I'd like to begin with Domain 2, Classroom Environment. In future posts on this topic, I plan to explore the other domains. For those of you who are being evaluated using the Danielson framework and who also happen to be doing gamification (with or without Classcraft), feel free to steal liberally from the language in this post for your professional "evidence folder". Gamification, Levelling up my Classroom environment with Classcraft I've been using Classcraft off and on since last year, but I'm just now really starting to get into a groove with this thing. ...

I’ve been blogging here about gamification for years. I’ve read and watched just about everything  Gabe Zichermann  and  Jane McGonigal  have said about human motivation and how games motivate us*. I've spoken at conferences, workshops, and in-service events about gamification. Despite all of that, I have not tried Classcraft until this school year. Classcraft  bills itself as a game-based approach to teaching, but it is basically a gamification tool (see my  Gamification / Game Based Learning / Game Design disambiguation here ). It was designed to encourage participation, good behavior, and collaboration and at first, seemed like the secondary version of Class Dojo. In some ways it is, but it does a lot more. Basically, Classcraft’s goal / premise is to help me manage, motivate and engage my students by transforming my classroom into a role-playing game, which should be right up my alley. Anyone who has spent any time reading my blog knows that I love...

Here's an infographic I made for my game design students and future blog posts because I didn't like any of the graphics currently available. I'm open to improvement suggestions. I used Easel.ly https://s3.amazonaws.com/easel.ly/all_easels/13957/Flow/image.jpg Edtech tweeps, if you're writing about Game-Based Learning, Gamification, or Game Design, and you want to use this in a post, permission granted. If you have ideas on how it could be better, comment below or hit me up on Twitter .

Receiving a "buff" out of the blue... w00t! On February 17th, I made the trek across the river to Millersville University . Jenn Shettel had invited me to lead a Middle Level Game Literacy Workshop with some undergrad pre-service education block students. We spent two hours talking about games, gamification, game based learning, and game design. More importantly, we talked about kids. We talked about teaching and learning. We talked about what works and does not work in the classroom. I had an awesome morning working with these students, and I got some great feedback from my host. I must admit, though, you're never 100% sure how a group you've worked with feels.

Collaboration, it's one of the 21st century skills. There's pretty much unanimous agreement among policy-makers, academic thinkers, and business leaders that collaboration must be a crucial part of our classrooms. Incidentally, there is almost unanimous agreement among teachers and students that group work is painful, cumbersome, annoying, and largely counter-productive. Even popular reality  shows rely on group assignments to weed out contestants and create unnecessary drama. Why is something that is so important and crucial to our survival, so painful and dreadful? How can we make it more awesome? What do we do with collaboration? Part 1: Why you hate group work. Before our winter holiday break, I informally polled students in my classes. In all of my sections but one, 100% of my students noted that they hate doing group work. In one class two students said that they love group assignments because they can usually con their group mates into doing all of the work. Wh...

21st Century Skills... why game design? I've been using game design for the last couple of years to increase the application of " 21st Century Skills " in my class. The actual curriculum of my course is focused on the ISTE NETS , my official standards, and the Pennsylvania  Computer Information Technology Standards for grades 6-8 . My goal in teaching and assessing those skills, though, is to provide a context including as much STE[A]M focused content as possible and as many opportunities as I can for students to practice the  21st Century Skills . Game Design is concerned with studying the concepts behind the basic elements of a game, and how the balance of fun and challenge in games creates flow. It is also concerned with the iteration feedback loop and how games are a complex system designed around creating a satisfying user experience. Game design is a great jumping off point for introducing STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) learnin...

Okay, so I realize that everyone and their sister, at this point, has posted their own curated roundup of videos on Game Based Learning and Gamification in the classroom. I'm certainly not doing anything new here. Occasionally, though, I want to share with a colleague or fifty, during workshops or conferences, my cannon of inspirational videos of gaming goodness. It's just more simple to put them all in one place, so here they are. Ultimately, these videos speak for themselves. I'll keep my commentary to a minimum. I will say that these videos actually started me down the path of actually taking games and game design seriously in my classroom. If I hadn't seen Chellman & Mcgonigal's TED talks one fateful day in 2011, I never would have attended break out sessions on games and gamification with Jeff Mummert at the first Tech.it.u or taken an online course called, " Simulations and Gaming Technologies for the Classroom ". I certainly wouldn't be...

Last week, Dr. Justin Marquis mentioned on Twitter that this coming week's # GBLFriday topic would be, How Games Help Students Learn Failure. Failure is a topic I've been thinking a lot about lately and hitting on in previous posts. Alas, I have decided to to tackle this topic a bit here and put in my two cents worth... Failure shouldn't be fatal   There are a lot of popular articles out there that say students should be failing regularly in school and activities (just Google "failure good for kids" or something similar), that point to various studies into the benefits of failure. My conservative crotchety old windbag friends love these articles. The driving idea is that children benefit from plenty of experiences with frustration, failure and defeat. Without a doubt, this will motivate them to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and try even harder the next time. It will give them grit and prepare them for the "Real World...

This month, I am re-reading  What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy , by James Paul Gee and Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal. As a result, I've been thinking a lot about the current state of affairs in my classroom and beyond. This post is a rambling mess of junk that's going through my mind. I'm wrestling with these ideas. I invite you to join me. I need feedback, comments, arguments, and ideas. Heck, I need help. I also think that we (the community of educators who see the value of real game based learning and gamification strategies in the classroom) need to band together and find a way to provide some hard core professional development for each other beyond the ubiquitous Minecraft & Warcraft articles we all trade on Twitter.  Gee, McGonigal, and big ideas  Seriously, If you haven't read What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy , by James Paul Gee and Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal, you should. Both of ...