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Pandemona
Charlie Sheens House51453 Posts
On July 06 2012 23:29 NEOtheONE wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2012 19:26 Pandemona wrote:
This is the kind of thing that gets out of hand real quickly. The gaming world and real life should be kept as seperate as possible due to the fact that there is always a small % that take things in the wrong light and cause sevre consequences. All it takes is for another crazy person to grab a gun and start shooting people because he plays CoD or CS:S and thinks that if he does so the world will be a better place, or that he is just angry and doesn't like person "x".
This gamerfication term should not be crossed over with anything else and should be scrapped before the press get hold of it and point it into the bad frame of light that we are always being labelled into. The system itself to the regular human being or child (which i think this is personally aimed at) it has good value in making "chores" fun or "fitness" fun just like games are to children, but it will get turned and twisted into a wrong aspect very quickly by the small % and then you have a shit storm on your hands faster than you know, and again gamers are looked as 1. weird and 2. sociopathic.
Also, the only thing in real life which is close to any game reference is the fact that you have to work to get currency. You do a quest or a challenge to get currency in a game, in real life you get given a job/task and you get paid for it thus the same. The only way the gaming world has any relevance to real life imo.
Adding this into school educational system has little rewards imo. The ability to make "learning" fun is not how we should be going about education. Education is your first step towards work, the ability to meet deadlines (homework) and produce good work (assignments via grading) is just excatly what work is all about, and turning up on time to school itself is key. Education system shouldn't meet the gaming system, however saying that you can possibly add this system to early learning 10year olds and under, teaching them to that way can be useful, making weekly assignments based on "quests" with chores at home and fitness is a good way to improve the youth of today (maybe, but im sure there will be repercussions on that by human rights activists as there always is) and im sure the goverment would back that type of initiative. Bringing it into highschool and higher education would be a very bad move. [1]Sigh so much ignorance in this post. [2]First off, no one goes out and shoots someone because of a game. People who go out and shoot people do so because they have issues long before they started playing some violent game. [3]You say gamification will get twisted by a small minority of people yet you fail to specify how. [4] If we as gamers do not use something like gamification to portray gaming in a positive light, then how are we going going to change the label society tries to put on us? [5]There is so much wrong with the statement I bolded. Learning should be fun. What I am hearing from your post is that learning should always be lecture based and punishment oriented. I say punishment oriented because you are punished for not doing your work, punished for not showing up on time, punished for not doing a good job, et cetera. That is a broken education system. Even work has promotions, bonuses, employee of the month, and etc. to motivate employees. Children and even adults are far better motivated by positive reinforcement rather than the punishment oriented system that we currently use.
[1] You miss read everything if it comes across as ignorance
[2] No i didn't mean to say people shoot people because of video games, i say thats how the press label it. Take the norwegian nut case, he went out shoots lots of people as an activist for a terrorists organisation, as soon as they find out he played Call of Duty it was the games fault in the media (maybe not in your country but in England it was highlighted a lot) Press constantly link the two when they have a point and people eat it up, even my parents say all "gamers are weirdos" (don't worry i heavily correct them ;; )
[3] The press, the press get hold of a rampage by anyone and link it to them playing a video game if they have evidence to do so.
[4] We will never be able to change what societ labels us, (i am going to add a statement which is a mjority based statement which can be deemed racist but i do not mean it and it is not my view.) take Pakistanni's as an example, they are deemed as terrorists all of them by certain individuals, the majority think they are all like the terrorists and hate everything the US and UK stand for and want to kill all of them, yet that is not the case, its a small minority of them which are corrupted into beleiving the above and 95%+ are regular people just trying to live their lives. Gamers are the same, they are portrayed as locked in a bedroom in a dark room with no social life and locked away from the world learning twisted things on the inernet. When we all know thats only a certain % of people and that the majority of gamers (again 90% or more) live normal lives of going to work and socialising outside of work as well as gaming because gaming is after all just a hobby not a way of life. But the media and society will never see that like in the case of terrorists due to the way things are portrayed, you will never stop it even if you set out all the positive'ness you want, in this cast "gamification"
[5] Learning should be fun for people under 10, they should be eased into wanting to learn at a young age and then turned into a man and women as they enter high school. Whats the use in turning into a job thinking its going to be "fun" and what you learnt (and the way you learn it) is how it is done in the working world, it is not. If you turn up late to a job more than 3 times you will get fired, if you do crap work more than 3 times you will be fired, if you fail to meet deadlines you will be fired. What is the point in not hammering home these rules in school education system when they are at a certain age for them to start to learn to understand this. Im not saying children and teenagers should not get rewards for a successful year in school or great grades or work, they should, and there is the right routes to do this without changing the whole education system into gamification. To reward children and teenagers with a couple of "field" trips or days out to theme parks a year should be plenty.
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I would never like school, no matter what you change about it. Nothing would motivate me to go back to school. It doesnt matter if i get achievement points and a shiney pop-up for getting an A on the math test, I'll still hate it because of the material and the effort it would take me to complete it. Even if I did get an A, i would thank whatever supernatural forces are out there in the universe that it is finally over, immediatly forget the material, and move on.
I've had teachers that have tried their damnedest to make their material/subject more 'interesting' or 'entertaining', and I appreciate that they know their students dont like their material because it's difficult, or memory based, or tedious, but it just doesnt work. Most people arent stupid (the ones that actually go to school lol) and they know what the teacher is trying to do, and they arent falling for it. You cant force someone to like something that they hate doing.
My dead-end database entry office job would not be more entertaining if I got more rewards for doing it. It would still be the most boring job on the planet, it would still be the same work. Even if they trippled my pay, I would still be pissed off about having to get up early every day and go to this job for 8.5 hours 5 days a week.
Games are games. Work is work. School is school. That is just the way life is. Some people like work and school, some dont. You cant change that by putting a mask on it.
If it was up to me, and I can just make miracles happen and change anything, then sure I would change work and school into something that every single person can find entertaining, motivating, interesting, "fun". But it is nothing but a fairy tale. There are the lucky few that make their jobs into gaming itself, and then there is the rest of us wishing we were them.
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Russian Federation748 Posts
Those proposals are really vague. In particular, when I read about the "gamification" of education, with levels awarded for completing tasks etc., it really reminds me of, between other things, the army or the promotion system in enterprises. Would you call life in those organisations a game ?
I also don't see why you would want to enhance human learning and education. It's very fine like it is.
Negative Reinforcement: For most school assignments, and in many cases the final grade calculation, students start out with a perfect score (100%) and are penalized downward. A few early mistakes can have a devastating effect on self-esteem, turning the rest of the semester into an uphill battle against a non-intuitive feedback system (more work does not grant greater rewards, merely less punishment), as well as a low sense of efficacy.
How could most grades be calculated that way ? The only time ever I've seen that was for orthography tests.
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On July 07 2012 04:27 Kyrillion wrote:
Those proposals are really vague. In particular, when I read about the "gamification" of education, with levels awarded for completing tasks etc., it really reminds me of, between other things, the army or the promotion system in enterprises. Would you call life in those organisations a game ?
I also don't see why you would want to enhance human learning and education. It's very fine like it is.
There are different degrees of gamification, and game mechanics can be implemented without distorting the activity itself. One example would be the "3-strikes" mechanic from baseball. It is formally used in traffic law in my state and others (I don't know if it's just an east coast thing), and more casually in classrooms/youth activities, and is analogous to "lives/hitpoints" in games.
Despite this, I would not call it an attempt to make traffic law "fun"
The "Prisoner's Dilemma" is a central implementation of Game Theory, but that does not make prison a game either.
Show nested quote +Negative Reinforcement: For most school assignments, and in many cases the final grade calculation, students start out with a perfect score (100%) and are penalized downward. A few early mistakes can have a devastating effect on self-esteem, turning the rest of the semester into an uphill battle against a non-intuitive feedback system (more work does not grant greater rewards, merely less punishment), as well as a low sense of efficacy. How could most grades be calculated that way ? The only time ever I've seen that was for orthography tests.
At least in my school and many I've seen, grading calculation tends to start with full points and subtract points for each mistake. From my perspective this was generally the norm pre-College level where assignments are smaller and don't have grading rubriks identifying the point values of each component of the assignment being turned in. Assignments were then averaged using weight multipliers to calculate the course grade.
It is entirely possible that your experience was different
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On July 06 2012 22:52 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2012 19:05 r.Evo wrote:On July 06 2012 15:23 Flakes wrote:On July 06 2012 12:48 r.Evo wrote:
In my opinion you need a solid combination of positive and negative reinforcement. School or education in general has a tendency to give too much negative feedback and not enough positive feedback.
A fun example I witnessed in my own behaviour occurs when you compare the "punishment/reward" features in DotA 2 and LoL. In LoL, you can only report players. In DotA 2 you can either report people or you can commend them. The commendations are there for everyone to be seen and have no effect beyond that at the moment. However, personally for me, the chance to be "commended" if I was nice and did well is way more motivating to show that behaviour than the chance to simply "not be reported".
Transferring that example to school the motivation is usually fueled by "get punished for bad grades" and "get not punished for good grades" because those are (usually both by parents and teachers) already expected. To be "good at school" is what's considered the norm - that automatically devalues doing well and makes doing bad demotivating - it shows you're somehow "worse" than others.
The problem with positive reinforcements at school however is that you also have to take the social factors into account. A day off for each A/1 you get in your half year marks? If used badly that kid will be bullied to hell and back because he gets benefits that are very wanted and obvious. Benefits, taking the social circle into account, have to be small, visible for everyone and reinforced by the social structure around them.
On July 06 2012 14:19 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:
For example showing grades in class on a wall, maybe with name (usually I think it's with the student's number so you don't know who's who).
...
Maybe instead of just showing grades off in 1 list (for a class), also show different areas of the student's grade. Have a ranking for test scores, homework scores, etc. etc. So that even if your overall grade is bad, you could still motivate/show off by doing very well on a test and increasing on rank, or simply having others see that you did so well on the test.
Obviously something like that could make those, who want to remain anonymous and not have others' see their score, feel uncomfortable.. I don't think it would hurt to have those people opt to not have their grades shown on those lists. The rest of the people who have decent or better grades should feel comfortable to have their grades shown, so they can compete with their friends. They could also just share information by word of mouth, but usually there are several cliques per class so a unified ranking of grades could be effective. Messing with competition and other social mechanics is definitely a problem once students start hitting puberty (speaking from experience as a former summer camp counselor), and would definitely have to be downplayed. One thing mentioned by both the Classrealm creator and in the Extra Credits episode (in the links section) was specifically encouraging cooperative/supportive behavior by using class-wide rewards -- for example, a reward contingent on everyone meeting a certain threshold of performance/good behavior. The current fundamental problem (that led to products like Classrealm in the first place) is how much work gamification is for individual teachers -- who receive almost no support from either their students or the school administration. The teachers would be held accountable for any exploits, harassment, or unfair situations generated by the students. Then again, it's not called "gaming the system" for nothing : \ Oh, so it's more like if the class as an entity gets xy points total they get a benefit as whole? I can definitly see that working, that actually encourages helping out the weaker ones and celebrating the good ones. There's no need however to pack that into a game, can definitly do this in some kind of more subtle way. Edit: Wow. The more I think about this the more I think it is actually a really, really great concept. It's very similar to those games where you have groups competing against others where the group as a whole has to solve riddles quickly. The people who are the "nerds" in those groups are actually getting celebrated because they benefit the group as a whole. That concept is just great. Basically it would mean, if class X gets an average of Z or better, they get a cool advantage like having a few hours off or getting to go home earlier on a certain day per month. Suddenly the group as a whole (as long as the goal is still achievable) has a reason to push weaker students and help them out while the good students get positive feedback from the group. I really, really would like to see how that works in practice. It's kind of a reversal of that class A vs class B experiment abusing the positive parts of the group dynamics. MICRONESIA WHERE ARE YOU CAN YOU TRY THIS OUT PLZ? =D What do the kids get when they accomplish the objective? Food? Money? I don't have any two classes that are learning the same material... how do I create competition? Split the class down the middle? A lot of this stuff sounds great in theory but isn't so easy to implement... especially by the teacher alone.
Honestly that's why I was curious if you had any ideas for this. On the level where parents deal with their kids I think it's rather easy to implement, but I find it hard to think about how one could implement this in the actual school.
Basically when I understand the concepts behind most of these "games" correctly it's about offering the group as a whole (to avoid bullying etc.) a benefit as a whole once they reach a certain goal. The goal has to be achievable (too low/high and it kills the motivation) and the benefit has to be something the group wants to obtain. I guess that the framing should be around "I as your authority figure believe that you as a group can achieve this goal" instead of "some of you will achieve it, some won't".
As I see it if the benefit is cool enough the group itself will develop the "competetive" dynamics without further help in that regard. It's kind of a similar basis for any of those group based games, if the good people want their benefit they have to help the weaker ones first. The weaker ones gain a reason beyond the task itself and get offered mostly unconditional help which both contributes to their motivation.
Some random examples I can think of for potential benefits:
If the class as a whole achieves an average of x+ in a certain subject they...
...make an field trip every half year (in my old school we had like a full week per year where the teachers could lead kids out on field trips, the people with like history/language classes or similar stuff as majors were kinda lucky and did cool stuff, the math majors usually didn't have much fun. =D)
...get some period without homework assignements.
...they're allowed to leave earlier / come in later at a certain date (probably tricky, I doubt it's possible to make this or anything similar work)
...one or two lessons per month get turned into movie lessons where the class watches subject related movies. (Let's be honest, no one cares what it is - as long as it's not regular classes it's already cool to get it.)
In ALL those cases a class which doesn't hit the set average they would simply have regular classes/homework.
Other things (which would need to have bigger benefits) would be if you put the classes in competition against each other. Thinking of myself back in school (we had about 5-6 classes per year until 11th grade at most) if you would have offered our class that if we beat the others in our average we get a week off we would have begged teachers to help us more. Maybe even for three days. =P ... This class vs class stuff would have to be handled carefully though since I can see a weaker class giving up easily and similar stuff. Maybe there could be done something if all the classes of a grade combined achieve a certain goal and get similar dynamics without the drawbacks.
You think any of this (should probably stick to the one class, one subject idea first) could work and be implementable?
PS: My incantations have worked! <3
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On July 07 2012 04:27 Kyrillion wrote:Show nested quote +Negative Reinforcement: For most school assignments, and in many cases the final grade calculation, students start out with a perfect score (100%) and are penalized downward. A few early mistakes can have a devastating effect on self-esteem, turning the rest of the semester into an uphill battle against a non-intuitive feedback system (more work does not grant greater rewards, merely less punishment), as well as a low sense of efficacy. How could most grades be calculated that way ? The only time ever I've seen that was for orthography tests.
Let's say you have graded homework for math or physics. If you make a mistake in calculation or don't write a step you'll lose points. Which is fine. But there's no way to make up for this by considering related problems, generalizing or making an interesting insight.
The goal is to finish a specific task perfectly. If you're a good student almost all of your effort goes towards making sure you avoid silly mistakes. Now, precision is important but is it really the no.1 thing we need to teach to above average math or physics students?
And the whole language of grading is fishy. A single number or letter representing your knowledge of or even talent for a whole area of study. If someone tells me my grade for Linear Algebra is C that's unhelpful and probably a little discouraging. If they give me a list of techniques and concepts I need to brush up on, that's immensely helpful. It's infinitely more useful than the single number and it's less likely to affect my confidence.
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United States24617 Posts
On July 07 2012 05:57 r.Evo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2012 22:52 micronesia wrote:On July 06 2012 19:05 r.Evo wrote:On July 06 2012 15:23 Flakes wrote:On July 06 2012 12:48 r.Evo wrote:
In my opinion you need a solid combination of positive and negative reinforcement. School or education in general has a tendency to give too much negative feedback and not enough positive feedback.
A fun example I witnessed in my own behaviour occurs when you compare the "punishment/reward" features in DotA 2 and LoL. In LoL, you can only report players. In DotA 2 you can either report people or you can commend them. The commendations are there for everyone to be seen and have no effect beyond that at the moment. However, personally for me, the chance to be "commended" if I was nice and did well is way more motivating to show that behaviour than the chance to simply "not be reported".
Transferring that example to school the motivation is usually fueled by "get punished for bad grades" and "get not punished for good grades" because those are (usually both by parents and teachers) already expected. To be "good at school" is what's considered the norm - that automatically devalues doing well and makes doing bad demotivating - it shows you're somehow "worse" than others.
The problem with positive reinforcements at school however is that you also have to take the social factors into account. A day off for each A/1 you get in your half year marks? If used badly that kid will be bullied to hell and back because he gets benefits that are very wanted and obvious. Benefits, taking the social circle into account, have to be small, visible for everyone and reinforced by the social structure around them.
On July 06 2012 14:19 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:
For example showing grades in class on a wall, maybe with name (usually I think it's with the student's number so you don't know who's who).
...
Maybe instead of just showing grades off in 1 list (for a class), also show different areas of the student's grade. Have a ranking for test scores, homework scores, etc. etc. So that even if your overall grade is bad, you could still motivate/show off by doing very well on a test and increasing on rank, or simply having others see that you did so well on the test.
Obviously something like that could make those, who want to remain anonymous and not have others' see their score, feel uncomfortable.. I don't think it would hurt to have those people opt to not have their grades shown on those lists. The rest of the people who have decent or better grades should feel comfortable to have their grades shown, so they can compete with their friends. They could also just share information by word of mouth, but usually there are several cliques per class so a unified ranking of grades could be effective. Messing with competition and other social mechanics is definitely a problem once students start hitting puberty (speaking from experience as a former summer camp counselor), and would definitely have to be downplayed. One thing mentioned by both the Classrealm creator and in the Extra Credits episode (in the links section) was specifically encouraging cooperative/supportive behavior by using class-wide rewards -- for example, a reward contingent on everyone meeting a certain threshold of performance/good behavior. The current fundamental problem (that led to products like Classrealm in the first place) is how much work gamification is for individual teachers -- who receive almost no support from either their students or the school administration. The teachers would be held accountable for any exploits, harassment, or unfair situations generated by the students. Then again, it's not called "gaming the system" for nothing : \ Oh, so it's more like if the class as an entity gets xy points total they get a benefit as whole? I can definitly see that working, that actually encourages helping out the weaker ones and celebrating the good ones. There's no need however to pack that into a game, can definitly do this in some kind of more subtle way. Edit: Wow. The more I think about this the more I think it is actually a really, really great concept. It's very similar to those games where you have groups competing against others where the group as a whole has to solve riddles quickly. The people who are the "nerds" in those groups are actually getting celebrated because they benefit the group as a whole. That concept is just great. Basically it would mean, if class X gets an average of Z or better, they get a cool advantage like having a few hours off or getting to go home earlier on a certain day per month. Suddenly the group as a whole (as long as the goal is still achievable) has a reason to push weaker students and help them out while the good students get positive feedback from the group. I really, really would like to see how that works in practice. It's kind of a reversal of that class A vs class B experiment abusing the positive parts of the group dynamics. MICRONESIA WHERE ARE YOU CAN YOU TRY THIS OUT PLZ? =D What do the kids get when they accomplish the objective? Food? Money? I don't have any two classes that are learning the same material... how do I create competition? Split the class down the middle? A lot of this stuff sounds great in theory but isn't so easy to implement... especially by the teacher alone. Honestly that's why I was curious if you had any ideas for this. On the level where parents deal with their kids I think it's rather easy to implement, but I find it hard to think about how one could implement this in the actual school. Basically when I understand the concepts behind most of these "games" correctly it's about offering the group as a whole (to avoid bullying etc.) a benefit as a whole once they reach a certain goal. The goal has to be achievable (too low/high and it kills the motivation) and the benefit has to be something the group wants to obtain. I guess that the framing should be around "I as your authority figure believe that you as a group can achieve this goal" instead of "some of you will achieve it, some won't". As I see it if the benefit is cool enough the group itself will develop the "competetive" dynamics without further help in that regard. It's kind of a similar basis for any of those group based games, if the good people want their benefit they have to help the weaker ones first. The weaker ones gain a reason beyond the task itself and get offered mostly unconditional help which both contributes to their motivation. Some random examples I can think of for potential benefits: If the class as a whole achieves an average of x+ in a certain subject they... ...make an field trip every half year (in my old school we had like a full week per year where the teachers could lead kids out on field trips, the people with like history/language classes or similar stuff as majors were kinda lucky and did cool stuff, the math majors usually didn't have much fun. =D) ...get some period without homework assignements. ...they're allowed to leave earlier / come in later at a certain date (probably tricky, I doubt it's possible to make this or anything similar work) ...one or two lessons per month get turned into movie lessons where the class watches subject related movies. (Let's be honest, no one cares what it is - as long as it's not regular classes it's already cool to get it.) In ALL those cases a class which doesn't hit the set average they would simply have regular classes/homework. Other things (which would need to have bigger benefits) would be if you put the classes in competition against each other. Thinking of myself back in school (we had about 5-6 classes per year until 11th grade at most) if you would have offered our class that if we beat the others in our average we get a week off we would have begged teachers to help us more. Maybe even for three days. =P ... This class vs class stuff would have to be handled carefully though since I can see a weaker class giving up easily and similar stuff. Maybe there could be done something if all the classes of a grade combined achieve a certain goal and get similar dynamics without the drawbacks. You think any of this (should probably stick to the one class, one subject idea first) could work and be implementable? PS: My incantations have worked! <3
In my experience, some of that could work some of the time, but most of it won't work most of the time. There are so many issues that will come up if you try to "gamify" school in the ways you suggested that wouldn't even occur to you until you have actually tried some of them (which I have). Your ideas are not entirely without merit, but don't represent sufficient evidence of need for a paradigm shift.
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Yeah this was a pretty sweet bot bump.
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EPT
