Gamification in ELT: Encouraging Behavior and Learning
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Gamification in ELT refers to applying game elements like points, leaderboards, and achievements to language teaching. While not new, gamification aims to motivate students to do activities they may not want to do, like speaking. Different types of gamification include using virtual currencies to reward behaviors. Leaderboards can demotivate lower-performing students. Gamification helps with behavior management which is important for young learners who may not want to be in class. It encourages positive behaviors through feedback and rewards. Overall, gamification can motivate students if implemented properly.
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Gamification in ELT: Encouraging Behavior and Learning
- 1. Gamification in ELT Magic Bullet or Broken Sword? IATEFL LT SIG & TESOL CALL IS 2nd Web Conference - 14th June 2014 Graham Stanley - graham.stanley@gmail.com
- 3. https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelhall Run for points, measure your progress...
- 4. https://www.zombiesrungame.com/ ...or run for your life
- 5. http://foursquare.com/ You can gamify the places you visit
- 6. http://www.rexbox.co.uk/epicwin/ You can gamify any part of your life
- 7. You can even gamify your sleep & dreams
- 8. CanCan gamificationgamification be usedbe used effectivelyeffectively in the Englishin the English LanguageLanguage TeachingTeaching classroom?classroom? https://www.flickr.com/photos/ana_cotta/2763575483/
- 9. Gamification in language teaching is not new So, what is new?
- 11. But...What is Fun? http://www.theoryoffun.com/ It can be argued that we now know more about games...and more about play and fun than ever before.
- 14. Nicole Lazzarohttps://twitter.com/NicoleLazzaro 4 Types of Fun People Fun (Friendship) Easy Fun (Novelty) Hard Fun - (Challenge) Serious Fun (Meaning)
- 18. What is Gamification? Gamification is the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g., point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity. Gamification encourages behaviour with instant, positive feedback.
- 19. Gamification of behavior management in language teaching is not new... https://www.flickr.com/photos/46097950@N02/7687402370 https://www.flickr.com/photos/benchun/ But...
- 20. Behaviour Management is... [please complete][please complete] https://www.flickr.com/photos/cgc/4280454/
- 21. https://www.flickr.com/photos/audiolucistore/14159712031 ...not an issue in some educational contexts... * * i.e. with motivated (adult)* i.e. with motivated (adult) students who want to learnstudents who want to learn
- 22. ...but it is vital in others** ** i.e. with young learners & teenagers** i.e. with young learners & teenagers who don't want to be in your classroomwho don't want to be in your classroom https://www.flickr.com/photos/light_seeker/6601077523/
- 23. Fundamentals of Behaviour Management You need to be in charge of the room Talk like you expect to be heard Be prepared to act tough Think about how you move Keep your cool, don't raise your voice Punish behaviour you disapprove Reward behaviour you like Be consistent, fair and proportional With kids, behaviour management is fundamental to good teaching If you can't control them, you can't teach them and they won't learn. http://behaviourguru.blogspot.com/
- 28. Virtual Currency Does not interrupt the flow of an activity / class There needs to be something to buy at some point Care needs to be taken not to make currency acquisition the main motivator in class Worked wonders to create an 'English only' environment Reward behaviour learners aren't doing that they should Don't over-use
- 30. Construction / world buildingConstruction / world building Resource collectionResource collection http://www.supercell.net/games/view/clash-of-clans Defence of the villageDefence of the village Learning from GamesLearning from Games
- 31. Attacking other villagesAttacking other villages TrophiesTrophies earnedearned Stars earnedStars earned
- 32. Experience points & LevelExperience points & Level Trophies earned & LeagueTrophies earned & League (Leader Board)(Leader Board) Treasure / ResourcesTreasure / Resources earnedearned
- 34. Community (clan)Community (clan) leader boardleader board Variation in measurementVariation in measurement depends on how you playdepends on how you play and your goalsand your goals
- 35. Community (clan) chatCommunity (clan) chat
- 41. Leaderboards It's common for participants at lower levels in a leaderboard to become demotivated – this happened and can be seen left. 5 out of the 13 learners started to feel that writing a lot didn't really matter and that they could not catch up to the others. I tried to help counter this by making more than one way of 'winning' the game. To some extent, adding 'Achievement' badges helped do this and those learners who had lost interest started to participate with enthusiasm again. Towards the end of term though, the same learners, and one more (Marina) has started to lose interest again, so I did not continue the speed-writing in the second term.
- 42. 'Using the IWB to support gamification in order to enhance writing fluency in the second language classroom' Bloomsbury Academic, 2014 GamifyingGamifying WritingWriting http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/teaching-languages-with-technology-9781441170569/
- 43. Gamifying Writing Once upon a time, in a land full of mountains, next to a river, there lived a group of pirates who wore helmets with horns on them. One day, the king of the pirates set a quest for the others: to find the mythical gigantic tree octopus. The prize, he told them, would be a golden cup, and the pirates would also hold a party and cook the tree octopus in the special silver cooking pot…
- 50. Gamification can help... ...to encourage students to do something they don't want to do... ...or to do something they think they don't want to do https://www.flickr.com/photos/42348786@N08/4131635529 In summary
- 52. Further Reading: Gamification & ELT Gamifying ELT http://gamifyingelt.wordpress.com/ Digital Play blog (Gamification) http://www.digitalplay.info/blog/?s=gamification Gamification in TESOL (Facebook group) https://www.facebook.com/groups/Gamification.in.TESOL/ 'Gamification and language learning', ELTJam: http://www.eltjam.com/its-in-the-game-gamification-and-language-learning-pt-1-of-2 Driver (2012) 'The Irony of Gamification' http://digitaldebris.info/2011/12/31/the-irony-of-gamification-written-for-ied-magazine.html Stanley (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) 'Using the IWB to support gamification in order to enhance writing in the secondary language class ' in Cutrim Schmidt & Whyte Teaching Languages with Technology: Communicative Approaches to Interactive Whiteboard Use York (2012) 'English Quest' Modern English Teacher, Vol.21 No.4
- 53. Further Reading: Gamification & ELT Gamifying ELT http://gamifyingelt.wordpress.com/ Digital Play blog (Gamification) http://www.digitalplay.info/blog/?s=gamification Gamification in TESOL (Facebook group) https://www.facebook.com/groups/Gamification.in.TESOL/ 'Gamification and language learning', ELTJam: http://www.eltjam.com/its-in-the-game-gamification-and-language-learning-pt-1-of-2 Driver (2012) 'The Irony of Gamification' http://digitaldebris.info/2011/12/31/the-irony-of-gamification-written-for-ied-magazine.html Mozuku (blog) Gamification & ELT http://mozuku.edublogs.org/category/gamification/ Stanley (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) 'Using the IWB to support gamification in order to enhance writing in the secondary language class ' in Cutrim Schmidt & Whyte Teaching Languages with Technology: Communicative Approaches to Interactive Whiteboard Use York (2012) 'English Quest' Modern English Teacher, Vol.21 No.4
- 54. Further Reading: Gamification Kapp (2012) The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based methods and strategies for training and education Marczewski (2012) Gamification: A Simple Introduction & A Bit More Sheldon (Cengage, 2012) The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing coursework as a Game Werbach & Hunter (Wharton Digital Press, 2012) For the win Zichermann & Cunningham (O'Reilly, 2011) Gamification by Design
- 55. Further Reading: Game-Based Language Learning Mawer & Stanley (2011) Digital Play http://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/titles/methodology/digital-play Reinders (ed.) (Palgrave, 2012) Digital Games in Language Learning and Teaching Sykes & Reinhardt (Pearson, 2013) Language at Play: Digital Games in Second and Foreign Language Teaching and Learning
- 56. Further Reading: Game-Based Learning Bartle (New Riders, 2004) Designing Virtual Worlds Gee (Palgrave, 2003) What Digital Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy Gee (Routledge, 2004) Situated Language and Learning: A critique of traditional schooling Gee (Peter Lang, 2007) Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays Gee (Common Ground, 2005) Why video games are good for your soul Prensky (Paragon House, 2001) Digital game-based learning Prensky (Paragon House, 2006) Don't Bother Me Mom – I'm Learning!
- 57. Further Reading: Game-Based Learning Bartle (New Riders, 2004) Designing Virtual Worlds Gee (Palgrave, 2003) What Digital Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy Gee (Routledge, 2004) Situated Language and Learning: A critique of traditional schooling Gee (Peter Lang, 2007) Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays Gee (Common Ground, 2005) Why video games are good for your soul Prensky (Paragon House, 2001) Digital game-based learning Prensky (Paragon House, 2006) Don't Bother Me Mom – I'm Learning!
- 58. Further Reading: Motivation Deci & Ryan (Plenum, 1985) Intrinsic motivation and self determination in human behavior Dörnyei, Z. (CUP, 2001) Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom Dörnyei, Z. (Longman, 2001) Teaching and Researching Motivation Rigby & Ryan (Praeger, 2011) Glued to games: how video games draw us in and hold us spellbound Ryan, Rigby & Przybylski (2006) 'The motivational pull of video games: A self- determination theory approach' Motivation and Emotion, 30, 347-364
Editor's Notes
- Can gamification be used effectively in language teaching? Or is it just another passing fad? Although at first glance, the 'adding of game elements to non-game contexts' using points, badges, and leader-boards, etc. seems to be an attractive proposition for teachers, there is more to gamification than first meets the eye. In this session we'll look at the meaning of fun and games, examine play and players and explore how different game elements might be used in the classroom and for what purpose. Graham Stanley is project manager for the British Council in Uruguay, working on the Plan Ceibal English project, teaching primary children English via video-conferencing. His first book, 'Digital Play: computer games and learning aims' won the 2011 ELTon (ELT Innovation award) for teacher resources, and his second book for teachers, 'Language Learning with Technology' was awarded the HRH Duke of Edinburgh award for ELT book of the year and was short-listed for an ELTon.
- Gamification is now embedded in our day-to-day life, although you might not know about it unless you take an interest or go looking for it. There is now a whole secret layer of gamifiction going on all around us, at work and at play. Here's an example – do you know what it is?
- It's a device that measures the amounts of paces you do, and which allows you to measure your walking or running progress. At a party recently in Montevideo, one of the other guests noticed the host's writst band and started talking about it. Whereas, the guest used hers to instill a bit of healthy competition between hereself and her boyfriend, measuring the amount of exercise they both did, the host and her whole familt of four used it and tracked each other's exercise during the day – apart from encouraging each other to walk more (in this case), it brought a family focus to an activity that they usually do alone. In addition, the woman said it gave her peace of mind too because the device allowed her to see where her teenage daughter was during the day.
- Adding a layer of points and providing competition is just one aspect of gamification, an aspect that is best called 'pointsification' if this is the only element of games that is used. Of course, gamification can mean much more than this – here's another running app that adds a story layer to your running. Want to do exercise but the idea of pounding the pavement bores you? Well, add a storyline to your running with the Zombies Run! App Complete with dramatised story and soundtrack and missions for you to complete, it makes running more fun for those who beome easily bored by it.
- Perhaps the most currently popular application of gamification these days is this. A social network that allows you to check in to real life places in order to gain points and badges, the application tracks your progress against your friends using a leader board, allows you to see where in the world your friends are currently at (so it's a great application for burglars or muggers!), if you check into a place more than anyone else, then you become the mayor and in some businesses now, this means you could get special offers, free coffee or other discounts. Another layer to this social network is that it allows you to rate and to see how other people review places such as restaurants, cafes, etc. If you are in an unfamiliar place, then this lets you easily find a place using your mobile phone and see what other people think of it, so helping you decide whether to visit a place or not.
- There are now apps that let you gamify any part of your life – this one, for example, Epic Win, allows you to build your own tasks and level up your life using anything you may do during your daily routine. This could be used to motivate yourself to become more productive, or simply turn somethings you have to do (i.e. chores and the other drip-drab of life) into something more interesting instead.
- Of all of the elements of your life that you can gamify, perhaps this is the most bizarre. The Sleep as Android app allows you to monitor your sleep activity, to measure how well you spend the night. You can also record yourself, so you can track when and how strong you snore, or listen to what you say during the night if you talk in your sleep.
- All of what I have just shown are examples of gamification in use. It's perhaps best defined as the application of game elements to non-game applications The most typical application of gamification is to encourage changes in behaviour.
- Gamification has become a buzz word in education over the last few years and there are now lots of educators trying to make sense of it and apply it to their classes. This includes language educators, some of whom are adding game elements to what they do in the classroom and exploring the results. Will this continue or, as some critics believe, should it be abandoned as a dead end of ELT? I am currently in two minds about the subject, but I am encouraged enough to want to explore more.
- Of course, some critics of gamification say that this is nothing new and that teachers have for years been using gamification in their classrooms, making exercises and activities more interesting by turning them into games, especially with young learner and teenage classes. So, this being the case, why the current interest?
- The answer, of course is in the explosion of interest and activity related to video games. Video games are now one of the most popular free-time activities for much of the population. Another important factor is the massive interest in games design. There is now a very large body of work relating to what makes games work, and many writers have deconstructed successful video games and written about the components of games that make them work. With so much of so many people's time and energy being spent playing games, and in a world where educators are worried about declining attention spans of students, video games hint at a way of capturing students' attention and engaging them to learn.
- With so much having been written and more attention paid to games than ever before, it can be argued that never before have we known so much about games, about play and about fun. That last one, though, fun, is perhaps the trickiest to pin down. What is fun?
- Noted video games designer Chris Crawford once said that fun was the emotional response to learning. He meant that much of the interest in video games was to do with players learning how the games worked, and learning how best to live in their worlds and move forwards according to their rules.
- Raph Koster took Crawford's statement and turned it into a very interesting book that has become a must for any games designer. It is also well worth reading if you are an educator interested in games. He claims in the book that learning is the drug, or the real reason why players want to play games. Solving puzzles, understanding how something works, this is what makes games fun.
- Another games designer, Nicole Lazzaro has gone a step further and has identified 4 different types of fun.
- When it comes to games and play, it is worth spending time looking at the differences
- Bruno Bettelheim, an American child psychologist provided these definitions. What is true is that, as Raph Koster states here, like it or not, we live in a world of systems and it is partly up to us whether we want to treat a given system as a game. Doing so can make interacting with that system more fun, and we can end up getting more out of it.
- Raph believes that games are systems built to help us learn patterns and fun is a reward to encourage us to keep on learning.
- As mentioned earlier, gamification is usually used to encourage behaviour, but is that something we ever need or want to do in the classroom?
- Again, it could be argued that teachers all over the world are already gamifying behaviour – if you are a teacher of children, then it is unlikely that you have not set class rules for behaviour or used some sort of reward and punishment system to help you manage the class. Reward charts are an excellent tool that can help to build consistency in establishing good behaviors in your children Reward and Behavior Charts Help:- - Encourage positive behavior in kids - Teach children to set goals - Teach responsibility - Track progress for the child, the parents, and the teacher to see Getting the best from your students often means tapping into a need for recognition and praise Some potential problems with rewards charts include 1) Kids seeing the rewards as the goal, not the behaviour 2) Some kids giving up if they fall behind the others 3) The best kids always win
- If you teach anywhere where you have a group of students who want to be there and are already intrinsically motivated to learn a language, or even those who have found their own extrinsic motivations for learning a language (career advancement, etc), then there is no need for behaviour management and you certainly won't want to complicate your life by adding a layer of gamification that acts to change behaviour.
- However, not always, but it's most likely that if you teach kids or teenagers, you know you need a behaviour management system to help settle the students and make it possible for them to learn anything. Without it, you would probably be spending much of the classroom trying to capture the attention of the learners and make them listen to you and their classmates.
- Behaviour management then is fundamental in many educational contexts One book I recommend is this one by Tom Bennet. In it, Tom focuses on bad behaviour of all different types and provides advice on how to deal with it. He is a strong believer in the stick (sanctions) over the carrot (rewards), because it is perhaps easier for teachers to think of rewards and more difficult for them to impose sanctions.
- Tom writes advice for teachers in the TES website forums – one of the most popular parts of the website. It is clear form the amount of teachers writing here that behaviour management is an important feature of teaching in many contexts and one that many teachers have difficulty with.
- There is a section on rewards, and some discussion in the forums of gamification, which is what I would like to focus on now – the gamification of behaviour.
- One popular online digital star chart that works for gamifying behviour is Class Dojo – it allows you to add your students and award points (positive or negative) for whatever you decide to do. The records of he students can be kept and so their behaviour can be tracked over time and even shared with their parents during meetings about the children.
- Class Dojo is aimed at younger kids – there are other systems such as class craft which can be used with older students. Rather than a simple digital behaviour system, though, Classcraft is more than this and can help to gamify learning too, which is something we will look at in a moment.
- After using Class Dojo with students, I switched to an even simpler system, introducing a virtual currency into my classroom. I did this specifically to try to manage the amount of English one particular class spoke. I had a hard time encouraging them to speak only English in class, and their use of Spanish was becoming disruptive. Rather than think of sanctions for those who spoke Spanish, I introduced money into the classroom and rewarded the students for their use of English as well as some other things, such as arriving to class on time (something that some of the children had difficulty doing). During the class, I would reward them for certain activities and take money off any student who spoke Spanish. I started giving this money to the student who told me that their classmate was speaking Spanish and so the children ended up being the language police. I was surprised how well it worked, and unlike other systems (star chart or Class Dojo, for example), where you have to interrupt the flow of the class to award a point, this was instant and I would spend very little time pulling out a note from my back pocket and handing it to a student. Another reason why this worked was the monthly auctions I held in the class – the currency therefore had value and was seen to be more than just paper. I collected a number of free gifts and other items that typically the school would have (pencils, badges, rubbers, bags, stickers, etc) and auctioned these off to the highest bidders. This would take place in the lat five minutes of class at the end of the month an so would not take up much time.
- One thing I noticed during the auctions and using this system was the difference between the students. Some would hoard their virtual money and never spend it – they preferred to have it saved and would count it often, keeping it safe in their folders. Others would spend it as soon as they could and others would save up and spend it on specific items they knew would be auctioned. As you gamify your class, you'll notice students adopt different roles and are interested in different elements of play. One useful chart is Richard Bartle's player types – whenever you create a game or gamify an activity for class, you need to take this into mind as your players will be motivated to play in different ways – either competitively against each other or for other reasons. If you don't take this into account, then you may not be successful when it comes to gamification. It may well be pseudo-science and students will most likely have features of more than one or of all of the above, but some students will be more competitive and others will get their fun from exploring the game, etc.
- I also recommend learning from games – many games like the very popular app Clash of Clans, have been designed to appeal to different types of players and ways of playing, and you can clearly see this. For example, there is the pleasure of world building, of constructing your village, of laying it out, of improving the buildings and watching how it grows. You can choose to defend more than attack and collect resources and money, taking pleasure in how the village prospers.
- The attacking option in this game has two threads to it – you can play against the machine, in which case there is a route that becomes progressively more difficult as you go on. How well you do against each village is recorded and so you receive between 0 and 3 stars. You can also play against other players, and gain trophies each time you win, or lose trophy points each time your opponent successfully defends their village.
- As you progress in the game, your experience points rise and this affects your level. However, this is not the only indication of success, and your success against opponents results in trophies being awarded – the higher this is, the more opponents you have beaten, and the better your status will be in the game. Some players, though, choose not to win trophies, preferring a strategy that increases their wealth and so allows them to build more, at the expense of the status and trophies.
- There are also other achievements, so you are always rewarded for accomplishing various actions in the game, whatever approach you take. This means that everyone is rewarded for something and each player decides what their objectives are and is able to measure them – this means that everyone is a winner to some extent,
- Finally, players can choose to group together in small (up to 50) clans, to help each other and create a shared purpose in the game.
- The social aspect is covered by the clan chat, and there are some players who play the game more for this than for any other reason.
- How can this be adapted for the classroom? Well, there are books that can help you convert your own classroom into a game – I recommend this one by Lee Sheldon, for example. Lee converted his own course into a role-playing game, awarding experience points and achievements, with students leveling up rather than getting pass/fail grades. He explains in a lot of detail throughout the book how best to structure levels and how and when to award points, based on his own experience.
- This has been taken up by ELT teachers now in different places, and I recommend anyone interested in gamifying their own classroom to look for these examples.
- Using sheldon's book as a model, I have gamified parts of my classes in the past. One simple way of encouraging things like attendance and homework completion was to develop a system of achievements – points or badges can be awarded under certain circumstances, such as in the chart, and this can add an extra and simple level of fun to the classroom,
- You can also gamify more specific areas – for example, I gamified writing in one of my classes, based on Sheldon's ideas. I developed a level system based on the amount of words (without mistakes) that the students wrote and awarded them badges for reaching a certain number of workds in their writing.
- I decided to focus on this after a class survey showed that these 12 year-olds had problems writing long texts in English. They found it boring and difficult – I decided to experiment to see if I could change their attitude and make the activity of writing feel more like fun as well as helping the students to do it.
- I decided to encourage speed-writing, which would only take up 5 minutes of their time each class. They would also be involved in the negotiation of the topic of the writing, which I hoped would motivate them too. In those 5 minutes, the students would write as much as they could, without interruption. I would stop them and take in their note-books, circling the mistakes and subtracting the number of mistakes from the total number of words they had written. This would give a figure, which then corresponded to a level of writing. Each student would be awarded a badge (or sticker as it would be placed next to the writing in their writing books) and I also displayed a leader board with the levels of each student.
- What happened during the term was interesting and had mixed results
- At the end of the term, it was clear that gamifying the writing worked for most of the students and they started to enjoy writing and felt it was easier than they originally thought. However, it can be seen that for a couple of the students, writing was perceived as more difficult, so it was not a complete success.
- If anyone is interested in more details, I have written this up as a case study in a book that is being published soon
- Another way of gamifying writing is by using the fabulous Rory's Story Cubes – it's a fun way of encouraging students to write (or to speak) stories – if you only have one set, you can still use them in class and get one volunteer student from each table to take a photo of the dice before you move them to another table.
- I have also tried gamifying speaking using screenshots from an actual game – Droppy. The reasons for doing this were based on the ideas behind Demand High ELT – I realised when exploring this, that the use of this computer game could be used to push students to speak at a higher level than they were doing.
- The activity used 5 screenshots of initial states from a puzzle game and corresponding screenshots of the same situations with the puzzles solved.
- The students were shown the initial states and asked to remember as much as possible from them. After this, the students had to remember as much as possible and to describe them to the class. I would award points and then ask if there was anyone else in the class who could describe the scene better. It was important here to insist on them not just adding information, but being able to say everything the other students said, but better.
- Afterwards, I would show the 'after states' to check the answers and also get them to predict what had happened to solve the problem.
- An example of another one of the mini games that needed solving
- And the solution – any idea what happened?
- One final point that I learned through my use of gamification was that often the students would say they didn't like something or found it hard (e.g. writing) but then after doing it from some time, they realised that they did like it – they just didn't like it they ways they had been doing it beforehand. This is what gamification can do – it can change the attitude of some students to certain activities.
- Thank you for your attention