While some students trek to the Salomon Center for large lecture-based courses or gather in a Page-Robinson Hall classroom for seminars, others turn on their computers and enter the world of gamified courses. Currently, Brown offers a variety of gamified courses across the Departments of English, East Asian Studies and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.
There, the goal is not to pass exams or finish a final project, but to complete a story and become immersed in a fictional world. Assignments may come in the form of quests and levels, which involve the same general work as a traditional course, but with a related storyline and characters.
The Herald spoke with Brown faculty who design and teach gamified courses.
Gamification entails the use of game elements and game-design techniques in non-game contexts, said Naomi Pariseault, a senior learning designer at the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning who specializes in digital learning and design.
But gamifying courses is not the same as “creating a game,” she said. Pariseault works with faculty to create “a course that has game elements in it,” with assignments that are completely “story-based.”
All elements of gamified courses are online and asynchronous.
This is more “efficient pedagogically to achieve the (course’s) goals,” said English Professor James Egan, who teaches several gamified courses at Brown. He added that through gamification, students “become better writers and critical thinkers.”
The first gamified course at Brown began nearly a decade ago after Egan read about gamification in pedagogical journals. He developed the class as an alternative to the larger lecture courses he was teaching at the time. After Egan applied to a University-sponsored program that provided funding for online-only courses, he was matched with Pariseault.
The two had a common goal: create Brown’s first gamified course. Before designing the course, they were both certified with Sententia Gamification, a company that introduces educators to tools for game-based learning strategies. After the training, the two became “gamification master craftsmen.”
The two then set out to build the course — using Canvas as the game’s interface — and bringing aboard Matt Rockman, a Brooklyn-based graphic designer who created both avatars and settings to be used in the courses. From there, the two designed a story that complemented the learning goals.
After months of preparation, Brown offered its first gamified course in spring 2017 — ENGL 0511C: “Fantastic Places, Unhuman Humans.” The course’s narrative follows a girl named Leila, who comes from the planet Io. Students help Leila determine whether she’s human.
Egan said the process of designing a gamified course can take anywhere from six to nine months. When designing the course, Pariseault said she considers the interesting and challenging aspects of the course, alongside how to introduce elements of gamification.
To progress through the story of ENGL 0511C, students — who each create their own avatar — read literary texts, respond to discussion posts and perform writing exercises. Students especially enjoy the opportunity to do alternate assignments, such as diagrams and drawings, Egan said.
In one of these assignments, students were given the opportunity to recreate Tarzan’s yell and explain how their rendition related to the yell in the novel — an option every student chose this semester.
This fall, around 10 students are enrolled in ENGL 1190Y: “Editing as Revision,” a gamified course that introduces students to the fundamentals of editing. It took Teaching Professor of English Emily Hipchen almost 18 months to develop her course, a process that involved writing a narrative that’s “in the neighborhood of 37,000 words.”
The class uses three levels — apprentice, journeyman and master — and divides students into competing historical writing guilds to teach students copy editing, proof editing and content, respectively.
The course was designed in collaboration with Pariseault, and features two talking lions, Carl and Terry, which are based off of the lions in front of the New York Public Library. Their contrasting personalities — Carl as the serious, strict lion, and Terry as the flexible and playful one — represent the two sides of editing, Pariseault said.
Hipchen finds that the most useful parts of gamified courses are “skills practice and skills production.” After around five exercises, students go from having little experience in a specific type of editing to being “pretty adept” at it, she said.
Student feedback is a big part of how gamified courses are developed. At the end of each gamified course, there is a “focused survey” that allows students to provide feedback on the game mechanics of class, Perisault said.
The course “attracts a broad range of students,” Egan said. Even though the class is entirely asynchronous, students “got to know the professor better than (they’ve) ever gotten to know another professor,” he added. Egan even voice acts as an avatar in ENGL 0511C.
As Pariseault designs gamified courses, she specifically considers the interests of Brown students, who she said value “a lot of autonomy.”
“My hope is that students find joy in learning about the subject matter, and it’s something really different that they’ve never experienced before,” she added.
