Fighting monsters, taking tests

1.  Guilds sit together. The classroom is divided into six zones. Each zone is identified by the name of a significant individual covered in class.

That's the first item Lee Sheldon mentions under Notes and Observations on his Gaming the Classroom blog. The Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article about Sheldon's class at Indiana University, writing that "class time is spent completing quests (such as presentations of games or research), fighting monsters (taking tests or quizzes), and "crafting" (writing game-analysis papers and a video-game concept document). The 40-person class is divided into six "zones," named after influential game designers, in which students complete group tasks."

Gaming the Classroom, the blog Sheldon began a few days ago, is a response to the overwhelming interest in how he taught his Mutliplayer Game Design class, and evidently his non-traditional approach to teaching made a lot of us lean in, seeing possibilities for our own classrooms.

Wouldn't gamers and non-gamers alike appreciate a good shake-up to the typical syllabus? Even this variation on the traditional dreaded quiz seems a vast improvement: "Last semester in our Theory and Practice of Game Design class I was planning to hide some quiz answers, taped to the bottom of chairs in each zone. They still had to match the answers to the questions, but they were encouraged to trade the information with one another. This directed their preparation for quizzes, forcing them to study when ordinarily many wouldn’t bother."

Sheldon's classroom game mechanics might address an interesting group dynamic that social psychologists call social loafing, or free-riding, the phenomenon in which individuals exert less effort on collective tasks than they would on individual tasks. How clever, then, to create guilds that are responsible for performing collective tasks, for which individuals and groups get evaluated, in the context of a classroom.

Sheldon wrote on his blog, "Every few classes guilds move to a new zone (so slackers can’t cluster at the back for an entire semester!), and receive extra credit for answering questions regarding the person it is named after. Since they don’t know the questions in advance, they do research on their own."

In my experience, most students come into a classroom, pick a seat, and that's their territory for the entire semester. And I understand why: we find friendly faces, we get comfortable with our neighbors, we like the view out the window, we need a plug outlet, and it's just easier not to renegotiate that sometimes awkward ritual of finding a place to sit. So belonging to a guild that periodically moves is a nice hybrid, a way to balance comfort with change.

Social loafing literature has identified the causes of free-riding, but the real implications are in learning what motivates people to participate. So often professors assign group projects that may or may not mimic real-world collaborative efforts, and participation in these group is, in my experience, usually uneven. Rarely have I worked on a project in which each person has contributed a fair share, and in classes that involve technical skill, people usually take on tasks in which they already excel. We are remarkably adept at pouring efforts into the item that gets the grade, and most group work seems more a process of coordination than collaboration. What I like about Sheldon's syllabus is that the collective tasks have sufficient focus, with some tasks being almost incremental, providing opportunities for different types of leading or following to occur in response to the task at hand or the longer-term goal.

What struck me most about Sheldon's class, though, was thinking about students' motivation to pay attention and participate, particularly in terms of the laptop-in-the-classroom debate. The laptop would be a tool in this class, useful when needed, but otherwise too distracting. It may even be detrimental to the success of the guild if it distracted individual members from the group's collective tasks. I understand professors who don't want laptops in their classrooms, but why stop there? Shouldn't the phones go too? And the windows? Most of all, maybe we should check how tired students are. I am at my least engaged and participatory, with no chance of paying attention, when tired.

I plan to follow Sheldon's blog, to see what else develops in his classrooms and others that may try something similar. How do you think game mechanics would work in non-game design classes? How would you go about applying something like this to your own classes? If anyone has tried anything like this, I would be curious to hear about it here, or over at Gaming the Classroom.