The classroom of the future

Tablets are seen as the new textbooks in high schools, IPads are being handed out to students in good faith, but are sometimes misused in class or seen as bad for our educational system. Recently, Minecraft developers Mojang launched an educational version of their game for math and geometry lessons. Lessons and classrooms are becoming more digital as technology gets more available. Playful elements in the classroom are increasingly prominent to get children and students to interact more with each other and with the digital tools that they now have. More play means more interactivity in class. New teaching methods that contain playful experiences are very beneficial for the future of education, because of three important parts.

To better understand education, educational games, or games in general, their components can be sorted into three important parts: rules, play and interaction, and culture and context. The first component that is the core of every part of education, game, or even a culture are the rules they are based upon.

When players have accepted the invitation to play, they are within Huizinga’s ‘magic circle,’ (…) Within the magic circle, the rules of games take on a certain power and a certain potential. Bound by the rules of play, we perform actions that we would never otherwise consider. (Fullerton, 2014)

Rules are the most basic part of any form of game or playful experience and define the basic borders of Huizinga’s magic circle (Huizinga, 1938). Game designers and other creators of interactive experiences create these rules to let the game be played as they intended. This is of course very important for teachers and teaching institutes. Grades, scores, learning goals and books to be used are all rules for education that we have grown accustomed to over the past years and decennia. These rules have developed by long periods of educational development and should be respected of course, but there are more rules that can be made for specific situations like workshops or regular lessons. For instance, a workshop about Dutch literature would be completely different from a flight simulator lesson.

The basic rule that emerges from every game or lesson is the goal or objective that has to be reached at the end of it. A lesson might be focused on the goal of doctors understanding how to talk to their patients for instance. Similarly, a game might be based around the objective of children understanding what certain diseases are. Both are built by defining objects and concepts, adding resources that the player can interact with, setting limitations to this interaction and finally creating conflict by letting the player reach the goal.

(…) Classroom rules are not the merely instrumental tools of management they are often taken to be, but rather that they are structures of meaning used by teachers and students to make sense of the world. (Boostrom, 1991)

This theory shows that rules of play and games can be very parallel to classroom rules and thus leads to a teacher having the role similar to that of a game designer because both are trying to create the same rules that make sense of the real world or the world within a game. Especially when classes are free to attend, a teacher needs to innovate with new rules and boundaries to attract students to their classes, similar to game designers creating a free to play game. Lenient rules can attract a lot of players and students to games and lessons, but when they are unclear they might cause cheating or otherwise strange behaviour. Additionally, when rules become too strict or complex a player might not understand the rules and they will make choices that do not make meaningful sense (Fullerton, 2014). When the rules compliment all the systems that are in place, the optimal player behaviours is encouraged. Finding the ideal ruleset for a classroom is just as difficult as finding the right one for a game, but when combining the two it might reduce pressure on both the students and the teacher. Combining the “rigidity of classroom rules” and the “softness of play” can provide a good platform for learning and innovation. (Salen K. , 2009)

Game designers, teachers and players will always be dependent on clear rules to reduce confusion and to create a natural flow to a lesson or game. The second part of a playful experience is the user interaction or ‘play’ that occurs when people start engaging with these clear rules. A playful lesson that contains a lot of feedback from both the teacher and the student lets the teacher improve their ruleset for the next session, much like a play testing session. Improvement and feedback is also very important for the student, negative and positive feedback influences the way they interact with their fellow students and their teacher. Katie Salen’s talk about the Institute of Play pointed out that a constant flow of feedback between students and turning them into peers or teachers of each other can create certain ‘nodes’ within a class or course. In this particular curriculum at the school it was experimented in, students actually requested lessons to solve certain math problems. The teachers in this school set clear goals for the students that consisted of solving problems and they presented the resources the students could use to do this. By doing this, they created a game for the students that was about figuring out how to solve the problems that were presented to them (Salen K. , 2009). However, play is still the experimental phase of the system that Salen and Zimmerman described, results will be different with every session and that is why results must be evaluated, revised and tested again to improve the effects they have on the learning goals and objectives (Salen K. &., 2003). Interestingly, an evaluation process that is similar to game development is very easily applicable to this. When describing an optimal play testing process, a continual iterative process of play testing, evaluation and revising is the way to keep the game from straying during a long process of development (Fullerton, 2014). It will keep the process on the initial path that was set when defining the objectives, goals and concepts, making the rules, etc. Seeing a lesson as a game and gathering evaluative feedback at every iteration can improve the teaching methods over time that are then more directed towards the needs of the student.

The third part of a game or playful experience is culture, which can also be seen as context or outcome. Many theories have already been made about what play in culture is, for instance Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens” (Huizinga, 1938), Callois’ “Man, play, and games” (Caillois, 1961) and Dibell’s “Play money: or how I quit my day job and made millions trading virtual loot” (Dibbell, 2007).

In Huizinga’s book Homo Ludens he focuses on the core of play in culture.

When speaking of the play-element in culture we do not mean that among the various activities of civilized life an important place is reserved for play, nor do we mean that civilization has arisen out of play by some evolutionary process, in the sense that something which was originally play passed into something which was no longer play and could henceforth be called culture. The view we take in the following pages is that culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. (Huizinga, 1938)

His study was about how play is woven into culture because man is playful from itself. We shape our cultures and societies by being playful. Social interactions with each other are formed through play and many traditions in different cultures are based around it. Huizinga also introduced the popular concept of the ‘magic circle’ of play. Homo Ludens is mostly about how culture is playful but it obviously does not have the context of all the different video games that are available now. Man, Play and Games is also pretty difficult to apply to play in video games, with the point of play being unproductive and free to participate in. However, video games contain play and are being used in education at the same time. And additionally, games with the goal of entertaining the player most often also lie behind a price that has to be paid. To connect education and game design better, Dibbell’s experiment and study Play Money: or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot is a good example of how modern games connect to our current culture. Julian Dibbell wrote a book about his experience in quitting his day job and immersing himself into the world of the massive multiplayer online game called Ultima Online. Dibbell experienced that modern MMO’s contain productive play, doing hard labor within a game to reach a certain wealth in the game and achieve goals more easily. Dibbell calls this Ludo capitalism, a strong deviation from capitalism where the binary between work and play is changed into a mix between the two. Dibbell thinks that we are entering “a curious new industrial revolution, driven by play as the first was driven by steam” (Dibbell, 2007) Which is an interesting statement, especially considering that virtual reality and other forms of user experience are still being developed at the moment.

In an essay by Steven Shaviro that is responding to Dibbell’s experience the following is mentioned that further criticizes twentieth century theorists like Huizinga and Callois.

Capitalism, as Weber shows, is grounded in the distinction between work and play – a distinction that many pre-capitalist societies did not even recognize. Capitalism traditionally exalts work as salvation, and stigmatizes play as diabolical. In the twentieth century, theorists like Huizinga, Caillois, and the Situationists sought to invert this binary, celebrating play as a subversive alternative to the Protestant Ethic and capitalist rationality. But today, the entire work/play binary has collapsed. MMOs offer us the possibility of “productive play”: something that neither the Puritan inventors of capitalism, nor its Situationist critics, could ever have understood. (Shaviro, 2007)

The essay further states that the equations and systems that are being used in the current day economy are complex in such a great way that it can also be considered a big game, further explaining the Ludification of our culture. A very interesting example of ludification in culture is the Social Credit System that China is currently developing (F. Obbema, 2015). Chinese citizens receive a score based on what friends they have and what they post on Wiebo, the Chinese alternative to Facebook. Based on this score, your creditworthiness is measured. This causes people to actually remove friends that negatively affect their score, because it has a direct effect on their financial life. Our education is also starting to become more influenced by the increase of playfulness in culture. Mixing play and work in the classroom changes a constant grind of for instance learning words of a foreign language into something that is more natural and playful. Repetitive tasks can be transformed into fun experiences by adding score or other incentive to it that gives more intrinsic motivation to the player. Duolingo is a good example of ‘gamifying’ work that relates to education. It encourages the player to keep working on their language skills and vocabulary by giving them coins and other rewards. Games are no longer a pastime, but are part of our daily working life. Furthermore, cultural context and outcome of educational games will probably change even more with the recent developments of virtual reality.

The three parts of playful experiences show that with better rules, iterative playtesting and a cultural development that allows more mixing of play and work, we should be able to make education more playful and allow for more development of innovative ways of teaching. Game designers and teachers should be able to work together to gather better feedback from students, from each other, and let the students be peers from each other in order to create a natural way of teaching that fits more in our current Ludo capitalist culture. Hopefully more educational institutes will take note of the big change that is going on and they will encourage the influence of gaming companies or developing individuals in their teaching systems.

Bibliography

Boostrom, R. (1991). The nature and functions of classroom rules (Curriculum Inquiry, 21(2) ed.). Tandfonline.com. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03626784.1991.11075363

Caillois, R. &. (1961). Man, play, and games. University of Illinois Press.

Dibbell, J. (2007). Play money: Or, how I quit my day job and made millions trading virtual loot.

F. Obbema, M. V. (2015, 4 25). China rates its own citizens - including online behaviour. Retrieved from Volkskrant: http://www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/china-rates-its-own-citizens-including-online-behaviour~a3979668/

Fullerton, T. (2014). Gamedesign Workshop (Vol. Chapter 3: Working with Formal Elements). Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Huizinga, J. (1938). Homo Ludens. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

Salen, K. &. (2003). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals.

Salen, K. (2009, 11 14). TEDxLeadershipPittsburgh. Tedx. Retrieved from http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxLeadershipPittsburgh-Katie

Shaviro, S. (2007, 1 10). Money for Nothing: Virtual Worlds and Virtual Economies. Retrieved from http://www.shaviro.com/: http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/MMOs.pdf