Invited Talk: Challenge-Based Learning: Creating engagement by learning from games and gamification Speaker: Dr. David Gibson, Curtin University Time: 9:15 – 10:00, 29 May 2015 (Friday) Venue: Room 408A, 409A & 410, 4/F, Meng Wah Complex, The University of Hong Kong http://citers2015.cite.hku.hk/program-highlights/talk-gibson/

1. Challenge Based Learning
Creating engagement by
learning from games & gamification

2. Why ‘Challenges?’
Work-ready global leadership
requires higher order thinking, and
this calls for a new way of teaching

3. People’s Car
In 2011, Volkswagon crowd-sourced a product
plan that engaged 33 million people in China –
via a digital challenge activity

4. $112 Billion by 2015
Gartner estimates that the majority of people
in the workforce will be using game-based apps
every day

5. Horizon Report 2013
This is a good strategic direction for higher
education

6. Gradebook vs Challenges
• Games are effective for scaffolding concepts and
simulating real world experiences.
• Gamification includes the larger canvas of social
processes and game design.

7. Challenges = Aspirational Problems
Student choices = engagement moments
New data = unintentional actions & products
Challenge-based = guidance feedback + rewards

8. Student Engagement
The hidden agenda of challenges is to teach

9. Empowered
Learners
• Co-Design
• Customize
• Identity
• Manipulation &
Distributed
Knowledge

10. Creativity &
Innovation
Challenges develop:
•problem-solving skills
•strategic thinking
•improvisation

11. How are challenges created and
badged?
Game-based methods create ‘big data’
and require more up-front team-based
authoring, but can then be scaled to
engage the whole world.

12. Interaction Library

13. Authoring
Transmedia Storyboard
Experience-First Learning
Interactions vs Text
Interdisciplinary Research
Play Testing
Drafts & Iterations
Quality Checks
Iterate

14. Curtin Leadership Centre
Self-guided online
experience in Leadership
Reaching 25,000 students
Badged levels of
achievement across twelve
modules introduce the
Social Change Leadership
Model.Successful completion of the
challenge leads to partial credit for
the Leadership certificate and
recognition on the Curtin Extra
certificate.

15. Careers Illuminate
Self-guided online
experience in Career
Development
Target: 60,000 students
Badged achievement
across twelve modules
lead to recognition on
the Curtin Extra
Certificate

16. Campus Quest
Aim: Raise aspirations
and build confidence
to attend university
Target: Rural,
indigenous
communities
Successful completion
will signal that you are
ready for university.

17. Balance of the Planet
International teams propose
feasible & scalable solutions to
Sustainable Development
Goals
Winners receive badges,
awards and letters of
recommendation

18. Badges @ Curtin
Policy document
drafted for academic
and administrative
review
International
benchmarking and
feedback
Outlines ‘internal’ and
‘open’ badges and
guides best practices

19. Research Frontiers
Transmedia Storytelling
Digital Media Learning
Learning Analytics
Psychometrics of Digital Experience

20. The Premise
In an interactive digital simulation, traces of a
learner’s progress, problem-solving attempts,
self-expressions and social communications can
entail highly detailed and time-sensitive
computer-based documentation of the context,
actions, processes and products.

21. New Psychometric Landscape
• A “do over” for performance assessment
• New ways of performing & new methods of
data capture, analysis and display
• Complex tasks and artifacts containing:
– higher order thinking (e.g. decision sequences)
– physical performances demonstrating skills
– emotional responses

22. Research Frontiers: BioSensors
• Wireless EEG
• Facial muscles, emotional
clusters, raw EEG
• Wireless Galvanic Skin
Conductance
• Arousal level
• Eye Tracker
• Gaze-point, duration,
mouse-clicks
• Haptics
• Button presses, head tilt

23. Data Dashboard at ASU
Helen Chavez and Javier Gomez

24. Research Questions
• What patterns are
found within &
between sensors?
• How do these patterns
relate to baseline and
experimental
activities?

25. Interaction Traces = Evidence
There is a need for new frameworks, concepts
and methods for measuring what someone
knows and can do based on game interactions
and artifacts created during serious play
Why? Ubiquitous, unobtrusive, interactive big
data (fast, varied & voluminous) created by
people working in digital media performance
spaces

26. New Psychometrics
• What are some of the measurement and
analysis considerations needed to address the
challenges of finding patterns and making
inferences based on data from digital learning
experiences?

27. Example
• Contexts: Farm, Playground, Science Lab
• Actions: Talking, Testing, Walking to…
• Processes & Products: Test Results, Explanations
Clarke-Midura & Gibson, 2013

28. Example
• Ecological rationality & Empirical probability
Clarke-Midura & Gibson, 2013

29. Network Graphs
Digraphs illustrate
structure in the
causative factors
during a time slice or
event frame.

30. Network Analysis
Adjacency tables
Centrality
AF3 F7 F3 FC5 T7 P7 O1 O2 P8 T8 FC6 F4 F8 AF4 GX GY
AF3
F7
F3
FC5
T7
P7
O1
O2
P8
T8
FC6
F4
F8
AF4
GX
GY

31. Symbolic Regression
Automated
search for
algorithms
Clarke-Midura & Gibson, 2013

32. New Space for Performance
• Unfold in time
• Cover a multivariate space of possible actions
• Assets contain both intangible (e.g. value,
meaning, sensory qualities, and emotions)
and tangible components (e.g. media,
materials, time and space)
NOTE: Asset utilization during performance
provides evidence of what a user knows and
can do

33. Example
Students who had
this pattern of
resources were
most likely to
show evidence of
forming a
hypothesis
Clarke-Midura & Gibson, 2013

34. Performance Space Features
• Unconstrained complex multidimensional
stimuli and responses
• Dynamic adaptation of items to user, which
entails interactivity and dependency
• Nonlinear behaviors with both temporal and
spatial components
NOTE: Higher order and creative thinking is
supported in such a space

35. Thinking States
Rise in
uncertainty
and interest
Agreement &
concentration
drop
During thinking

36. Conclusion
Methods based in data-mining, machine
learning, model-building and complexity theory
form a theoretical foundation for dealing with
the challenges of time sensitivity, spatial
relationships, multiple layers of aggregations at
different scales, and the dynamics of complex
behavior spaces.

37. Research Frontiers:
Heuristic & Haptic
Knowledge
• Movement-based
• Incidental Learning
• Feedback

38. Research Frontiers: Brain Food
Challenges help stimulate
the production of
dopamine, a chemical that
provokes learning by
reinforcing neuronal
connections and
communications.

39. Next Steps
• Establish a Challenge Based Learning network with
international and Australian HE providers, innovators and
scholars to advance scalability and portability
• Research and publish on impacts on students, international
collaborations
• Provide leadership for higher education and NGO providers
to join or replicate the challenge approach in new contexts
• Host an international forum with UNESCO Bangkok, with
free webcast access to all Asia Pacific HE providers, to
showcase high profile invited international thought leaders
and introduce the concept of challenge-based learning to
ministers of education in the region.