This is available to read in full at

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338152242_Practical_Methodology_for_the_Design_of_Educational_Serious_Games

Part I can be found at https://ludogogy.co.uk/practical-methodology-for-the-design-of-educational-serious-games-part-i/.

An archive of all currently available infographics can be found in the Research Infographics page.

The post Practical Methodology for the Design of Educational Serious Games – Part 2 first appeared on Ludogogy.

This is available to read in full at

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338152242_Practical_Methodology_for_the_Design_of_Educational_Serious_Games

Part II to follow next week.

An archive of all currently available infographics can be found in the Research Infographics page.

The post Practical Methodology for the Design of Educational Serious Games – Part I first appeared on Ludogogy.

We should be honest about the game. The game is surely fun, but addictive. People can have pleasure and satisfaction after the game but also regret the time they have spent on it. So, human beings can feel very ambivalent about games.

I think that gamification in the education field can be understood and explained by the educational philosophy of John Dewey. At first, philosophy starts with definitions of concepts. Human beings think through language. Defining the meaning of words in detail can be the foundation to share and expand thoughts with others.

So, Why John Dewey? Dewey created the basic framework of modern education. His concepts are familiar to Korean people, through many books and thoughts related to the concept of educational philosophy. His representative book, ‘Democracy and Education’, illustrates educational concepts including interaction, continuity, interest, growth, and experience. All of these concepts can be considered part of what we call gamification.

Continuity

Continuity is an important principle of gamification. Human life is based on continuity. As we live our lives, many things change, but many things also remain the same. Human beings live through the flow of time and are subject to the influence of continuity.

Many games seek to facilitate continuity. Games on Nintendo or PlayStation, for example, allow you to save your progress and reload after a break in playing. These functions maintain continuity, which encourages the player to keep playing. If a game is a short-term and one-time experience, the effects of the game on human beings are not great or lasting. A game which one plays for a long time, has a much greater impact. Each game has its own objective, but some games have continuity as an objective. These games continue without ending or have finite but long-term objectives. This characteristic is one of the gamification principles, and has an important role in creating the fun of the game.

Interaction

Interaction is a very old philosophical concept, and includes all activities concerning moving and reacting with others, and external objects. Movies, cartoons, or works of art don’t interact with us. On the other hand, a game is a complex thing with interaction. By clicking, touching, or choosing in the game, the player receives constant feedback. This interaction can make the player immersed in the game.

Human beings live through communication. We continuously interact with others. This is fundamental to our existence, and good and free interaction makes life abundant and interesting. One important principle of gamification is well-designed interaction. Dewey himself mentioned that education is interaction, and this is the core of gamification. Every life is not being alone but interacting with others.

Interest

Dewey explained ‘Interest’ through the story of bystanders and actors in his book ‘Democracy and Education’. In some events, a bystander with no interest and an actor will differ greatly in the results they achieve. Interest is not just in short-term reward and stimulus but in continuous self-will. Continuous interest makes human life abundant and is empowering. If there is no interest, a person loses power (to act) and doesn’t develop. This is the loss of desire to act. Gamification can stimulate human desire to act by stimulating interest. Therefore, interest is one concept which can separate games from other works. Normally, the reason why people play games is to have ‘fun’. The necessary concept in gamification, which occasions this is ‘interest’.

Growth

In Dewey’s perspective, education is the activity of seeking growth. If there is no growth through education, education is no longer required. Education can be the core for growth. Not just the growth of the physical body but internal growth and maturity is the key to education. Dewey thought that growth is a process towards completion. Games also have this process of progress from easy levels to more difficult ones. The principle of growth is applied. In the past, the Tamagotchi game in the past consisted of activities to grow and develop virtual animals. The reason why many people love this is the growth of characters in the game. If there is no growth, there is no life, and it is no longer fun for humans.

Growth is also very important in gamification. Particularly if it is used for educational purposes, growth should be more focused on development. Growth through games can be a process of seeking ‘the truth’ or developing (in-game) skills, or gaining information and knowledge. This is education. A game for learning or study has steps, and a process which leads the player’s learning. If it leads to growth, it can be named as education, in which case, there is a blurring of the purposes of the game and the learning.

Experience

Experience can be defined as an ‘overall ending achieved’. This ending includes all ‘Beginning – Development – Achievement’ processes that have been part of the experience. For example, every detailed story in a game includes background music and background story, historical facts, and many other ideas.

The main characters in the game are constructed from many historical, and cconceptual materials, such as the languages used, the type of speech is used, their relationships, the clothes and foods depicted, etc, not just their (game) objectives. For players who see, hear, and experience it, the process itself can be an educational experience. The education experience is a complete with continuous interaction, interests, and growth.

When we see research about immersion related to gamification, we can see that gamification helps to create better educational experience. Immersion is very important for learning, and games can give bigger immersion than other activities. Immersion into games by children allows tremendous depth of experience. Immersion means that a human deeply dives into some activities, and that their current experience can be felt as optimal. These immersive experiences can also be educational experiences. For immersion, ‘Objective, Competition, Interaction’ is required.

Human live their lives through experience, and life is the continuous process of many experiences. In addition, the educational experience is meaningful. If games are used to present ethical and artistic experiences, gamification can be extended into really meaningful areas of human life. If this kind of educational experience is continued, it can become a life habit. And it can be accessible for all. As requirement to learn and access educational experiences grow, the requirement for gamification will grow too. These experiences will lead to making human life abundant. The principles of gamification meet the major concepts of educational philosophy.

The post Gamification and John Dewey first appeared on Ludogogy.

I sometimes like to counter the question ‘what can games teach?’ With ‘what can’t they teach?’. Jane McGonigal created a game to teach herself healthy behaviours for recovery from a serious brain injury, and that game has gone on to help thousands around the world improve their mental health and resilience. There’s anecdotal evidence to show that playing games has helped protestors to organise. Games have helped millions around the world find new ways to connect and socialise during a global pandemic.

Superbetter (the book) by Jane McGonigal is available on Amazon

One growing way for games to have a real impact on people’s development is the burgeoning use of tabletop role-playing games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons, for therapy. The Game to Grow non-profit ‘provides gaming groups for therapeutic, educational, and community growth’ and ‘promote awareness of the life-enriching potential of games across the world’.

Their flagship game is a roleplaying game of their own creation, developed after using Dungeons & Dragons for many years. The testimonials speak for themselves, with parents citing benefits from improved interaction skills to better impulse control to kids coming out of their shells. But the games they run are not just for children, and if we think through what role-playing games help people to learn and reflect on about themselves and their behaviours, it’s easy to see why.

Role-playing games set a stage for agency and exploration

In a game of Dungeons & Dragons, or a similar role-playing game, you create a character, through which you act. That avatar acts as a shield. You are not saying what you think or what you’d do, but what the character thinks or does. So you can try and test things, and connect with a viewpoint that may be different from your own.

With the help of the Dungeon Master or Games Master, you guide that character through a world of challenges: a space to test actions and consequences. A space where you can try things because any failure is game-based more than personal. A space where the challenges and journey mirror real-life things: you have to collaborate with the rest of the group and with some of the world’s inhabitants you meet along the way.

And you participate in a story arc, where your agency and your decisions result in your story beats. Any victory is yours, because you earned it. Anything more complex, including defeat, is yours to reflect on. And the game can raise all kinds of issues that you can be a part of: if a local village is engaged in an armed uprising against landowner taxes, whose side do you take? Why? What are the consequences, good and bad? And what does that say about you?

Real and relevant skills grow out of role-playing games

Whether your role-playing session is specifically a therapy session with a licensed therapist or not, if it’s a good session, this is likely to ask of you that you:

• Use social skills to persuade others and win them over
• Build and use esteem and confidence
• Co-operate and collaborate effectively to get results
• See things from others perspectives
• Take your turn and consider other players in the game
• Express yourself and your needs
• Creatively solve problems

And these skills don’t stay in the session. One participant in Megan A Connell’s Self-Rescuing Princess Girls’ Group said of a situation outside the session:

“I realized in the situation my character would not have said yes to this, so I decided to do what she would do, and I said no.”

The research is difficult, because every game of Dungeons & Dragons, or any other role-playing game, is individual – it’s hard to have a control and test group. But there is a growing body of research, and strong links have been found between role-playing and social skills, battling depression, moral development, suicide prevention, and a host of other positive effects.

Role-playing games can inspire learning game design of all stripes

This information is particularly useful if you’re somebody who could directly benefit from this, or a parent or carer of somebody who could. And with a positive psychology outlook, that shouldn’t be limited to those who are struggling. But what about learning game designers? What about educators, or L&D managers?

I think very little is as instructive as looking at what works well in one situation and asking how it can be adapted or learned from in another. If you’re looking to find, commission or design a solution that will help with some of the kinds of behaviours and skills listed, then look for something that works on some of the same levels. We can learn from how role-playing games:

• Encourage collaboration by making success contingent on it
• Set open challenges that players use creativity to solve
• Allow players to explore their identity by creating and playing another
• Bring about feelings that relate to real-life experiences, such as exaltation, challenge, uncertainty, empathy and others, and give space to explore them
• Allow agency and testing of actions and consequences

These are just a brief selection. In many ways, role-playing games are the most open and flexible games of all. Play isn’t limited by a programming language or the components supplied in the box. You’re limited only by your will and imagination.

This makes it a petri dish for what imagination can achieve – and where it excels, game designers and learning experience designers can and should learn from it. With the sheer amount that role-playing games can help unlock, the possibilities for players learning about themselves, and growing as people, are endless.

The post Dungeons & Dragons & Development first appeared on Ludogogy.

Fail to Learn by Scott Provence is a book based on a syllogism. In fact, each of its three parts is based on one part of the syllogism: People learn the most from failure, People fail the most playing games and Therefore, games are the best way for people to learn.

Games-based learning (GBL) professionals and other interested parties make many claims for the efficacy of games in learning. For example, that they engender greater engagement, that they allow the creation of learning situations which would take much longer, or be more dangerous, in a non-game setting, or that play and learning are, in fact, the same thing. And there are many books in which you will find all these and more addressed in some detail.

An In-depth Exploration of Failure

One of this book’s greatest strengths, is that it focuses on just one aspect of play in learning, and thus, not only emphasises the importance of that aspect, but gives space and time to be really thorough in exploring it. While I, like many other GBL professionals have often cited ‘safe failure’ as a reason to use games in learning situations, I have never read something, which, in its depth, made me think about all of the implications of that in such detail.

This book is subtitled ‘A Manifesto for Training Gamification’, and the author goes on to explain his liking for the audacity and actionable nature of manifestos. There is much here that is actionable – and aspect of such books that I particularly like. Indeed, the entire third part of the book is dedicated to finding ways (many of them very quick and easy) to put into practice what you have learned about failure during the first two parts

An Audacious Manifesto

It is also true that many will find this book audacious, and for some educators, maybe too much so. As Scott notes throughout the book, we have been socialised to have a deep aversion to failure, and this is common in the field of learning and education as elsewhere. In this book, you will find compelling arguments as to why this is a problem we should, and indeed must, tackle, if we are to create learning as it should be, not only effective, but joyful.

While this subtitle implies a focus on workplace learning, the ideas within are universally applicable, from early education to adult learning. Creators of learning games often find that they have to justify why they are proposing learning techniques which many believe should be ‘just for children’. I hope that sceptics who read this book will find plenty of food for thought in the examples of research from learners of all ages.

People Learn the Most from Failure

In the first part of the book, People Learn the Most from Failure, the reader is invited to explore the current basis of many learning and education systems, based as they are on the ideas of Behaviourists such as B.F. Skinner. Although most teachers would dislike the idea that they treat the children in their care like pigeons in cages, or cats in electrified boxes, it is undeniable that we still ‘punish’ learners, of all ages, for failure, by making that failure ‘costly’ (if you fail the exam you must retake the whole course) and stigmatising the act of failure, as well as relying heavily on extrinsic motivators to incentivise people in all sorts of ways.

And yet, as Scott shows through references to many studies and through compelling anecdotes (the entire book is peppered with these, to great effect), those who are allowed to fail, benefit from that process by learning better – and the more they fail, the greater that beneficial effect becomes.
We often hear quotes from inventors and entrepreneurs about the wisdom of ‘failing fast and cheap’. This part of the book asks us to reflect on what failing fast and cheap might look in education.

People Fail the Most Playing Games

With the benefits of failure now well-established, we move to the second part of the book, People Fail the Most Playing Games. The first chapter of this section appears as an article in Ludogogy, so if you want to get a taste of this book you can do so there.

The section explains in detail what games are, and their relationship to failure, how they make it a low-cost activity, and the benefits of creating similar low-stakes failure opportunities in our learning experiences. Without ‘obstacles’, which bring with them the potential to stumble and fail, games are not games at all. When we apply this idea to learning, we discover, counterintuitively, that making learning more difficult, and thus more likely to cause failure, we facilitate learning rather than hindering it.

Therefore Games are the Best Way for People to Learn

The third part of the book, Therefore Games are the Best Way for People to Learn, draws together all that has come before, giving us actionable ways to implement constructive failure in our learning designs. But these are spread throughout the book too. Many chapters end with a pop quiz, which not only consolidate material covered in the preceding text, but, progressively, incorporate actionable failure features, providing practical examples of implementation and allowing us the experience of constructive failure in the learning of the book.

An example of the kind of simply actionable ‘hack’ that we could apply to learning designs, to utilise failure as a benefit, is to add ‘confidence’ scores to learner assessments. Learners answer a question and then simply give a score of 1 – 10 of how confident they are in their answer. This adds little design overhead, and, as it doesn’t need marking, adds nothing to the educator’s work after the fact. However, it is shown to increase correct recall of the material being tested, especially, again counterintuitively, if we are confident in an answer which is actually wrong.

Templates for You to Use

The final section of the book also provides a complete model incorporating the ideas in the book and templates and other resources to support your use of the model for your own learning designs are offered at Scott Provence’s site.

This review just scratches the surface of what you will learn by reading this book, and the inspiration you will take away for your own learning designs. Scott Provence has done a masterful job of exploring failure in its many forms and presenting us with simple applications, which in turn will inspire further exploration.

The aversion to both failure, and, it seems, fun, which characterises many of the education and learning experiences which many of us have borne in the past, and continue to have to bear, do not just make learning unpleasant, but they make it less likely to stick or benefit us longer term.
If you want to do your bit to make learning better, then embrace the fun and benefit of failure, and you could definitely do worse than to use this book as your guide in your exploration of Failing (in order) to Learn.

Honourable mention also has to go to Will Burrows, who did the illustrations for the book, which complement the text wonderfully.

Check out Scott Provence’s TEDx talk on Failing to Learn.

Fail to Learn is available on Amazon

(Ludogogy Affiliate policy: Ludogogy did receive a review copy of this product, but only publishes reviews of products that we would be willing to recommend and buy ourselves. If we don’t like something, we don’t write a review, ‘cos ain’t nobody got time for reading about something that’s no good)

The post Review – A Book About How We Learn From Failure first appeared on Ludogogy.

Have you experienced that feeling of triumph before? The one you get from completing a really difficult level or beating an experienced opponent?  You know, when you throw your hands up over your head in triumph? That feeling is called fiero. Fiero is highly addictive and highly engaging. Often that feeling comes after we’ve become completely engrossed in the game. That’s called being a state of “flow.”

This post will cover the roles that flow, fiero, and games play in shaping our teaching and learning experiences.

Emotions & Player Experience

Games are experiential. They are about the player’s experience. But not education is the same way.  Sometimes when we teach we are highly focused on the instructor, the modality (in person, online, or hybrid), or on the content.

But game designers think of these experiences differently. Game designers pay close attention to the kinds of emotions that games evoke in players.  Educators can do the same. However, most of the time, we’re bogged down with meeting learning outcomes, assessments, and other factors that don’t deal directly with our students’ experience.

But what if there was a way for instructors to reach that high level of student engagement? How about a level of engagement so intoxicating and exhilarating that all individuals lose a sense of time and space?

That’s Flow

Flow is that highly engaging and intoxicating experience. It’s that feeling of being “in the zone,” where time seems to become a blur. This completely engrossing experience directly addresses player engagement. Because, for a time, a player is no longer thinking about whether they should be doing something else. Instead, they are concentrating on the game and nothing else.

This level of commitment is called the engagement curve. And it’s an incredibly important consideration for designers. Engagement is critical for educators as well, because focusing on the student experiences means addressing some of the key areas where flow is most likely to occur. That means creating content that has clear goals, established rules, and increasingly challenging levels of difficulty.

I remember my first time engaging in this level of flow playing a game. It was playing SkiFree on my first computer.  SkiFree is a game where you represent a skier trying to race down a mountain. But there are trees, rocks, and other obstacles in your way. Famously, there’s also a snow monster that comes out to chase you. All I wanted to do was to get away from that snow monster… To this day I never could.

As educators, we are in an ideal position to identify, direct, and design this flow state for our students. Two of the most important characteristics for flow are already included in class designs: clear goals and feedback. Thankfully classrooms are already places of clear goals and feedback. Right?

Let’s think about that for a moment. What was the last syllabus you read? Were the goals from the class completely clear based on what you read? What about getting feedback from an instructor? Did you get that feedback instantly? Was it immediately useful?

Learning design has a lot to gain from incorporating aspects of flow. The innate feeling of progress, the excitement of moving forward, and the general applicable areas of accomplishing something difficult after investing time and effort are incredible forms of feedback.

And what happens when we accomplish that one seemingly impossible task? We celebrate.

Fire in Fiero

Fiero is that celebration. It is the neurochemical phenomena we feel when we’ve invested time and effort into something through our flow state to achieve something difficult.

Fiero is the Italian word for pride which is used to describe this emotional high. Anytime you’ve beat a really hard boss, found that really rare item, or finally defeated your friends at Mario Kart: you’ve experienced fiero.

The funny thing about fiero is that it’s a common reaction across cultures, borders, boundaries, and people. We like to throw our hands up over our head. It’s often accompanied by loud screams and shouts of triumph.  It’s one of the most powerful reactions that we can feel as humans.

Think about the last time you saw a World Cup Soccer match. Player scored a goal? Yeah. That’s fiero.

Combining opportunities for fiero while players engage in a state of flow provides something very addicting and engaging. When players are in this engagement curve they experience an emotional roller coaster. Periods of inactivity, followed by highly engaging activity, followed by moments of triumph or defeat.

It’s that roller coaster of emotions combined with our desire to keep playing that keeps us engaged. That shot of dopamine to the brain when we achieve fiero is highly addictive and something that can be used for design and instruction.

Flow and Fiero

So how does flow and fiero interact and how is it used in design for both games and learning experiences? Fiero is just one aspect of good design and is something that is used to continually engage and entice the player. Too many instances of fiero and the game either becomes too easy or the player is no longer challenged. Too few instances and the game becomes too hard or lacks engagement opportunities.

The roller coaster of moments, the periods of high highs and low lows, is what brings players back into the state of flow. You want to engage them long enough to keep playing but not make the game so easy that it’s no longer challenging.

This is often where you see level design come into play.  Players are presented with challenges, opportunities, and structures to surmount them. After a while, they encounter a larger challenge or a “boss” that they must beat in order to progress. Once they do? They progress to a new level with ever increasingly difficult challenges or decisions. The path continues from there.

Those moments when players encounter a boss and triumph? An element of fiero. Those times when students ace a test? Fiero. When tennis players score the match point? Fiero. The time your students win a case study competition? Fiero.

Games and learning are two sides of the same coin. They can be highly engaging experiences ripe for applications of flow and fiero.

Fiero In the Classroom

Games and learning have long been intertwined. That’s because games are great experiential teachers. They are able to autonomously demonstrate and instruct students on how to succeed and progress. Often this is through the discovery of patterns in games that can be capitalized on over time.

But sometimes the most powerful forms of learning are not fun or engaging. Instant gratification is fun. But that’s called easy fun. For role playing games, easy fun is just walking around the world. But other types of engagement like attempting challenges, fighting bosses, or preparing presentations? That’s hard fun. It’s a type of fun gained only through significant effort on the part of the student or player.

Balancing opportunities for easy fun and hard fun is part of the engagement curve for designing these learning experiences. One way of doing this in the classroom is to provide peer-instruction tools that allow students to become the authors and purveyors of classroom learning.  Another means of providing feedbacks is through developing basic and rudimentary processes in the classroom. Those processes might be slow and difficult at first, but over time become more efficient as the student achieves proficiency.

Designing for Balance

Defining the engagement curve; balancing between flow and fiero; and creating opportunities for easy and hard fun can be difficult. The variables between all of them needs to be robust and that middle point between player exhaustion and player boredom is hard to achieve.

The best balance appears to be between 75% flow and 25% fiero for immersive and enjoyable games.  This was implemented by Blizzard Entertainment when they implemented a 25% drop rate for important items in order to keep players happy and engaged.

We can even see this in modern table top games like Settlers of Catan where die rolls determine if you earn any resources on a turn. Those resources can then be used to build settlements and roads. Both of them give you access to more resources which then give you more access to more settlements. Play then becomes a self re-enforcing active feedback loop.

Takeaways

Flow, fiero, engagement, easy fun, and hard fun are all different aspects and tools that we can use as game designers to engage our players. Educators can also use these tools to help our students learn experientially through games-based learning.

This engagement loop for players have turned them into meta-gamers where they are constantly evaluating and assessing their own play. In a way, they become agents of their own learning. It is a goal that learning designers hope and strive for when creating educational content.

To do this learning design needs to take into account several different aspects to fully engage learners: giving students the autonomy to choose their own goals; the ability to self-assess their own feedback; and the agency to play out the game (or engage with the content) in a manner of their choosing.

Doing so enables your students and learners to maximize those opportunities of getting fired up with fiero.

This article covered fiero from a games-based learning perspective. To learn more about fiero in gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

If you have enjoyed this article – consider getting yourself lifetime access to his Games-Based Learning Digital Library containing all of the content from the past two Games-Based Learning Virtual Conferences; past webinars and courses he’s created; as well as his complete back catalog of articles; podcast episodes; and videos. And more content is being added all the time.

Readers of Ludogogy can get a $50 discount on this valuable resource by using this link.

The post Fired Up Fiero first appeared on Ludogogy.

An ‘Open World’ Educational game, Liber Domus is currently focused on Grade 6 Mathematics, and is geared to the Portuguese curriculum. However there are plans, not only to cover other subjects and grades throughout K12 – but to regionalise for other countries too.

Educators who are interested in collaborating with Eduardo on these developments, will receive access to the game for their classrooms, and should contact him using the details below.

The post Liber Domus – Interview with Eduardo Nunes first appeared on Ludogogy.

As Sherrelle Walker explains, this is due to our brains being structured in a way that causes us to seek out coherent narrative structure in the stories that we hear and tell, then using this structure to absorb any information within the story and then connect it with any of our own personal experiences.(Juliani, 2014)

This is especially true with children with the Writer’s Bureau (2009) and the British Council with the BBC (2016) highlighting some of the benefits of telling stories throughout their growth which include;

• Increased confidence, self-esteem and understanding of empathy.
• Improved listening skills and verbal proficiency.
• Learning about various concepts like shapes, colours and objects.
• Learning about tasks and activities such as taking care of animals or preparing a meal.
• Discovering diverse cultures and people from around the world.
• Understanding emotions and how to cope with certain feelings.
• Offering a method of relaxation by enjoying stories during their downtime.
• Improving the development of their imagination.

Although there are many benefits to utilising stories within education, there are several challenges that come with the territory. Most of these challenges come from the stories that you’re hoping to use, the implementation of the story and its relevance to the subject being taught.

Mcnett provides a useful table of learning objectives that can be referred to in order to test the viability of a story that is intended to be used within an educational setting. They also point out that a story that doesn’t accomplish any of the objectives in the table doesn’t necessarily rule out the story being beneficial to the situation it’s used in, rather it runs the risk of being considered irrelevant to the current situation and a waste of time.

Although it is important to find stories that are relevant to subject matter that you’re hoping to tackle, if you don’t present the story in a way that captivates the audience and makes them want to listen, then you’re just wasting time and you might as well just hand your listeners a textbook about the subject they’re being taught.

Luckily you don’t need to be an actor to tell a convincing story and the British Council has a handful of techniques and skills that can be practised in order to improve your approach of storytelling, such as;

• Adapting the story in your own way
• Rehearse the story so that it feels natural when telling it.
• Vary the volume, pitch and tempo of your voice to exaggerate expression and to differentiate between you narrating and playing a character.
• Utilise body language, including your hands and face.
• Engage with the audience through eye-contact and looking at your audience as you speak.
• Utilise silence and pauses for dramatic effect where necessary.
• Remember to pace yourself to match the mood of the story.

(British Council and BBC, 2016)

This is only really scratching the surface of using stories as a teaching tool but hopefully this serves as a decent start to anyone who may be interested in learning more about a way of teaching that has been a long-standing yet effective method throughout human history.

The post Making an impact with Educational Stories first appeared on Ludogogy.

Playing games and creating games not only can teach high-level concepts but also build collaborative learning skills. Creating games develops rigorous learning connections to entrepreneurship, innovation, and the iterative cycles of business development.  This Entrepreneurial Ludic Learning ™ I believe will create environments of learning and livelihood that will transform education and the workplaces of the future.

The instructional pedagogy of gaming and game creation and their systems  used in my high school business classrooms  are compatible and reproducible  in any classroom. They also have worked in my management consulting and personalized education endeavors. In short – they work!

The news is filled with headlines of teachers in the United States leaving the profession of education en masse, teacher labor strikes or shortages, underperforming schools, and conflicting curriculum goals.

Yet every day, countless teachers are making magic in their classrooms, from urban to rural, affluent to impoverished; and these teachers, some with little to no knowledge of business process analysis, are doing just that! They analyze, they incentivize, they deal with human resources issues and motivation and continue to be productive.

Play – Entrepreneurship – Management; three words that most people would not put together when speaking about education; however, in my tenure as an entrepreneur coach, instructional developer, adjunct professor, athlete and coach, singer and performer, and teacher of Business and Career Education and Social Studies with over 30 years in classrooms, board rooms and server rooms, I have worked to empower my students and clients by teaching innovation, iteration and integration through project and problem-based learning and gaming and I have seen its results firsthand!

Not only are these three words, Play – Entrepreneurship – Management connected, but optimal in learners’ deep understanding of the oftentimes difficult and unfamiliar vocabulary of vocational or any of their studies.

We want to make students college and career ready? I daresay then we better start playing MORE!

We are inherently problem-solvers by nature. We are curious and crave connections. We love to play.

Gaming is the ideal platform to make learning “stick”—to afford students deeper leveling, broader reaching, and easier recalling of curricular concepts.

Like gum under a desk, students (from birth to adulthood)  use games, play, and the iterative methodologies to not only form good learning habits, but also to transform themselves into  managers of their own learning, entrepreneurs of their ideas and players of a self-determined future—the sticky learning concepts we all epitomize.

So why don’t we play more?

Perhaps the educational systems in the United States are stuck in a poorly translated world where the definition of a game – loosely translated from German, is “any activity which is executed only for pleasure without conscious purpose.”

The “former” models of U.S.  education are very rigorous. There can’t be pleasure and fun in education! We most definitely can’t do anything without a conscious purpose!

Well then why, as we look to the Finnish model,  do they hold “ the unofficial title as the country with the world’s best education system since 2000?”

“Finland also has the smallest gap between the weakest and strongest students in their educational system.” (Staff, Math & Movement & Hancock)

Why? Perhaps it is in that the Finnish model of education that focuses on the importance of ‘play’ and ‘joy’ in education.

And maybe, as purported by Jane McGonigal, everyone from HR Directors and Superintendents would be serving our world better by looking at the skill sets that gamers hold that will be ideal in not only  transforming the workforce of the future but also energizing and improving outcomes of educational systems based in an agrarian model that no longer exists for most.

The workplace learning skills of McGonigal are:

Blissful Productivity

Urgent Optimism

Social Fabric

Epic Meaning

McGonigal believes that these four things cannot only create happier workplaces, more productive and collaborative employees but also a better world.

So we need to BUSE it up in the classrooms and workplaces, to increase joy, optimism, connections and meaning though gaming.

In addition, entrepreneurship (or as I view it, game based learning) needs to be accepting that there will be failure.  RISK is inherent in creativity and without creativity there will be no change.

This is why Entrepreneurial Ludic Learning™, MUST look to the iterative process of the production cycle of business and game play to allow our students (the employees and entrepreneurs of the future) the creative and productive outputs that will make learning stick.

So why have we driven risk taking and failure from learning? Why has the four letter word RISK become so bad especially in the education world?

Let’s look at why risk and failure has been cast out of education.

Do we like failure? The simple answer, NO!

My question then is why not?

It hurts. It makes us look bad.

This is where cognitive theory kicks in.

In discussing gaming and learning with my “crew” (A group formed from the onset of the Games in In Education Symposium in the Capital District of NYS that encompasses teachers, game developers and business people.)  and oftentimes we speak of the challenges of the neurotypical mindset as non-neurotypical learners. We also wonder if non-neurotypical is a better way of creating challenging material and improving education for all.

What can we learn from non-neurotypical learners? Are all learners non-neurotypical but conditioned to be neurotypical through habit? How can we break the habits to form better neurological connections?

Malcolm Gladwell calls them “Outliers,” business teachers call them innovators (entrepreneurs), cognitive scientists call them non-neurotypical, and historians call them rebels.

Perhaps more simply put, some, no, many people enjoy coloring outside the lines in a world full of boxes drawn in permanent marker.

We speed just a little bit. We put just enough coins in a parking meter and try to stretch out a minute or two more. We show up at 7:20 am for a 7:30 am appointment…

So if most people want to take risks, why don’t we call it that? Why don’t we fess up to wanting to make mistakes and own them when we make them?

Why are schools encountering more and more students that are non-neurotypical or on the autism spectrum?

According to the Autism Society: “Prevalence of autism in U.S. children increased by 119.4 percent from 2000 (1 in 150) to 2010 (1 in 68). (CDC, 2014) Autism is the fastest-growing developmental disability… and its prevalence has increased by 6-15 percent each year from 2002 to 2010. ”

How do we, as teachers encountering more and more students that are non-neurotypical, (Note: Non-neurotypical learners are students most commonly placed on the autism spectrum but this term can be used with any student that does not benefit from or has difficulty with learning in traditional ways.) address the learning needs of the increasing number of students presenting with these learning types while allowing those who enjoy the structure of neurotypical lessons and procedures through either preference or as I dare say “habits,” create engaging and robust lessons?

Well, by incorporating gaming of course!

When in the 1950’s Professor Leon Festinger’s in his groundbreaking book, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance stated, “when there were discrepancies of opinion or ability among the members of a group, pressures arose to reduce such discrepancies.” He also wrote:

Dissonance results when an individual must choose between attitudes and behaviors that are contradictory.

Dissonance can be eliminated by reducing the importance of the conflicting beliefs, acquiring new beliefs that change the balance, or removing the conflicting attitude or behavior.

We feel the pain. We don’t like it. So we do everything in our power not to feel it. We push away anything that is different to “fit in” or to just make the pain go away. We habitualize our experience to create habits.

We may not like doing things the way everyone else does them, but we crave acceptance and hate the pain so we have engaged in learning  methods that may not be the best for us.

We then take that learned experience about risk avoidance from schools  into the workplace.

We fear taking risks because we fear condemnation, losing jobs and/or status. It can create toxic work cultures.

As an organizational management consultant, I have been involved in workplace improvement projects that take a year or more due to the resistance to change cellularly ingrained in our being.

If we want to create the employees and entrepreneurs of the future, how does this cognitive dissonance thwart discovery, inquiry, and change in the educational setting?

How do we go from the scientific, exploratory and risk-taking toddlers to the fear-filled, settlers of the status quo?

How does this subversion of creativity and discovery learning from our childhood continue onto the workplace?

How do we, in turn, address this shameful statistic that “35 percent of young adults (ages 19-23) with autism have not had a job or received postgraduate education after leaving high school”(Shattuck et al., 2012)?

To me, students are just employees and entrepreneurs in training. Their ideas, suggestions and prior learning MUST be valued, acknowledged and, painfully at times, corrected if we are to create the social change agents and entrepreneurs of the future.

We must teach them about cognitive dissonance and about the pain that comes with failure without stifling the growth and creation that can spring from it. (Festinger)

We are told, by administrators, the public, and the media that as teachers, we should create a learning environment that creates a safe and productive learning place for all of our students.

So how do we accomplish that with the oftentimes limited financial resources, oversized classrooms and over-taxed time schedules of teachers, students, and families?

My answer came by developing a business process analysis model for educational purposes through gaming after asking myself the question, “How can I pull my unique knowledge of organizational management, employee motivation, and the habitual nature of what makes worksplaces successful and games fun and use it to make my students’ ‘user experiences’ better?”

Businesses of learning—make no mistake,  school is business.  Not-for-profits are still businesses and therefore need to be viewed through a business mindset.

How can we as teachers utilize the boundless studies on workplace performance to assist us in helping our students be better learners? We want them to enjoy learning, to crave more of it, not see it as an enemy. We want to produce a service (education) that more and more customers crave and create a positive experience when engaging in it.

We as teachers need to take risks, and to allow our students to do the same in a safe environment to change the oftentimes bad habits of education.

In other words, we need to PLAY GAMES!

So I hit the books. I dug out my undergraduate business textbooks and articles. I researched successful business leaders and the brain based learning theories that they engaged in to change bad habits and improve their users’ (employees’) experiences. I talked to my friends and colleagues.

Paul O’Neill in October of 1987 as the new CEO of Alcoa decided to make a small but substantive change in the way Alcoa did business. He decided to focus on worker safety. That was relatively unheard of in those days of fierce Japanese competition within the metals manufacturing  industry. That one “small” change led to a quintupling of Alcoa’s profits.

In a nutshell, Mr O’Neill changed habits.

Schools, and by extension, teachers, are like airplanes. Oftentimes there are problems with the inner workings that cause the oxygen masks to fall from the ceiling.

Discipline problems, unsafe home lives of our students, substance abuse, truancy, cheating, absenteeism, tardiness, disruptive behaviors—all of these are things that individually can send a plane down and when multiplied, can bring the plane and our oxygen masks from the ceilings.

Our first reaction is to put the oxygen mask on our students.  But as everyone knows from the demonstrations on the airplanes putting YOUR oxygen mask on first, allows you to have the strength to give O2 to help those around you.

But how?

Focusing on righting the airplane by focusing on teachers FIRST. Taking business concepts of caring for your employees, creating a positive work environment that is safe and secure and FUN!

“It should go without saying, if the person who works at your company is 100 percent proud of the brand and you give them the tools to do a good job and they are treated well, they’re going to be happy,” “If the person who works at your company is not appreciated, they are not going to do things with a smile,”

– Richard Branson tells Inc. president and editor-in-chief Eric Schurenberg.

How do you get that smile? How do you get teachers to feel as if they matter and that they are valued?

In our professional meetings we need to play games. We as teachers need to learn more about how playing games affects learning and we need to listen to business learners and entrepreneurs, watch TED Talks and continue to learn about how game theory can improve user experiences.

Ok, I know, I know…it seems crazy, but I have questions about when you play games in your classroom be it online, teacher directed “Kahoot” or “Jeopardy” type, or just letting your students play a card game like “Uno” during free time or recess.

What do your students look like? Are they smiling? Do they push through frustrations after losing a game and try again? Are you smiling and happy?

Isn’t this what we want our students to do in their learning? Isn’t this what YOU want to be doing?

Let us take it one step further now. Imagine having the student, who may not be engaged in the lesson, but who you observe drawing beautiful pictures. They obviously enjoy that and have a talent. Why not engage that talent into creating a game with a team of others in the class?

Why not have them take the learning objectives and concepts of the content and create a game?

Let your students  naturally figure out who is good at what, figure out what game modality would best address the content, create a materials list, storyboard the game play, collaborate to find the answers, and present that to other students by developing the rules for their game along with the finished product.

They can briefly explain their game in a roundtable or direct presentation style to the others in the class and let the other students do an analysis of their playing experiences with tips to the creators as to how to make it better and thereby engage in a peer analysis.

Then take it a step further—ask other teachers and/or parents/members of the community to sit on a panel of investors and have these student creators pitch their game to them.

Cognitively robust, collaborative, and creative are the three phrases that come to mind in that educational exercise as well as play, entrepreneurship, and management.

Through play, gaming, and game development, students engage in entrepreneurial, collaborative, and creative processes and learn self-and team-management techniques.

Through learning through play and game-creation they hit upon every Level 4 in Danielson’s Framework For Teaching.

So take a risk, play “Risk^©,” encourage risks in your classroom.

Gaming is a great tool to change habits, improve learning outcomes, and prepare students for the future workplace. Let’s play!

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