Leveling up in the classroom

Right at the end of class on Monday, Rory asked a heck of a question: how can we use students' love of video games to design a more engaging classroom environment?

I think anyone who found a successful answer to this question would become a billionaire. Most attempts to make concrete use of students' interests in the classroom crash and burn, specifically because the school environment killed any student enthusiasm. It's quite a Catch-22 for us teachers.

That said, I'd like to take a stab at the idea. I wonder if you could incorporate the idea of "leveling up" in the classroom. Basically, students would earn points (or gold coins, as Destiney suggested) for fulfilling various tasks - doing homework on time, scoring well on quizzes, etc. It would take some thought to set up a points system - how detailed do you want to get? A more detailed system could easily get overwhelmingly complex, superseding all other considerations in the classroom. Leveling up would have to be linked to some kind of reward system in order to provide the value necessary to foster motivation. There's also the problem of competition - would you make the "levels" public? Would the kids moving slowly feel embarrassed and then shut down, or would they work harder to catch up to their peers?

I think someone else (during or maybe after class) mentioned that a classroom set up we heard about in ED649 has some of the qualities of a game. In that classroom, students did their learning and work on a computer system in which they moved through units at their own pace, watching their progress in completing lessons on a chart on the wall of the classroom. Some students thrived in this system, progressing rapidly and learning a lot. However, the major problem with this setup was the massive attrition rate - by the end of the school year, only 25% of the original students were showing up regularly. This suggests to me that setting up school as a self-motivated series of tasks with tracked progression serves to motivate some kids but will completely disenfranchise others. Maybe it isn't such a good idea to set up a classroom like a video game after all.

That said, there's one key principle to be derived from video games: one of the reasons they're so fun is because they hit our sweet spot in terms of challenges that are "pleasantly frustrating". This concept is discussed by cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham in his book "Why Don't Students Like School?" (which we're reading for ED606). He says that thinking is fundamentally difficult for humans, but we enjoy learning - so long as we feel we have to work to solve a problem, but that that work has a reasonable chance of success and the pleasure associated with a problem well-solved. Games come at a variety of levels, and the games that kids latch on to as their favorites hit their own difficult-but-doable sweet spots. They glean the most satisfaction possible from solving these problems. In our classrooms, we need to do as much as we can to find that (elusive) sweet spot for as many of our students as possible. We must avoid crushingly difficult tasks, but we also must avoid anything too easy and unrewarding. This requires careful attention paid to our students, their prior knowledge and capabilities. Doing the work to learn these things about our students and then carefully designing tasks/assessments accordingly is difficult but ultimately necessary to foster success and engagement in our classrooms.