By Thomas Barker | Fellow
This column focuses on a broad range of practical academic issues from teaching and training to professional concerns, research, and technologies of interest to teachers, students, and researchers. Please send comments and suggestions to ttbarker@ualberta.ca.
A recent article in Vitae by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens at Boston University gives us a glimpse into the world of the academic who wants to expand the reach of her writing course. In “Reaching Students who ‘Don’t Need Writing,’” Stevens brings up a key point about writing among STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students: their motivation. Realizing that many of them are gamers, Stevens observes, “When you think about the amount of dedication, attention, and precision that goes into saving the planet from zombie alien overlords, you realize that gamers are already highly motivated achievers. They only need to transfer their skills to writing. And the key to that is giving them a winnable goal.” New directions in game-oriented writing courses might also give instructors a winnable goal.
In keeping with this issue’s theme of technical communication on the Web, it might be interesting to follow up on the academic conversation about instructional design and gaming, and gamification in writing instruction. What would a game-based or “gamified” writing course look like to a student? What principles of gaming can be useful in course design? What would such a course look like from a teaching standpoint?
To answer these questions, I spoke with Roger Graves, director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alberta. Graves specializes in writing across the curriculum, or writing as a tool for all disciplines in the university. Three years ago Graves, and two of his colleagues, Heather Graves and Geoffrey Rockwell, redesigned an earlier version of a basic research and writing course. The result was a course called “GwRIT,” or “The Game of Writing: Writing in the Disciplines.”
But the course is not simply a game version of writing. The way to win at using games means that you need a winnable interface and student experience, sound gaming principles to drive the design, and a working and winning course model.
What the Student Sees
Let’s start by looking at “The Game of Writing” from the students’ perspective. If I’m a student in GWrit 102, I log into something called the Game of Writing System. I see some very typical writing course elements: syllabus, assignments, and rubrics. I see videos explaining ideas like the writing process, research topics. This looks easy, but I’m not seeing how I can save the medieval village here. I read on.
The Introduction to the course explains that this course is based on theories of writing and that I will work in an “interactive writing context.” It tells me that learning how to use the reviewing/commenting function and to respond appropriately and usefully to others” is a key component in learning to write well.
Hmmm. I skip ahead to my first assignment. Here is something I have seen before: three assignments to choose from: one from STEM areas, one from social sciences, and one from arts. This is new because I can write on any one I want. I choose my warrior path.
I read an assignment. Here is something new: I can see all the other drafts of all the other 169 students in the course. So if I’m lost I can probably dip into someone else’s work and get inspired. So I write my essay and submit it. I read the work of others. I find something I want to comment on. I highlight it and write my comment. Here is where the course starts to look different.
If I get a comment on my writing, I can either like that comment, dislike that comment or zap the comment into oblivion. This I like! But some comments I can’t delete, which are the ones with star icons on them. This means that an instructor or TA has marked these as important. These little monsters move to the top of the list and challenge me until I do something about them.
I also see a Leader Board that lists the top 10 warrior commenters. Some writers really get into this commenting. I’m off. I’m learning the genre by reading others attempts to perform it.
So on the surface, the interface, while it may look like the usual Web-browser fare, has some elements that draw me in as a gamer. I have a choice, I have challenges, and I have a team, a cohort of others with the same goal. What’s more, I can see their work. If we lift the hood on this interface, what principles are at work?
The Principles of Gamified Writing Instruction
The sophisticated interface that students see did not come about without some careful attention to the gaming ideas that specifically pertain to writing instruction. To find this out, I asked Graves about where the idea for a gamified writing course came from. He explained that about five years ago a grad student came up with this idea to make a writing game based on “gaming” rather than writing. “It was a bragging game, so you would brag about how much writing you did to your friends.” I laughed.
“See?” asked Graves. “Anyone in writing or tech comm would laugh because you would never do that. So that’s the ‘gaming’ approach. We met with them and we said, ‘This doesn’t work. No one does that.’”
It turns out there are two approaches to gaming: the competitive approach and the cooperative approach. Graves and his team realized that, unless you’re Ernest Hemmingway, writing may not fit the competitive game type. According to psychology researchers, competitive games tend to damage self-esteem, destroy relationships, and stunt community development. Better to try cooperative games. In cooperative games, players work together to beat the game. Cooperative games reward, connect, and build community.
As Graves put it, “You need to make this a more cooperative game, not a competitive game, but a cooperative game.” So this became the foundation of the Game of Writing system. Students see what all the other 169 students are writing. Ideally, the system promotes a sense of community, or co-learners. It’s like they’re on a quest together.
To reinforce the comradery of the course, the Game of Writing relies heavily on the commenting feature. In fact, the system has four levels of commenting based on roles the commenters play. Your peers are commenters, paid tutors are commenters, teaching assistants are commenters, and your instructor is a commenter. The power of commenters increases the higher you go up the commenting value chain. The higher up you go, the more important the comments become, which builds a kind of winning into commenting.
Here’s how it works. First, if you wrote that comment, you’re going to get a bump in your grade for writing that. Second, if you’re writing a draft and you see a comment on your draft that has a star, you better respond to that comment. “You can do the math,” says Graves, “It takes me about 2 seconds to star a comment; it takes me about 2 minutes to write it. When a comment gets a star it moves to the top of the list and stays there.” Treating comments this way provides a win for instruction: the system logs roughly 5000 comments per term. And it’s all voluntary. No need to draft recruits into this army: they volunteer for the challenge of it.
Another principle of gaming at work in the GWrit system is transparency. Students get to read “front-runners” (essays posted early) to get themselves started. Many students, says Graves, report doing this. They read these early drafts as a way to get going. According to Graves they read about 30 drafts, on the average. This average is collected from the students learning journals. Where is the win here? It’s the fact that students are not required to do this. They see the opportunity and take it.
The wins for writing instruction, then, lie in creating an environment where cooperation trumps competition, and where students can see the progress, rewards, and engagement (let’s call it self-enlistment) of the other players. This speaks to the point of motivation. But how do these principles work in a wining set of course features?
Putting the Principles to Work
The course features a number of recognizable elements: assignments, instruction modules, readings, grading rubrics, and an extensive resources section. It’s a blended, flipped classroom, where students meet one third of the time and work online the rest of the time. The course is built on writing principles that move from description to synthesis to reflecting. The foundation of the course is the 4 stages of student development found in Susan MacDonald’s Professional
Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Science. Those are: 1) non-academic writing, 2) general academic writing, 3) novice approaches to disciplinary writing, and 4) knowledge making, and expert, insider prose. So the course offers a sound pedagogical foundation. But it also features elements that support the gamification principles at work.
One of those features is the completion badge system. Professor Graves walked me through the interface of the program and showed me the Comment badges. These badges mark student achievement. Says Graves, pointing to a badge with a bronze star on it, “So this person’s made more than 10 comments so he has the ‘10 Comments’ badge. They make one more comment they get the Silver star, and there’s a Gold star, of course.” Students also get badges for turning in assignments … on time. “If they turn it in late they get the Turtle badge. And if they hand it in early, they get the Rabbit badge.” Another conspicuous feature is the Leaderboard. Students who have done the most commenting get their names on the leader board. You can see the top 10 commenters out of 200. You can see who is winning with comments.
As an approach to writing instruction, the gamification approach offers a lot of wins. In a gamified writing course, like the example of the Game of Writing course at the University of Alberta, the engaging experience of the student, the sound principles of cooperative game theory, and the foundation of strong pedagogy combine to provide, for the adventurous writing instructor, a winning exemplar of innovative instructional design.
Resources
Burke, Brian. Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things. Bibliomotion Inc., 2014.
Kapp, Karl M. The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
Stevens, Elizabeth Hyde. Vitae. A service of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Reaching Students Who ‘Don’t Need Writing.’” https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1284-reaching-students-who-don-t-need-writing?cid=VTEVPMSED1 (accessed 16 February 2016).
