Level Up: Designing Games That Go Light Years Beyond Jeopardy and Kahoot

Purpose & objective

The express purpose of this interactive session is to provide attendees with a deeper look at how (and why) they can design stronger, more effective, and more engaging games for their classrooms. Far too many "gamified" classroom tools and edtech websites reduce higher order thinking to a brightly colored parade of lower-level questions hidden behind a sea of shallow bells and whistles. The end result? Noisy, fast-paced classrooms that *appear* engaging -- but quickly reveal a troubling trend where players are more motivated by hacking their way onto flashy leaderboards than by actually learning the right answer. What's worse: as many well-meaning educators continue to dedicate significant teaching time to these low-level engagement strategies, students become habitualized to a classroom environment that rewards speed over critical thinking and outcome over creative output.

This session seeks to correct these troubling trends to show attendees a better way to play by learning how to design playful, purposeful lesson plans where students fuse content knowledge with creativity to achieve incredible levels of performance. In turn, this session will help teachers cut through the clutter when employing these same design principles to craft highly interactive student-centered lessons of their own.

Outline

As mentioned on the previous page, this session will blend "big picture" research with "hands-on" activities designed to help teachers see practical applied solutions of each relevant tenet of game-inspired instructional design. The Deep Dive Creation Lab affords us a respectable 90 minutes in which to balance these dual objectives.

Our intent is to dedicate the first 10-15 minutes of the session introducing attendees to the essential "why" that lays the foundation for this fundamental shift to a more playful pedagogical approach. And from there, we plan to dedicate the remaining time to a sort of mock classroom experience, thereby allowing session attendees the opportunity to shift into the role of students in a sample classroom so as to give them the chance to experience "how" and "what" these same core principles might look like as they play out in across a series of sample activities. In working as a full-time educational consultant and instructional coach, we have found the highest degrees of success consistently come from taking this more andragogical approach to adult PD: start with why, show the how, and give teachers time to experience the what before providing them with appropriate time between each activity to debrief and consider how a particular technique can best be modified or applied for use in their own classrooms.

Supporting research

This session will draw heavily on the work contained in all three of our books -

Explore Like a Pirate: Gamification and Game-Inspired Course Design to Engage, Enrich and Elevate Your Learners (2015)

EDrenaline Rush: Game-Changing Student Engagement Inspired by Theme Parks, Mud Runs, and Escape Rooms (2019)

Fully Engaged: Playful Pedagogy for Real Results (2021)

In addition, we'll be drawing multiple examples and citing relevant research from the work of numerous education pioneers and researchers including Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Bluma Zeigarnik, Josef Pieper, David Bohm, Paulo Freire ("Pedagogy of the Oppressed"), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ("Flow"), Sean Achor ("The Happiness Advantage"), and Carol Dweck ("Mindset").