How can games help teachers engage their students?

Summary

Summary 

In this episode of The Search Bar, Jonathan Truitt, Co-Director of the Center for Learning through Games and Simulations at Central Michigan University, discusses game-based learning and its implementation in classrooms. Game-based learning involves using games to teach specific learning objectives and helps to engage students and make learning more enjoyable. Truitt differentiates game-based learning from gamification, which involves applying game elements to a course. He explains that game-based learning can involve tabletop games, role-playing games, or video games, and highlights the benefits of using games in the classroom, such as fostering connections between students and promoting risk-taking and deeper learning. Truitt also discusses the academic board game press at Central Michigan University, which publishes board games that have undergone a double-blind peer review process. He mentions several games that have been published, including Monumental Consequence, Rising Waters, Five Hundred Year Old Vampire, and Hydrologic Cycle. Truitt emphasizes that game-based learning can be applied to various career paths and offers opportunities for creativity and innovation. He encourages educators to start incorporating games into their classrooms by finding games they are familiar with and modifying them to fit their learning objectives. 

Transcript

Chapters 

• 00:00  Introduction
• 01:18  What is game-based learning and gamification? 
• 03:44  How do we gamify our daily lives? 
• 05:07  How did game-based learning start to catch on? 
• 08:58  How is game-based learning different than educational video games? 
• 10:40  How do you decide if game-based learning is a good fit for a lesson? 
• 14:16  Why does game-based learning help to increase understanding? 
• 16:14  What is the benefit of face-to-face, live game play? 
• 21:37  What game models work best in the classroom? 
• 23:41  How does an academic board game get published? 
• 25:03  What games have been published through Central Michigan University Press? 
• 28:47  How can educators introduce game-based learning to their classrooms? 
• 33:51  What are the career opportunities in game-based learning? 
• 37:28  Conclusion 

Introduction

What is game-based learning and gamification?

Jonathan: So, part of that — so, the class that you were in was our History 560 class where all the students pitch a historical topic. They actually pitch it to the other students in the class. I'm there grading their pitch, but I'm not there making the determination of what game we're going to move forward. I give them some guidelines. I say, here are the rules on what the games and the pitches have to have. And then, they run with those. And every semester, I won't even break ties. It comes down to the students determining and deciding what they're going to go with. And so, in that case, that year, one of the students picked Chernobyl. We had future student educators who were talking to me about wanting to take game-based learnings to their future classrooms. They wanted to be able to take it to their high schools, and then middle schools and elementary schools. And elementary schools have always had game-based learning of some sort, right? We think that teaching kids through games is a good thing, but somewhere around sixth grade we're like, "Okay, and now learning is serious. Stop having fun." In part, it's a conversation with the students of, and future educators, as we do these workshops now, of replacement cost, is what we call it. And it’s if you're going to run a game to replace something where you'd normally have a lecture, you have to talk about how much time you normally commit to that topic in that classroom. How important is understanding that topic for that space, because a game is always going to take longer. In part, you still have to set up the context of the course, the context of the game. Once you've set that context up, you have to then teach them the game, and then they play the game, and then after it you have to reflect back on it. Whereas with a lecture, you just lead into the lecture and you answer any questions that they might have, and then you move on to the next space. There's — that reflection time comes later from an exam. So, you're automatically having to spend more time. And so, you have to determine, and this is one of the exercises the students go through is, they have to say, "Okay, so, what kind of course would you use this in?" So the one in Chernobyl [for example], what type of course would you use this in? And then how much time in that course would you spend lecturing on Chernobyl? And then how much time would you spend building that game and using that game? How much realty would it occupy within the context of that course? And they have to be somewhat comparable. I use an example of a game that I created on the Black Death that I would talk about it in my world history course. And with that Black Death, the conversation would take me about 20 minutes, right? Okay, so we've got the Black Death raging and you've got about 60% of the population, average — different places going to have a different amount — that are passing, that are dying, and then here are the ramifications of it. I can get through it quickly, but the students, the amount of life lost in that moment was just hard for them to really fathom. This was pre-Covid. And then, so, what I did is I created this quick, short, 20-minute game where, at the end of it, you can look around and see the decimation of how many people have died in the context of that game. It was a fully cooperative game where people are in different societies. And so, I use that as the example to show my students. I'm like, okay, so it's 20-minute game, but really it takes up a full class period. Whereas, in teaching the context, I would've taken up 20 minutes. So, it occupies more space, but the dividends on the other side of it just proved to be worth it.

Why does game-based learning help to increase understanding?

Adam: When you play an RPG and everyone does the RPG together, it's like the dragonborn really surfed on the back of the shark. It's like it’s real. It's a real thing that happened. You're never going to lose the context of it. That's a real thing that happened in a Dungeons and Dragons game I was in. But there's also these big moments where, if you're on a tabletop game, you're going to remember the numbers, you're going to remember the location, you're going to remember, roughly, the hex you're on. So, if those things are historical, suddenly it's there. The experience is very, very valid. It is not just, at least to me, it's not just a way to fill time. It’s a really valid experience. So, I imagine, in the classroom, that's sort of what you're doing, is we're creating an experience you're less likely to forget.

Jonathan: As I talk to people who are familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, and I'm talking about game-based learning, I'm like, find a DnD player who won't talk about their character, and they aren't a DnD player. You're going to get — anybody who plays Dungeons and Dragons has a character, or 12, that they want to sit down and talk to you about, and they're going to talk to you ad nauseum about their character. And if you've played a game with them, they're going to talk to you about your character and they're going to remember that. And that's, coming out of these games, the roleplaying games where this is happening, that's what the students are doing. They often come out of the classroom remembering each other by the character that they played. And so they'll be like, "Hey, yeah, that's Pancho Villa," and they don't remember the student's actual name, they remember him as Pancho Villa. Which happens, in fact, at faculty workshops on these, too, where we'll run into each other, and we’re like, "You're Nehru. I don't remember your name, but I remember you played Nehru." And they can remember some of the arguments and some of the sources that you used in that process, and they remember their stuff. And so, it's really kind of interesting how that plays out. 

What is the benefit of face-to-face, live gameplay?

Jonathan: This is sort of a good point. We're talking about tabletop games here; roleplaying games, board games. Video games are also a part of game-based learning. You mentioned Oregon Trail earlier, and it's not to say that it's not there, but what we really try to do is we focus on these tabletop games for two reasons. One is, we really want that student contact with other students. We want that face-to-face contact. We want them forming connections and really fostering that friendship bond, colleague bond, so that when they have to study for a test, they have somebody they're comfortable going to. It also just changes the dynamics of the class if they know each other and they're not necessarily sitting in front of a screen. And so, I really like what it does in a classroom. If you walk into a classroom where they're playing games face-to-face, it’s completely, just, an altered experience.

Adam: Nothing will make you question every introvert you've ever met like some dice and some cardboard. I mean, right? I have friends that I play games with, regularly, who, if you see them outside of the context of a gaming table, you're like, “That person never screams and yells and talks back at...” Wanna bet? I have friends that are just, they're a different animal there. It really is, it's such an opening experience, especially if the proper precautions are made to make sure that it is an opening experience. Anyone can ruin a game.

Jonathan: Anyone can ruin a game. But it's also, I mean — so, you talked about your dragonborn riding a shark, and that's a risk that you have to take with your character. But if you inhabit a character, if you inhabit a board game… You might make a trade in Settlers of Catan that's a little bit riskier for you, but you see the long-term outcome, and you're willing to take that risk. Whereas taking a social risk in a classroom where you feel like it might stigmatize something, like the professor against you or the students, like you aren't willing to do that. But as soon as those students enter those games, they start taking those risks in that space, in a safe space with other people around them. And then, when you remove the games, they're still taking those risks much more comfortably and they're willing to sort of step out and take that social risk, that leads to more learning into deeper learning, than they are when you're just lecturing or when you're even having small group conversation. Even though it's about a shared book, now, it's this shared experience. It's this, “Yeah, those dice did not roll the way I needed to," or, "Can you believe that I tried to do that and it failed?" But then they can also take that and go, “I can see why Emiliano Zapata takes a risk to bring in the Carrancistas soldiers to his side who then assassinate him,” which is what happened historically. But they get it.

Adam: And that's the fun part about it, is that the failure can be so much fun when you're playing a tabletop game. I own — I'm sure like you— I have a big giant gaming collection, and when people see it, they're like, "Wow, you must be really good. I don't want to play with you." I actually don't know that I'm that good. I just really don't mind losing. I really don't. And it made me think, again, of the Chernobyl game when I was playing it with your students and just — I mean, not to make light of Chernobyl — but it is a wild disaster. When you're playing the game, it kind of feels like a wild disaster. All you're doing is, you're kind of kicking the can down the road one way and you're trying to push water back uphill this way. And that's essentially the experience that they were having. “Oh, and by the way, someone's deciding who gets which money to either kick the can down the road or push the water back uphill.” And I am saying this because I forget what the specific tasks of each agency are, so I don't want to misrepresent it, but there was a lot of failure and a lot of, "I can't believe you didn't fund me" at the table when I was playing with them. But, at the end it was like, now imagine that. Imagine you're these government agencies and you're kind of all trying to descend upon this thing, and there's only a certain amount of funds, and there's only a certain amount of lives that we're willing to risk losing. Is it better to starve to death or to be exposed to radiation? There's all these wild things that are happening. And it's like, doing that makes it feel so much more real, I think, than just going, "Okay, that was pretty tragic." And I think that we have a tendency to, like you mentioned, the Black Death or Chernobyl, we have a tendency to take things like that and go, “Eh, it's in the past.” You make some events in history — particularly kind of dramatic ones — you make them kind of unreal in your brain a little bit. They become mythological, and I think acting it out is a huge benefit. It's got to just be, like, light bulb moments for all these students.

Jonathan: Yeah, it is. I mean, the connections that they form off of it is really impressive. There's a person at Walmart who actually used my Black Death game and would run people through it. He was onboarding 2,000 to 4,000 employees at Bentonville, Arkansas's headquarters. And for him, he's like, this is a way for me to get people in who need to be more flexible about the understanding of what their position is. He's like, it's a 20-minute game that gets them thinking differently and more flexibly. It puts them together in a group really quick. It scales up quickly. And so, that replacement cost for him and using that, we had an ongoing sort of conversation for a while about why he would use that. And so, this is what you have when you sit down to play your games. Do we have two hours to play a game right now, or do we have eight hours to play games right now, or do we have 20 minutes?

What game models work best in the classroom?

Adam: Getting into those mechanics, what has worked best for you? What do you see the most happening, I guess, with your students, or with the work that you're working on when you're publishing as well? What are the types of games you see the most in certain spaces?

Jonathan: I mean, so, it's going to depend on the topic that you're covering and what your goal is, right? So far, I've had wonderful successes and I've had a couple of things that have just completely fallen flat on their face, and I can talk about those too. Talking about failures is as good as talking about successes. But part of this is, I haven't found a mechanic yet for a game that doesn't potentially have some applicable use in a classroom setting. Roleplaying games are fantastic because in life, as you go from one space to the next — right now you've got my work persona, you don't have my family persona. They're not terribly different, but I interact with my kids different than I interact with you. I interact with my bosses here are different than I interact with my wife. I should, right? But you have these personas that you take on. So, roleplaying games work really well. Worker placement games, though, as well — in many ways as I — so, what I did with my students in the World History class is, I put them into small groups, and that small group was the player, and then the students around the table were the pieces on the board. And so, what you'd do is you'd, as a group, you'd determine who is deploying to do X, Y, or Z. And so, that student's going fishing and they're going out to get that research and then bring it back to the group. Alright, well, this is the decision that bosses are making all the time as they ask you to sit here. As a work placement, you have been positioned to do this podcast with me at this moment. This is where you've been positioned on the game board. Congratulations. And so, worker replacement works really well in that space. Tiling adds random elements where you can flip things over and you can look at it. But, even moving backwards in time, game-based learning's been here since Plato. So, you've got dice and cards. 1502, there's a set of cards that are made to teach Justinian's law code.

How does an academic board game get published?

Adam: I guess this is probably a good time for us to talk a little bit about the press. Tell us what it is…

Jonathan: What it is…

Adam: And — I guess you can start with that game and work backwards or however you want. Let us know what y'all are doing with academic board games.

Jonathan: There's Central Michigan University Press, which is more than just the board game segment. We've got a poetry program right out of the English Department as well. That's part of that right now, which is cool. And my brain just died, and I apologize to my English colleagues on that. And then we have the Scholarship and Lore gaming series. And so, we're the only academic board game double-blind peer review press in the world, that we are aware of. I should say the other CMU, Carnegie Mellon, has one where they're publishing books out of it, but not necessarily tabletop games out of it. And so, in our case, what we do is the games come in, we look at the games, we evaluate them, and then we send them out to peer reviewers in the field, like you do any other academic journal article or book. And so, it goes through that same peer review process, but it also goes — because we want to make sure that we have good games — it also goes to a reviewer who just reviews the game mechanics to make sure that the game is a fun and engaging game so that we're not just, the industry term is “chocolate covered broccoli”, where you've got something you like with something you dislike and putting them together. Yeah, we don't want that. So, what we have is fun game mechanics with game topics. 

What games have been published through Central Michigan University Press?

Jonathan: And so, we actually started two years ago now, was our first launch of Monumental Consequence, which is a parlor LARP game that runs from, I want to say it's 9 to 38 players. So, these are going to be larger because it can go into a classroom setting, and it asks the question of, “Is art worth dying for?” And the premise on this game is that there's a medieval church in a small French town where enemy forces have invaded that church and they're occupying it. And the town residents have a difficult decision to make because it's where baptismal records, and ancient stained glass that we no longer have the skill to make, and a whole bunch of other rare artifacts are based, as well as monuments to their deceased and everything else. So do you go in and attempt to save that art or do you simply blow up the church getting rid of the enemies all at once? And this is actually based on a historic situation. In this case, slightly fictionalized because it's in a fictional town. There's another game that's developing over the historical situation. So, then all of the characters that people are playing are making that debate about what they do, and as they debate it, there are consequences as pieces of art are being torched and thrown out the window, or as a sniper climbs to the top of the roof. So, that's the first game that launched, and it's doing really, really well. The second game we did is Rising Waters, which is a co-op game with a bit of territory control as well. And it's about the 1927 Mississippi River flood. Players — this one's very serious. It went through three cultural consultants and two educational consultants and one other who is in the community. You're playing African-American sharecroppers who are trying to survive the US's worst environmental disaster prior to Hurricane Katrina, as well as the systemic racism of the time. So it's got some really serious elements to it. That's the second game that we launched, and then we started fulfilling that one this fall. All of our games are crowdfunded. The third game we launched is 500-Year-Old Vampire, which is a based on 1,000-Year-Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings. 500-Year-Old Vampire is by Jason Cox, and it's creative writing and art and creative art. It's a fun game where you're playing vampires who go through 500 years of history as you wrestle with trying to maintain your humanity and not lose it. It's a prompt-based game. So it's a role playing game, but it's got a series of decks of cards based on where you're at in that timeframe. So, you start with Rebirth, and then you go to Neophyte, and you go to Elder, and then you go to Ancient, and then you walk into the sun. And so, that's a prompt-based game. We're hoping to start fulfilling that in June. We're waiting for the copies from the manufacturer to show up for us to do the final double-check on that one. And then Hydrologic Cycle is our first science game that we're really excited about. Well, it's our first science game and we're really excited about it, as opposed to our first science game that we're excited about. No, we've been excited about a lot of them. So, that's the next one that we're launching. It's launching February — not February, sorry — March 24th or 26th. That Tuesday. I should have had that down. And we're really excited about it. We've taken it to GenCon, the second largest tabletop game convention in the world, the largest one in North America, the last two years for playtesting. And we're really excited and really surprised by the excitement around the game. People are excited to learn about the hydrologic cycle and to play it and it plays in — you can play it in under 10 minutes when you get really good at it. First time you play it, it'd probably take 20. But people were just really excited about the game, so we're excited.

How can educators introduce game-based learning to their classrooms?

Adam: So, I want to talk a little bit about if I'm a teacher, if I want to bring this into my space, what are some good tips? What are some things I could do to start having games in my classroom?

Jonathan: So, the easiest is to find — I tell people, I'm like, find your worst lecture, worst unit if you're a high school teacher, that every time you teach it, you're just unhappy with it. We all have one. And once we fix that one, we have another one because we're always changing and modifying. So, here's the thing, if that's your worst unit, you're not going to make it any worse. So, take that unit and then find a game, either that's on the shelf that reflects it or one that you're familiar with, and start tinkering. You don't have to start with Catan or something that you're unfamiliar with. Start with something that you're familiar with. Look at it. Look at how you use those mechanics. I mean, Monopoly is a popular one that people will use and modify. Sociologists that I've spoken with will modify Monopoly to specifically show income inequality, and they'll start a student with $1,000, another student with $750, another student with $500, a student with zero. “Go.” And as you play the game, whoever started with the most does the best over the course of the game because they have that money starting out, which is sort of that conversation about income inequality in life. So, it's find a game that you're A) familiar with, and then play with it. And the first time, don't be set on that having to be correct every time. Tinker with it. Get a deck of cards. Using a deck of cards you can modify and change things. Grab some dice. You can grab six-sided dice, but there are lots of different types of dice out there for people who are unfamiliar with them. There are four-sided dice, six-sided dice, eight-sided dice, twelve-sided dice, twenty-sided dice. That's the standard set, and then you get into all sorts of other wacky formations.

Adam: Those good old thirty-sided.

Jonathan: The thirty-sided, the seven-sided, which are just weird, right? The 120 is exciting now. You could...

Adam: I love holding those.

Jonathan: Yeah, I know. I feel like I've got my — I don't know, it's something. But you can create games with that. But just stop and play with it and find something that you're willing to do, and then play more games. There are so many game stores around now. I remember when I was growing up as a kid, I was like – you know, I'd be begging my mom to take me up to this game store that was inner city, Minneapolis in Minnesota an hour from my house.

Adam: And our moms thought all game stores were evil because of DnN and Magic. 

Jonathan: Exactly.

Adam: So you had to convince them that you weren't going worship the devil.

Jonathan: You weren't going to be sacrificing chickens or, oddly, professors in your basement. But you've now got them just a throw from your place. Go there, talk to them, and just ask for some short fun games. Take those games home, start playing them, and see what you can find in those mechanics.

What are the career opportunities in game-based learning?

Jonathan: Yeah, so, we have a Game Design Thinking minor. To my knowledge, it’s also the only one of its kind in the US. Other places may have adopted it at this point; I've had conversations with faculty other places. But the idea of it is that you develop these game-based learning skills and ideas, and gamification is definitely in what you're learning. But the idea isn't that you're going to go into the game design field, which is a really good thing right now because of all of the layoffs in the game design field, which is just a travesty. But what it is, is — the idea is, is that it's going to attach to whatever major and whatever career path you want to go into. Because, as we were talking about in the beginning, gamification and game-based learning seems to be almost everywhere. It's at General Motors, it's at Walmart. Dow Chemical has used it in their leadership institute for training their people leaders.

You've got it in other car situations. We've got it in healthcare apps, we've got it in running apps, we've got it in Duolingo, it's in museums, it's in educational classrooms. And so, the idea is that students coming through will have that attached to their program to help set them apart, and it's also just students who want to do game design don't realize that they can do game design in almost any career that they're going into. I mean, Wendy's created this role-playing game. NASA just created their own role-playing game, too, that you can get. And so, you never know what space you're going to end up in where you can add in that game-based learning. So, that's what the minor does, is it shows you how to really create games no matter what space you're going into. And so, as to career opportunities with it, we knew we were onto something when we had a superintendent in, I think it was Colorado Springs, who specifically targeted our capstone course three years in a row to recruit students out of it into his school district. And [in] that that space we've talked with a couple of different museums who've wanted games built in their space, and we we're now talking about setting up internships for students to go to those spaces. We've got a student at Fort Michilimackinac, an alum, who's working on getting games into the space. That's Veronica Gregory. There's another shout-out for us. We've got — just, really what it comes down to is the creativity of the student and the students who are going into the game space are ridiculously creative. They're a blast to work with. And so, as they land, they're already empowered to bring those in, and the employers are like, please run with this.

Adam: I mean, we're destroying the annoying icebreaker and making something that makes more sense for everybody. I mean, that's kind of what they're doing.

Jonathan: We're helping them onboard and we're helping them — I've been having conversations with people about, “So we've got these safety videos. Is there a way that instead of making somebody watch another talking head safety video, we could give them a game” and I'm like, "Yes!"

Adam: Are we going to do that for the fire and egress access thing here?

Jonathan: Exactly. 

Adam: No…

Jonathan: Right, but it would be so much better than the fire and egress access video. This is the point, right, is that it can go anywhere with you, and you can really find ways and new avenues into these spaces to help out the career path that you're in and applying learning. Because you don't stop learning when you leave your undergraduate or you leave high school. You're constantly learning, so let's make it fun, because that idea that we should stop having fun when we're learning in sixth grade because learning is serious is a bit ridiculous. We learn more when we have fun.

Conclusion?

Adam: Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent. I think, on that note, thanks for coming in. Play more games. 

Jonathan: Absolutely. 

Adam: If you're not playing games, play games and you'll learn a lot from having fun.

Jonathan: Yeah. Agreed. Thanks. I appreciate it. It's been fun.

Adam: Awesome. We'll have to play some games soon. 

Jonathan: Yeah. 

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