Gamification in Biology

This post by Ms. Silvana Meneghini is cross posted at Technology is Happening @...

Gamification means applying certain gaming elements to the teaching and learning process. It appears at the Horizon Report 2013 as one of the technologies that will have a strong impact in higher education in the near future. Graded's Innovate 2013 Conference hosted some gamification sessions which inspired our Biology 9 teacher, Ms. Beck, to apply the idea in her DNA Genetics Unit.

Two elements of gaming that are very important and actually mix together involve "storytelling" and "challenge".  In a game, the fantasy aspect is key to transport the player to another world where a challenge will take place. Below, you will see the storytelling and the challenge for the DNA Genetics Unit. It involves groups of students trying to unlock the secrets of DNA, which takes us to other elements of gaming: "cooperation" and "competition". The competition element involved cooperation within groups to come up with the first DNA model. This process actually mimicked the real life challenge among different scientific groups around the world when the DNA structure was  unveiled by Watson and Crick, who won the Nobel Prize. The students watched a movie about the real world DNA scientific competition at the end of the Unit.

At the end of this post you can watch Ms Beck's video  describing the whole gamification process in the DNA Unit, which was used to encourage student independence. She reports that students were on task and engaged while she was able to offer more individualized support. In order to encourage such independence, the "challenge" was combined with another important element of gaming which is a "reward system". That involved the use of bagdes and a leaderboard. The badges were created by the teacher and assigned to students as they achieved levels, built vocabulary, found facts, created concept maps, etc. So they were associated with achievement in terms of covering the material/activities. Below you can see the badges that were assigned through Edmodo.

A similar principle was applied to the use of a "coin leaderboard", which indicated the top 20 students with more "coins" collected. The coins were actually physical "bingo"coins that students would get as they completed tasks and levels. The leaderboad is therefore not based on who is smarter, but based on an incentive to cover the material and activities (collect coins). Students could then exchange some coins for "prizes" such as taking a 5 minute break, going to the snack bar, etc

The overall feedback from Ms Beck is very positive, and while she will not use gamification for all her Units, it seemed appropriate for the DNA Genetics study. Enjoy Ms. Beck's full description at the video below!




The ideas about gamification in this post came from the following sources, which you can check for more information:

Kapp, K.M. The Gamification of Learning and Instruction. 2012. John Wiley & Sons. Pfeiffer.

"The Rules of Gamification". Razorfish Outlook Report. <http://razorfishoutlook.razorfish.com/articles/gamification.aspx>

Putting the learning from Innovate 2013 into practice

Flipped Classroom

After two full weeks of school following the Innovate 2013 conference, we can already see changes in practice that are a result of learning that took place at the conference.

One of them involves allowing students to become more independent learners, which makes classroom time more hands-on under teacher guidance. The teachers are creating screencasts (video recordings of teacher explanations) for student  The use screencasts to support student learning leads to flipped classrooms. The flipped classroom isn't new to Graded, but after Innovate other teachers have started experimenting with the practice. PFL teachers, for example, are beginning to explore the idea with the aim of generating a bank of screencasts from different teachers.

Gamification of Education

Another theme present at the conference was gamification of education.This Infographic provides some background on the term. 9th grade biology classes have started to explore this idea by following Paul Andersen's suggestion for game design to improve learning. Elements of game design used include "completing levels to acquire experience points and move up the leader board".  Edmodo and Google Spreadsheets are being utilized to gather and organize points/levels. On a similar trend, other game and flash card sites are also being explored like Quizlet and Zondle.

Learning Network on Twitter

Using Twitter to create personal learning communities was another recurrent theme at Innovate and several people have become excited about the tool. Aside from using Twitter to communicate with colleagues around the world,  one science teacher is beginning to explore how Twitter can be used as a space for asking questions and finding information about science. Several science hashtags are being explored  including #scichat. A hastag is a keyword that indicates the topic being discussed or explored by a group of people.

It's always exciting to see educators take what they've learned at conferences and immediately put them into practice.

Image Credit:
Classroom by James F Clay. Creative Commons Rights on Flickr. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamesclay/3509154283/lightbox/>
El Grande by Chasing Imperfection. Creative Commons Rights on Flickr. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/chasing_imperfection/226685564/lightbox/>
Twitter Typographic Wallpaper by Jez. Creative Commons Rights on Flickr. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/girlgeek/3374620636/sizes/n/in/photostream/>