Providing Students with Positive Failure Feedback










Gamifying a Short-Term Online First-Year Composition Course








The Blackboard Gamegogy Leaderboard Tool
The Blackboard Gamegogy Leaderboard Tool









Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons


Encouraging Discussion



Tracking, Assessing, and Regulating Discussion






Pervasive Games as a Model for Pervasive Learning








  • make the player’s body a de facto game token
  • escalate previous experiences
  • force collaboration through interdependence
  • foster networking to ramp up collective knowledge



War of the Words: How to Gamify Online Discussions

photo credit: mrsdkrebs via photopin cc
photo credit: mrsdkrebs via photopin cc






  • Each team member may ask no more than three questions.
  • Each team member may answer no more than three questions.

4 = excellent
3 = good
2 = fair
1 = poor









Turning Your Class into a Game, Part 4: Giving Students Meaningful Choices

A game is a series of meaningful choices

This post is a bonus post of sorts, since I only intended to write three posts in this series. But, as I was writing each, I was also designing the game that my fall FYC students will play and, as I was doing so, I began to really understand just how important having meaningful choices is in the games that I like to play. Even though I’ve been working to incorporate more and more games-based learning mechanics into my classes for a while now, I’m slowly building those mechanics one at a time (and also tweaking each iteration based on student feedback and my own feelings of whether my methodologies have been successes or failures). There are a lot of interconnected, interworking components to a good game and getting them all effectively integrated and tuned to one another is a difficult process. But as I move further along in that process, I’m realizing that choices, and the rules that constrain those choices, are really what drive a game and make some games more engaging than others (the more choices, the more engaging the game). So, I feel the need to revise my original argument in terms of the order of process for turning a class into a game to include giving students meaningful choices and making it second only to designing the experience. The key word in this step is meaningful. Far too often, teachers give students choices, assuming that choice alone equals autonomy (which, according to research, equals a higher likelihood of engagement). But are those choices truly meaningful? Of course, some choices can just be fun and I’ve tried to build some fun choices into my class, as well, but I’ve put considerable effort with this class into making sure my students have plenty of meaningful choices throughout the game.

Difficulty Levels

As I mentioned in my post on designing experience systems, levels are one type of experience system and difficulty levels are one type of level. It may seem complicated and time-consuming (both on the front end and during the course of the game) to have multiple difficulty levels, but I’m hoping that it will pay off in the end by allowing more students to work within their zones of proximal development and, by extension, be more engaged with the work they’re doing. A difficulty level is a meaningful choice because the student must decide which difficulty level aligns with both their current and potential skill level; they need to both complete the quest and maximize their XP (experience points) potential. Because my game also affords “do overs” if a student fails to complete a quest successfully, the consequences of making the wrong choice are lowered a bit: if a student fails at one level, they can retry it at a lower difficulty level (unless, of course, they failed at the lowest difficulty level, in which case they just need to try harder). This does not necessarily detract from the meaningfulness of the choice, though, as the ideal scenario is to complete each quest successfully the first time, as repeating quests reduces the time a student has to complete the number of quests required for the final grade they desire (more on this in the next section). Each difficulty level also has a different number of possible XP, so which level a student chooses to complete also impacts how many XP they earn, which in turn affects their overall experience level and how quickly they will be able to level up (and earn the achievements and advantages that come with doing so). So this deters students from constantly picking the easiest level just so they can complete the quest the first time, since the achievements and advantages earned for leveling up allow the student to play the game smarter and earn higher levels of bonus XP (and, thus, reach subsequent experience levels sooner and earn even more achievements and advantages).

So, how does this look on the ground?

  • Each quest (except for the boss quest) has three difficulty levels: easy, intermediate, and advanced
  • Each difficulty level requires a different skill level and provides less or more of a challenge in terms of critical reading, thinking, and writing
  • The level of challenge for each difficulty level goes up with each subsequent quest, so that even students who work at the easiest level have to increasingly improve in targeted skills
  • Each difficulty level has a different number of total possible XP (this number goes up with each subsequent quest)
  • A student must complete a quest and earn at least 50% of the total possible XP for the quest plus at least 50% of the possible XP for the major writing assignment associated with the quest in order to proceed to the next quest

The challenge for me will be to monitor and process 25 students working at different difficulty levels and on different quests. I’ve addressed this by keeping the work schedule the same for everyone every day. For example, every other Tuesday will be in-class peer review, so it doesn’t matter which quest a student is currently working on or at what level they are doing so, everyone will be peer reviewing their peers’ drafts and getting their draft peer reviewed by their peers.

Which Quests in What Combination?

A second way that I am introducing meaningful choices into the game is by including bonus quests and side quests that students can combine with the major game quests in various ways. Bonus quests are fun, voluntary quests that students can complete for bonus XP that they can add to their current major quest. This is a convenient expedient for any student who starts the game late and needs to catch up or a student who did not earn enough XP on a quest to move on and doesn’t want to lose the time available for completing future major quests. Side quests are also voluntary, but are complex, multimedia, research-based quests that must be completed with a guild. The XP earned for completing a side quest are simply added to a student’s overall XP, but the real advantage of completing a side quest comes in the ability to substitute it for the major boss quest if a student either wishes to not complete the boss quest or runs out of time to do so and earn their desired grade, since the number and combination of quests determines a student’s final grade, as indicated below:

A = 6 Major Quests

B = 5 Major Quests + 1 Side Quest

C = 5 Major Quests or 4 Major Quests + 1 Side Quest

By setting the game quests up this way, I am giving the students more control over their final grade and over their learning (more on this in the next section). Often, students seem to give up on a class right at the finish line. While these students typically disappear, leaving me with no feedback on why they did so, I can only assume it’s because they feel that they are out of choices when it comes to their final grade in the class: either they’ve made so many mistakes along the way that there’s no way for them to pass or they don’t foresee themselves making the grade they desire (at my university, anything below a C in FYC goes on record as No Credit; the student has to retake the course, but it doesn’t impact their GPA). By providing students with options that allow them to tailor the course to their needs and interests and that allow them to recover from mistakes in terms of failures or wrong choices made along the way, I am hoping to keep more students engaged and encouraged so that they feel that they are truly and meaningfully in control and, therefore, are less likely to give up.

The Boss Quest

The last quest of the game is the boss quest. This quest doesn’t have difficulty levels since the student, in collaboration with their boss quest guild, determines their own difficulty level because they design it. The boss quest is also voluntary; once a student reaches the boss quest, I give them the option to walk away or use a side quest as a substitute. I don’t want to reveal much about the boss quest at this point in case any of my future students find and read my blog, but the boss level is a chance to not only synthesize and demonstrate the skills they’ve mastered during the course of the game, but it also allows them to take meaningful action in a community. What that action is, which community it impacts, and how the action is carried out will be completely up to the student’s guild and will involve a series of very meaningful choices because they have consequences beyond the classroom.


As I discussed in my last post, one of the achievements that students can earn for completing various quest-related tasks is either a green, purple, or blue potion, with each color potion related to a specific kind of task/skill. Students can combine these potions in order to unlock powers, which give them advantages in the game. Some colors are rarer or are harder to earn than others. Making decisions about how and when to combine potions gains meaning depending on the student’s current needs and possible future needs. Because students have to balance both expediency and planning ahead and because their choices are constrained by several factors, including which and how many of each color potion they currently have, which and how many of each potion may or may not be available immediately or later in the game, and the likelihood of them earning those potions, their choices take on a complexity that transcends the value of any individual potion and make managing their potions an exercise in critical thinking (but, hopefully, a fun one). Compare the complexity of these choices to some of the other kinds of “choices” that we often offer students and you’ll see why our students prefer the rigor and complexity of games to that of the classroom.

Fun Choices

As I mentioned, I’ve also tried to integrate some “fun” choices into the game. Games often use chance and the element of surprise to keep players engaged and on their toes. Easter eggs are one fun way to do this, but choices can also introduce chance and uncertainty. Since the game I’m developing for my FYC class is inspired by The Hobbit, I decided to introduce the kinds of chance occurrences and surprises that often happen to heroes during an epic journey. I did this by creating the Wheel of Destiny and the Cup of Fate. The Wheel of Destiny is a random name selector app that selects names via spinning a wheel much like the Wheel of Fortune wheel. The Cup of Fate is a red plastic Solo cup (hopefully, I can find a cup that fits in with the theme aesthetic before class starts) which contains various events and consequences related to those events. Once a week, I’ll spin the Wheel of Destiny and whichever student is selected will have to pull a slip from the Cup of Fate. Some events require the student to have demonstrated desirable behaviors and will reward them if they’ve done so. Other events, though, require the student or the student’s entire guild to make a choice. While the choices made do not necessarily have the ramifications of choosing a difficulty level or mixing potions to gain powers, they can change the dynamics of the student’s experiences in the class and, again, give them a level of meaningful control over their destiny in it. Again, I don’t want to reveal the events contained within the Cup of Fate, so I’ll outline this and other “secret” aspects of the game in a follow-up post once the fall semester is over.

These are a few examples of how you can integrate meaningful choices into the experiences that you design for your students. Remember that the key word is meaningful. Without truly meaningful consequences, choices are just an illusory autonomy. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t constrain those choices. Unconstrained choices are often paralyzing for students, especially those in introductory courses. And constraints are one way to make choices truly meaningful. But like the choices, the constraints must be meaningful. In my game, purple potions are rare because they require more effort. If I allowed students to progress to the next quest no matter how many (or few) XP they had earned, then difficulty levels and the quests themselves would have no real value. Rules are the defining characteristic of games. But it’s how games allow players to choose how to play in meaningful ways within those constraints that is the defining characteristic of a good game.



Turning Your Class into a Game, Part 3: Rewarding Effort


In my last two posts, I covered two aspects of turning your class into a game: creating the experience and designing experience systems. In this post, I’m going to cover the third aspect: rewarding effort. In games, all effort is rewarded and failure is not punished. In fact, failure is built into games. No one ever plays Mario Kart or Assassin’s Creed without failing–multiple times. This, as has been pointed out by several GBL advocates, is one amongst several reasons why games get learning right and schooling gets learning wrong (or, at least, has poorly designed it). In addition to de-stigmatizing failure, games reward every effort on the part of the player. Every effort. No matter how small. No matter if the effort leads to ultimate success or abysmal failure. Not only do games reward all effort, but, as James Paul Gee points out in What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, they reward effort based on the amplification of input principle. In this design principle, a little input results in a lot of output. By rewarding the player with mega-feedback and mega-output, the game encourages them to put forth even more effort in the hopes of receiving ever larger and larger returns. Again, this stands in stark contrast to how schooling responds to effort. So, how can we apply these principles to the classroom? That’s the question I’ll try to answer in this post, though this is an aspect of games-based learning that I have only recently begun experimenting with myself, so what I’ll offer are some basic principles, as gleaned from well-designed games, and a few ideas based on things I have done or plan to do in my classes.

One way that games reward effort is, of course, with points (XP). This is usually the first thing that people think of when they think of GBL and gamification: giving players/students points for doing things. But points are only one way in which games reward player effort. They also reward effort via achievements. Achievements can be almost anything that has value within the game: tools, clothing/armor, virtual money, powers, bonus content, advantages over other players/NPC’s, etc. In general, there are two types of achievements in games: measurement achievements and completion achievements. Completion achievements are earned simply for completing a task, while measurement achievements are awarded based on the degree and/or proficiency to which the task is completed and are evaluative in nature. A good example is the star rating system in Angry Birds, in which the number of stars you receive for destroying the pigs’ structure in each level depends on how well you did so (evaluating aim, accuracy, speed, and number of projectiles you used). In The Gamification of Learning and Instruction, Karl Kapp recommends awarding completion achievements for boring tasks and measurement achievements for challenging and interesting ones.


Achievements can be expected or unexpected. Expected achievements, according to Kapp, encourage goal-setting and self-evaluation, as players seek to earn achievements that they know are available. Unexpected achievements, on the other hand, encourage exploration and creative gameplay; as a player discovers an unexpected achievement, they become curious about other achievements that might be hidden in the game and actively seek them out. A good example of unexpected achievements are Easter eggs, which I discussed in a previous post. Kapp recommends using unexpected achievements sparingly, but I’m not sure that I agree with him. I think that using both expected and unexpected achievements as much as possible will allow you to target and encourage both types of behavior, and unexpected achievements will offer more challenges for those students who crave them.

There are four general types of achievements in games: status (badges, character classes, etc.), access (to places and items that other players don’t have access to), powers (extra abilities and advantages), and loot. There are several types of loot, including money, goods, bonuses, and time. Money can be used to purchase apparel and tools/weapons for your character or items within the game world. Awarding players money encourages autonomy, creativity, and problem-solving, as they must consider what items to purchase based on both their current and future needs. For example, in the game that I designed for my argumentation and debate class this past Spring based on classical Greek institutio rhetorica (schools of rhetoric), teams of students earned (virtual) gold for participating in in-class activities; they could then use this gold to purchase “favors” from their patroness (me) such as the ability to select which side they debated in an upcoming debate or what order their debate would be held in. In the “Murderers and Mad(wo)men” game that my English 102 students played, they earned money for completing writing assignments and for helping out their guild members with their “cases”; the players could then use this money to purchase virtual investigative tools for their character. The number and cost of the tools their character owned determined their character’s status within the world of the game in terms of renown within their field.

Goods are a second type of loot. The investigative tools that my students purchased in “Murderers and Mad(wo)men” is one example. Goods can be used to personalize and/or strengthen a character or allow the player to play “smarter.” In my upcoming FYC game, players will earn potions for various efforts (peer review, attendance, commenting on peers’ blog posts, etc.); there are three different colored potions, each earned for a different type of effort, some completion-based and some measurement-based. The potions can be combined to attain various kinds of powers, which give the players advantages within the game (extended deadlines, bonus XP, skipping tasks, etc.), with each power requiring a unique combination of potions–the more advantageous the power, the more complex the potion combination required. And once a potion has been used to attain a power, it is used up, so, with some potions scarcer than others, the students will have to think carefully about which powers are most needed at the moment and which might be needed later on. So, like money, goods encourage creativity and problem solving, as well as goal-setting.

Bonuses are also effective ways to reward effort, whether in the form of bonus points or items, because they often allow players to catch up with other players or recover from an especially debilitating failure. A good example of this is found in Mario Kart, where the best weapons are often dropped at times when and in places where the players at the back of the race can pick them up. Students who start a class late (either literally due to late registration or figuratively because they chose to ignore early assignments due to lack of interest or competing commitments) or who get behind later in the term may become demotivated if they feel that it’s impossible for them to catch up with everyone else or make enough progress to pass to class. Having bonuses that allow these students to get back on track may help keep some of them from giving up. I’m attempting to address these students in two ways in my upcoming FYC class game. For one, a couple of the powers that can be attained by combining potions include earning double and triple XP on quests and the ability to skip certain tasks. I have also designed a couple of bonus quests that students can complete, adding the bonus XP earned for doing so to their current quest XP in order to help them level up to the next quest (one of the rules of the game is that players have to earn at least 50% of the total possible XP for a quest in order to move on to the next quest). Like bonuses, time can be used as a way to gain advantages over other players or over the game, again allowing players who get behind a chance to redeem themselves by either slowing down or speeding up the game for themselves or for others.

Whatever types of achievements you design to enhance the experience of your players/learners, have what game designers term a trophy room–a place where students can (re)view and relive their glory, whether virtually or physically. And try to tie achievements to activities that are rewarding in and of themselves. Too often, teachers believe the lie that we have to purchase student effort by assigning (subtractive) points to everything. This practice creates a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein students begin to buy into the idea that only things with points attached to them are worth doing. And that is ultimately the message we send when we attach rewards to some things and not to others (these things are worth doing, these are not), even though we scream about how lazy students are because they won’t read the assigned textbook or essay (but we haven’t designed any explicit reward system for doing the reading, while everything else is replete with punitive, external motivators). Within well designed games, rewarding effort is not about attaching extrinsic carrots to everything. An excellent example of this is the “student in peril” component of the Lego Harry Potter franchise. In each level, there is a student hidden somewhere; if you manage to find that student, the game rewards you by playing special music, having the student dance around while other students cheer, and providing you with a celebratory announcement. That’s it. No points. No extra powers. If you happen to rescue all of the students in peril (there are 50), then you earn the status of having rescued all of the students in peril. There’s no real extrinsic value in doing so. Yet, I have dedicated more hours than I really wish to think about trying to locate and rescue all of the students in peril, even replaying levels I’ve completed in order to do so. Why? Because it is a challenge (the students aren’t easy to locate, so it takes effort and skill to do so) and it feels good knowing that I have the potential to overcome this challenge the more I engage in the process (once you’ve located one student in peril, the chances are good you’ll be able to locate another and then another). And the fact that I’m not getting anything out of it actually makes it even more motivating, strangely enough (although Daniel Pink has proven this is actually not that strange).


An achievement is just that–a) a thing done successfully, typically by effort, courage, or skill; and b) the process or fact of doing that something successfully. In order to be most effective and to encourage intrinsic motivation, achievements need to be part and parcel of an experience in which the effort, courage, and skill required to do something successfully and the process and fact of doing it successfully are the rewards most valued, both by the teacher and the students. If you think about it, I am, in fact, receiving something for rescuing the students in peril in Lego Harry Potter: positive acknowledgment and feedback from the game (reward for effort) as I engage in the process of locating them and the pride and self-confidence that comes with doing so successfully. Points are not the only, or even the most powerful, form of rewards available to teachers. Positive feedback, acknowledgement, pride, and self-confidence are all types of achievements that belong in any classroom, whether it’s been designed as a game or not.

What do you think? How can achievements be used most effectively in the classroom? What kinds of achievements work best in the classroom? How can we best balance extrinsic and intrinsic rewards? These are questions that I am considering as I begin the process of integrating achievements into my classes and, I believe, some of the most important ones to consider as we turn our classrooms into game spaces.