Jamie Turner: Hello, everyone. good evening, good day, good morning, wherever you are and wherever you’re joining us from. And we all want to welcome you to our inaugural speaker series. My name is Jamie Turner and I am the COO at Digital Media Academy. Founded in 1999 on the campus of Stanford University, Digital Media Academy provides a comprehensive K-12 STEAM curriculum and consultation services to global schools and education leaders. Digomedia Academy’s curriculum covers six subject areas computer science, engineering, music and media, digital Arts, business, and game development. This public speaker series is available globally through the Digital Media Academy community. So why are we here? And what is this series about? This series aims to connect you with leading thinkers and change-makers in education to unlock the tools and knowledge needed to lead change. Today’s session is titled the Engagement Challenge game Design Thinking in K-12 STEAM Education. So, without further delay, please allow me to introduce to you Chris Bennett and the host of our series. Chris is an award-winning game designer with over 20 years of experience in the entertainment software industry, including three very successful franchises the Sims, Diner, Dash, Tiger Woods PGA Tour. Chris is a lecturer and affiliate of Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he teaches students about education, technology, and student engagement. Chris teaches studies and practices ways to apply his science of game design thinking to improve lives around the world. Chris, thank you for being with us today. It’s great to have you here.

Chris Bennett: Thank you, Jamie. I really appreciate this. And, as the host of this series, we’re flipping the script a little bit on this first one because I really wanted to give Jamie a chance to kind of ask me about some of my work and some of my work with students and work around games.

Let’s start with, what we’re going to be doing during this series. I’m super excited about this. And there’s five main challenges we’re going to be discussing. One is around the pace of changes in technology and subject-specific skills. And it’s making it almost impossible for schools to keep up. We’re also finding that top universities are relying on more than just grades. Students need to be well-rounded individuals. They need to be prepared with a portfolio of evidence that showcases their passions and their creations to get to the school they really desire. And we also find that with top talent, finding this top talent and holding on to them around the world really requires a lot of work because we want them to be able to deliver this specific content knowledge. It’s very challenging. We’re also finding increasing competition and expectations of schools to deliver things that are beyond just the traditional curriculum. Of course, during the COVID of the past several years, we’ve really found this come to the forefront. And one thing that I’m particularly interested in is that schools must provide relevant, real-world learning opportunities and student experiences that make it very relevant to, the student’s own world. And for this particular session, we’re going to be learning about four main things. one, why video games are so compelling to students and where the traditional education can often fall short. We’re going to learn about three important types of learning that involve both games and play. We’re going to learn about why project and play-based learning is critical for student success. And also we’re going to learn a little bit about Gamification, which you may have heard of, and why learning from game design can go so much more deeper than that.

Jamie Turner: So much, Chris. That’s really exciting. Ah, it’s going to be a wonderful speaker series. So, as you mentioned today, we are discussing the challenge of student engagement and maybe more specifically, the role that game design thinking plays, in education.

Jamie Turner: Chris, you are an expert game developer yourself and have had an extensive career creating and engaging, players of your games. Perhaps you could begin by sharing with us how and why you ended up in education and what you’ve been able to bring into this space. Thanks.

Chris Bennett: I appreciate it. I worked for a number of years in video game development, doing everything from Windows games to mobile games, to social games that we play online. And when I first started in games, I wondered how maybe sometime the game industry will be bigger than the movie industry. That’s what we used to talk about way back in the 90s. What we found now is not only are video games bigger than movies, they’re bigger than movies and TV and the entire music industry put together. In fact, just games that we play on our mobile phones are bigger than the movie industry. So it’s huge. It’s something that a lot of adults play, but a lot of kids play. And we find numbers of around 80 to 90% to 92% of kids in the K-12 space are playing video games on a weekly or even a daily basis. And so instead of pushing this thing away, I think it makes a lot of sense for us to embrace this and look at it, see why are they playing these games and what do they want to get out of it? And how does that cross over with our educational experience? From my own experience, after I, kind of went from working for Core Games to start consulting as a video game designer, I started spending some time at Stanford, sitting in on classes, doing some guest lecturing. And I found a couple things. One was that people who were outside of the game space kind of saw game design as like this black box. It almost seemed like magic. They didn’t understand how these things were working. Also, I was finding that I was starting to look at a lot of kind of, quote, educational games that you may have seen, and especially back then, they weren’t always really that effective. They were done for a specific pedagogical reason, but they weren’t always hitting the engagement that students were looking for. I got really interested in that crossover between what video games can do and what great education can do to lives and how we can kind of combine those two things together.

Chris Bennett: Okay, so six main things that I want to talk about, about why video games are so compelling to students. One is that games give us a series of achievable goals, and they also give us, the tools to accomplish them. Two is that games give us immediate feedback when we do something in a game, oftentimes within seconds, we know whether it was a right or wrong answer, and the game gives us feedback on that. Three, games let us explore our world. They don’t just give us kind of a critical path that takes us through the game experience. Oftentimes we get to explore a whole kind of created world around it. Interact with other players, whether they’re real people or whether what’s called kind of non player characters. Games allow us to practice inhabiting avatars, so we get to put ourself forward as something that looks different than we actually are and sometimes acts different than we are. For adults. We can sometimes look at this as being a little bit frivolous. But for someone who is growing up like, I have a daughter who’s in middle school right now and kind of, checking out different avatars and exploring her different possibilities are a key aspect of what’s making her grow into a young woman right now. Fifth, games allow us to work with others towards common goals. Again, when we look at a game, this may seem frivolous to an adult who’s looking at it from the outside, but from the inside, kids really want to work with others and they really want to see something that they’re working on together. The sense of collaboration. Games aren’t just about competition. There’s a lot in games that are about collaborating with others. And this kind of takes us to the 6th one, which I think is one of the most important ones, which is games let us achieve things greater than ourselves. Kind of in the same way that you can watch a, well-scripted TV show or go to a movie theater and watch something and see kind of these world-changing events. Games allow us to experience those things. But the big difference is that it adds in something called agency. When we’re sitting in a movie theater watching this thing happening, the only thing that we can affect is whether to sit in the chair or whether to walk out and get some popcorn. We can’t have any effect on what goes on on the screen, but when we’re playing a video game every time, we’re, ah, making adjustments in what we do and we’re making choices that affect what happens, in our game experience.

Jamie Turner: Thanks, Chris. That’s really interesting.

Chris Bennett: Current model of learning in classrooms falls short on several points

Jamie Turner: So maybe now turning to the classroom, when you look at the current model of learning in classrooms around the world, where do you see, this falling short on many of those six items that you’ve listed?

Chris Bennett: So it’s always challenging to make generalizations about classrooms because they are so different. But over the past five or ten years, I have got a chance to sit in on a lot of classrooms, not just as a teacher, but as an observer. And some places, some amazing prep schools in the Bay Area that are San Francisco Bay Area that are getting students ready for Harvard and for Stanford and other world-class universities, but also some classrooms that are less fortunate and they don’t have all these kind of shiny things that the nicer schools have. But I have found some interesting things that are similar in the classroom. We often give students tasks and tools, but the students often fail to see the overall goals of what they’re doing and how these will be accomplished. And I think it feels to many students like they’re being kind of pushed through the curriculum and that there is a teacher on the other end that’s kind of pulling them through to get this done, but they don’t have a big sense of why they’re doing this or kind of where it’s going. A second piece is that students get feedback on tests, quizzes, and homework, but sometimes they get this days later. And when we look at how the grading system goes, grades can take weeks or even months to make their way through the system. And what we find then is that the connection between, the grades the student get and the pedagogy and the experience can easily be forgotten. We want students to be able to make the connection between things they did good and things they could do better, and what the learning is. At the same time, we also find that classwork is often focused on a specific path and doesn’t allow students to explore the wider world around the subject matter. A fourth one is that I especially see this in some of the top-tier schools around the country and around the world. There can be an immense pressure around learning and how it’ll affect the student’s life, especially in the upper grades and especially in some of the better schools in the world. But this is happening at the same time that young people are exploring the concept of avatars and what it would be like to be another type of person. And some of this is fantasy-based, but much of it has a practical application, I think. How do you know who you will become if you aren’t able to try on different experiences on for size? And a fifth one is my observation is that school can sometimes feel like a game of multiplayer solitaire, and by that I mean that students are working in a classroom together, but they’re focused on their own work and their own experience. And not only is collaboration often not discouraged, a lot of times it’s forbidden during class, and students don’t get a chance to collaborate on these things together to really buttress the learning that they’re having. And finally, the classroom experiences can often provide learning that happens in a vacuum, doesn’t have a wider sense of the world around it and how students are going to be affecting this. Students are learning something, but they don’t have an opportunity to, and they don’t have an incentive to apply it to the world around them. And again, we’re not just trying to get students through the curriculum and through the schools. We all want to create students that are going to become, adults and become young leaders and people who can make positive effect on the world around them.

Jamie Turner: That’s really fascinating, Chris. I love that multiplayer solitaire idea. It’s very true. also, I feel like I have been, at times, one of those educators pulling or pushing students through or across the finish line, and often it’s the students that race ahead that we don’t have to worry about as much because they’re independent and they’re sort of self-motivated. And maybe there’s a group of students that we’re really feeling like we have to pull through that get the majority of our attention. And so, yeah, these are real challenges facing the current traditional education model.

When we talk about game design thinking, we’ll talk about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation

Chris, maybe a second, follow-up question. can you speak a little bit about how games and motivation for students cross over?

Chris Bennett: Sure. We’ll talk about this a little bit later. When we talk about game design thinking, we’ll talk about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. But when we look at really what motivates students, we look at what’s called intrinsic motivation. This is motivation that’s internal to the student and to what they’re doing, as opposed to extrinsic motivation, which is something that’s, external, and we’ll talk about that later with kind of giving badges and points inside of classes. There are four main types of intrinsic motivation. And again, this isn’t just for students in a classroom. This works everywhere and for everyone. This works for you at your workplace. This works for you in your personal relationships. One is meaningfulness. Students need to feel that what they’re doing is important and feel like they’re contributing to something that has real value. Not just real value in the classroom, but real value amongst the student population, real value in their neighborhood and their city and in the world. The second thing is choice. Students sense a possibility to influence their work. This connects to a feeling of ownership and responsibility for their own work. Remember M? I talked about that a few minutes ago with the difference between going to a movie and playing a video game is in the video game, you have real choice. You can really affect what happens on the screen. And in a well-rounded classroom, there’s real choice so students can have an effect on their learning and kind of how it affects the world. The third one is competence, and this is a tough one for a lot of students. And again, as a parent of a middle schooler, I’m feeling this right now is students feel like they’re performing their learning tasks well. They’re competent, they feel proud of their classroom accomplishments. And the fourth one is that students have confidence in their future, and they feel that they’re doing the right things and that they always can see a light at the end of the tunnel. And as educators, that can be a really challenging one for us.

Jamie Turner: Thanks, Chris.

Chris Bennett: I hear a lot that we need to completely redesign schools

Jamie Turner: So let’s get a little bit more practical. What do you feel this would look like in a classroom?

Chris Bennett: I think that it’s kind of watching a lot of videos and listening to podcasts about this. I hear a lot that we need to completely redesign schools, and we need to completely redesign the educational experience to make change. And in a perfect world, that would be great. I work with people who are completely redesigning schools because they want to test these things out. But from a practical matter, if you’re running a school, you can’t just close it down and completely redesign it. But what often happens is this leads to doing little or nothing because the perceived costs are so high. But what we can do is follow a different road of taking the current experience that we’re providing for students, knowing that there’s a huge amount of value in that, but that there are some points of weakness in there. How do we identify those points of weakness and how do we design for those? Let’s remember that much of what we’re doing for students is really good and really helpful. It’s just that there are some things that are slowing engagement and motivation down, and that’s what happens is it decreases the overall learning experience.

Jamie Turner: Thank you. That’s really helpful. I think many of our viewers today are leaders of schools and traditional schools maybe trying to be on the forefront of some of this change. So that’s really helpful to contextualize. Chris, let’s move on to the next question. There’s basically a continuum of games and play and education. The three most important types of learning that involve games and play. What are those, in your opinion?

Chris Bennett: So there’s basically a continuum of games and play and education. If we move all the way over to the left, it’s where everything that happens is scripted. Even the teacher in a classroom doesn’t have much choice, the students don’t have much choice. That’s a lot of what traditional education is like. And what I’m trying to do is push it a little bit more to the right. And so we’re going to talk about three different things in the continuum. There kind of what we might find in the middle is what’s called collaborative play. And collaborative play is where students are playing with and learning with others towards a common goal or a purpose. We have some examples there like it might have a treasure hunt, inside class. We might be solving puzzles together or any sort of team games that have the collaborative element. When we move more to the right, we get to something that I find really interesting called playful learning. And playful learning is we’ve been starting to see a lot more scientific research around this in the past ten years. This is around bringing choice and wonder and delight into the learning space using things like exploration and discovery. Examples of this might be using role playing in the classroom to set up a new situation that many students have never experienced before. Another example is letting students take over pieces of the classroom experience and seeing what it’s like to have the ownership and responsibility for designing and learning. And when we look at playful learning, we see five different important elements of play. One is that play in and of itself is spontaneous and intrinsically motivating, which means that it moves towards the goals and aspirations of the students themselves. Two is that playful learning is active and it doesn’t require students to sit back and consume content. It can be solitary and focused, or it can be social and cognitive. And both are relevant types of playful learning. The third piece is that play is rule-bound and students understand and even get a chance to make up the rules. Four is that playful learning is symbolic and it’s meaningful and it’s transformational, not just in the classroom, but in the student’s experience. And fifth, playful learning is fun. It’s a pure, pleasurable experience. And then if we move all the way over in the continuum, to using games in the classroom, we have something that’s called game-based learning. And one example of this that you might have seen before is using Minecraft in the classroom. Minecraft, has actually done some great work around creating interactive lessons where students get a chance to play Minecraft, but we get a chance to connect it to learning goals and learning outcomes in the classroom. And game-based learning is playing games to learn a specific skill or a topic. Sometimes we see this referred to as serious games or games which have a learning goal.

Jamie Turner: Thanks, Chris. That’s fascinating. I’m a visual learner. I hope know we’re going to try to share following the sessions, a bit of a visual of this continuum and maybe some links to some things you could, learn more. I think that would be helpful, Chris, for our audience.

Jamie Turner: Let’s move on to the next question. Why project or play based learning is critical for student success? A lot of us in education have heard about PBL or project based learning for a long time. Play based learning is maybe, a little bit more new to us. Why is that critical for student success?

Chris Bennett: So again, it’s a bit of a continuum there. When we do project-based learning or PBL, we’re trying to add in relevance, kind of world relevance into the classroom. In play-based learning, we’re adding in more of student choice, kind of more fun, more exploration. And then when we get to game-based learning, we’re actually using games to do these types of things. But there’s four main reasons why I think why project and play-based learning is so critical for student success. And it’s all-around engagement. The first one is called effective Engagement, effective with an A. And this is the student’s emotional response to learning how they’re feeling as a result of the learning process. The second one is behavioral engagement. And behavioral engagement are the actions and behaviors that students take while learning. These may be helpful to or detrimental to learning, but, we have to think about the fact that students are behaving in a certain way and we want to nudge them towards more positive behaviors, not just for the classroom, but for their own learning and their own experience. The third one is cognitive engagement. There’s mental effort and thinking strategies that students use while learning. This is related to some things that you may have heard of called fast and slow or type one and type two thinking. And some of the work that you might have heard around growth mindset of, what is a fixed mindset versus what’s a growth mindset of kids and students really feeling that they can grow in a classroom. And the fourth one is a social and cultural engagement. And this is interaction between students and their peers and the interaction between students and the school staff. And practicing this in a classroom is so critical because students need to learn how to properly navigate their world while also feeling that they have some focus of control over that and going through the experience and just kind of having it happen to them doesn’t let them properly practice these skills.

Jamie Turner: I love that breakdown, Chris. Of those four, different areas for student success, I’ve often felt the playground itself and watching young learners on the playground is a space where they are just learning, they’re observing, they’re watching, they’re copying, they’re repeating. And I know as an educator, I’ve had those experiences. maybe they feel few and far between, but where your classroom feels like a playground and learners are not there out of resentment, they’re not there out of obligation, but rather, they’re excited by what you’re doing and engaging in learning in a playful way. And I think those four effective behavioral, cognitive, and social-cultural engagement is really interesting to unpack. So thank you.

Chris Bennett: Can I make one note about playground, since you brought that up? I find it really interesting that when, kids are what in North America, they called kindergarten around kind of five or six years old, there are huge amounts of time where kids are outside often, and they’re playing and they’re running around kind of what parents would consider kind of wasting time. But really there’s important social, emotional learning that’s going on. And what I find is the older that kids get and as they go through the school experience, they start taking those things away. Until by the time you’re in kind of the high school or upper levels, the only time that you’re really spending time with other students outside the classroom is walking in between classes or maybe a bit of time around lunch. And we basically take all that play and all that experience, and we take it away from them. So I think finding opportunities to bring that play and those opportunities for social, emotional learning back into the classroom, where it’s still relevant for the pedagogy are super important.

Jamie Turner: Yeah, I completely agree. Maybe we’ve seen movements in the last five years towards more growth of outdoor education, for example, or maybe during COVID In particular, growth of pod learning or home school learning where students are engaging ah, more and more with peers, not in a formal school setting as well as maybe starting the educational formal education later, in life and delaying the beginning to allow for more play. These are really interesting, fads and phases that are happening in education.

Jamie Turner: Let’s, move on to the next question, why learning from game design goes much deeper than gamification. You could help us to just differentiate these two terms, Chris game design, thinking and gamification. And then sort of how game design goes deeper than gamification.

Chris Bennett: Sure. I mean, the whole concept of game design thinking that I created with one of my colleagues, Margarita Kiwis, kind of a dissatisfaction of a gamification about, say, around ten years ago. Because what I was seeing was this trend around gamification, which is taking the extrinsic or external parts of games and applying them to a non game situation like a classroom. And that’s where we got things like adding badges and points to reward students and keep them engaged. And, this can work for limited periods of time, but it doesn’t typically lead to long term change. What I kind of see gamification as is a bit of a path. If you’re walking through a city and you’re trying to find some big landmark and, ah, there’s something on the road or the sidewalk that kind of guides you along the way. That’s the gamification portion, the extrinsic. But you need to be able to see that. You need to be able to see that in the distance, the intrinsic part, to really have a goal of where you’re going, right? And as I was sitting in classes again and starting to lecture and work with, a lot of students, we started to think about what are some of these kind of tools, techniques that we might be able to use to kind of bridge that gap. There are several things that I’ll only have a chance to touch on. Love to dig in on these things later. One of them is some great work that Heather Browning did, back in 2015, where she took a seminal game design framework called the MDA Framework, and used it for serious games by adding outcomes to it. And what she posited is that mechanics and these are the kind of, the rules and systems that we see either in a game or in a piece of, learning, lead to dynamics. And the dynamics are kind of what we say in America, like when the rubber meets the road, when you have a lesson plan and you bring it into a classroom, it never works how you expect it’s going to work the first time. And those dynamics are when the learners meet the mechanics or the rules or systems that you put in place there. And when those dynamics happen, aesthetics happen. And the aesthetics are the emotions and the feelings that people, in this case, that learners have, right? So if we bring something into a classroom and it doesn’t work how we think, and learners are frustrated with it, they’re not going to get the desired outcome of learning from that. And so these aesthetics, these feelings and emotions learn to lead to outcomes. What we want to do is sculpt kind of experiences for students to have that are going to lead to really interesting dynamics that are going to lead to really useful aesthetics or feelings and emotions that are going to lead to the desired outcomes. Not just for us as the school administrators, but are also going to lead to desired outcomes for the students. So what we do with this is do kind of a backward based, design around this, where when I work with students ah, at Stanford and work, in a class where they’re creating pieces of online learning the very first thing that we have them do is think about what the desired outcomes are like, not only for them, as educators, but as the students themselves. Then we start to work backward to, well, what are the feelings and emotions that these learners are going to. Have to reach these outcomes. And some of this is usually involved talking to the students, having some interviews, doing some needs finding. And once we have those aesthetics, we start to work backward to the dynamics of what’s actually going to need to happen in the classroom or online, if this is something that’s online to reach those feelings and emotions. And only then do we get back to the mechanics of what we’re actually going to be doing in the classroom. I’m taking two minutes to explain something that I usually take an hour to explain to, but wanted to give you a sense of that.

Chris Bennett: Another thing is something that we call the core engagement loop that Margarita Quihuis and I developed. What we’re trying to do is take game engagement loops where you see something happen in the game, you react to it, you do something, and the game changes as a result and think about how that happens in the real world. And we see four main things that we do over and over again, not just in the classroom, but in life. And we think about how we assess the choices that are in front of us. Once we have assessed these things, our brains are really good at getting choices down. So if you’ve ever been to a restaurant for the first time, and it’s one of those restaurants that has like 70 or 80 things on the menu, it can be really overwhelming because you’re not sure what you’re going to order. When you go to that restaurant the second time, I guarantee you, you’re not looking at those 70 or 80 things. You’re looking at a section of the menu that you’re really interested in. And by the third or fourth time you go to that restaurant, you may be looking at three or four things and kind of ignoring the rest of the menu. Our brains are really good at those things of kind of assessing the choices that are in front of us, and then we need to decide what it is that we’re going to do. And there’s kind of two different rewards that happen during a core engagement loop. One is the actual reward of doing something, but the second is kind of anticipating their rewards, thinking about how good it’s going to be. And again, if we go back to the metaphor of being in a restaurant or being at a coffee shop, we think about something and we’re deciding what we’re going to order and we’re thinking about how good it’s going to be. Right then the third piece of it is acting. When we actually do the thing, we order our coffee, we order our meal, or we decided something in a classroom in a project that we’re working on and we act on it. And the fourth piece is the most important part for the learner is the reward. There’s the extrinsic piece where we get a grade on something or we get feedback on something. But the more important part is the intrinsic part that happens. There’s an expectation that we might feel good about something, we might learn something. There may be something in what we’re acting in the classroom that has a bigger reward than just kind of what’s on paper in front of them. And I find when I teach this, especially to students, is that they realize that there’s not just core engagement loops in the classroom, but they start to see core engagement loops everywhere, and it starts to kind of change their thinking. It’s not just a tool in the tool belt. It’s more of like a lens that they can use to look at the world. We also spent a lot of time looking at Professor BJ Fogg’s, work around behavior. He has a great simple behavior model, and he actually has a great book that came out a year or two ago called Tiny Habits, where he’s thinking about how to get desired behaviors that you need. There’s so many things out there, especially online, that are trying to nudge us into behaviors that are good for other people. I’m really interested in nudging people into behaviors that are better for them. I want to help people become better versions of themselves. And what BJ posits in his model is that to get a desired behavior, you need the motivation to do something. You need the ability to do something. And then you also need a prompt along the way when we don’t have we really need to bump up the motivation and make it really valuable for the person. At the same time, the prompt we have to remember to ask, right, if you’ve ever done something online, like get a mortgage for a house or get a piece of insurance, you’ll suddenly oftentimes start getting flooded with mail that’s asking you, hey, do you want to refinance your mortgage? Hey, do you want to get this different type of thing? Or if you give money to a, good cause, I start to get dozens of pieces of mail around. That because they understand that you have the motivation to do this thing. You have the ability to do this thing. And so they’re throwing prompts. It’s the natural thing to do is to throw prompts in the way to see if they can get you to do that behavior again.

Jamie Turner: Thanks. I’m just going to jump in there just for the sake of time. I know. I hope I’m not interrupting your no, not at all. So interesting. Fascinating. I think that concept of the core engagement loop and some of that research that’s gone into going beyond gamification and really designing intentional, learning through game design thinking concepts. Ah, thank. you. There’s some amazing questions coming in, and I want to leave time for that. we only had 45 minutes for this session. We probably could have taken an hour and a half, but there’s a whole series to come of this. So that’s exciting.

Jamie Turner: Chris, maybe, a million dollar question that we like to ask all of our guests. Where do you in all of your research and your expertise, where do you think education is going?

Chris Bennett: That’s a huge question. It’s a good one. I think, as we’ve all known, the COVID pandemic has forced us to completely change our modes of teaching and learning. And right now, there’s a sense of kind of, how do we get back how do we get back to normal? But I think that what we’ve done is create a new normal to a certain extent, and it’s never going to totally go away. Digital learning, whether it’s an adjunct to what we do in the classroom or replacement in some cases, is here to stay. I think as kids continue to grow up with games and social media and the immediacy of the Internet, our schools need to change with them. It’s the natural thing. We need to go where the students are going and not kind of force them to stay with us. But I think that the one thing about learning that’s never going to change. And that’s engagement. Without student engagement, there is no learning. That’s the part that we need to concentrate on.

Jamie Turner: That’s really helpful. I think this is a question we ponder at Digital Media Academy all day and, all year. And COVID, certainly, whether we can say we’re a post COVID or beyond, learned how to cope with COVID world has changed things forever and opened up new opportunities to engage with learners in their homes remotely, and maybe bring real-world learning experiences closer to students than they ever could know. Coming inside the four walls of a physical building. Chris, we do have five minutes left here, and there are some really great questions coming in, and so I would like to maybe take some of those, just to kick us off here.

Jamie Turner: Time is the biggest challenge for educators. They are already busy. They’re doing, as you say, grading papers, et cetera.

How do teachers find the time and the space to use meaningful gamified learning experiences, like taking on the professional learning and how to upskill themselves? How do you see them building this into their routines and experiences?

Chris Bennett: That’s a super challenging one. The number one thing I hear from teachers is, I need more time. Not just, I need more time in the classroom, I need more time in school. I need more time in my day to be able to do all these things. And we can’t give people more time, but what we can do is try and double up a little bit. So in the classroom, what I try to do is help teachers think about where are these periods, of time in the class while you’re doing things where you might be able to double up on things? Is there a time of transition where you might be able to have kids have a little bit more choice, or a little bit of social-emotional learning, or even to help kind of flip the classroom and help design things a little bit themselves. Is there time when we’re taking a test that we might be able to build in a little bit more exploration around that, or when students are doing presentations? I try to find ways to kind of meld things together. I think about these pieces of education and play and engagement as kind of these different atoms, these different atoms. I try to see how can we meld these things together into interesting molecules for our students? It’s challenging, but we can do it.

Jamie Turner: Yeah, we have, maybe a contentious question here, Chris.

Does game-based learning limit academic progress?

Jamie Turner: I guess maybe just to put this another way, too, I think a lot of educators maybe feel like at know, using Minecraft, or it’s taking away from the precious time where you could know, focusing on the academics, or focusing on, I guess, maybe those more traditional modalities of classroom learning. So from your experience or what you’ve seen in the research, does game based or gamified learning limit academic progress?

Chris Bennett: I haven’t really seen that it could, I suppose, but it depends on how you use it. I see some schools will put a game inside of a classroom the same way that they might show a video to students on volcanoes for 15 or 20 minutes. They might have them go in a game for 15 or 20 minutes. I think the big difference between this is whenever you switch modalities, there’s some kind of switching that needs to go on in the student’s head and sometimes in the teacher’s head. And so it’s important that when you are going to change that modality, that you do it for a reason and that you don’t switch into a game for four minutes and switch back into classroom learning and switch back and forth. That when you do it, you have a real sense of why you’re doing it and that you want to spend this time wisely around it. I think it could be less effective, but it doesn’t really need to be.

Jamie Turner: Yeah, it’s interesting. Speaking from my experience, I think the key to measuring if it’s impacting student progress is the intended outcomes, that a teacher is looking to have through that learning experience. I’ve seen a lot of teachers sort of throw something against the wall and see if it sticks, or maybe throw students into a game that they themselves don’t know a lot about, with very little understanding of the intention of that game, how it’s useful to the students in what they’re trying to learn. So I think the key that I’ve seen, is intentionality, intentional design.

Jamie Turner: Let’s take we have time for a few more questions here. This is about implementation, but maybe more specifically, you could speak to how gamification has impact at different levels of age.

Is there a stage at which sort of learning pivots from game based play based to more academic rigor, or do you see it working throughout?

Jamie Turner: I guess the question here is, again, is it about hindering sort of the higher level learning skills or anything like that, by just allowing this type of play-based learning?

Chris Bennett: I think that, again, just like we talked about playground learning or kind of a playground experience, when you’re in kindergarten five or six years old, there’s a lot of it. When you’re 1617 years old, there’s very little or none of it, because we have this sense that when you get into upper levels, it has to be more serious, and you have to be spending your time on this. But what we’re really doing is kind of, in many cases, forcing students to sit in the chair and having more chair time and more book time and more kind of focused computer or laptop or iPad time. But we’re kind of forgetting about that engagement. Just because a student is focused and sitting in front does not mean that they’re engaged in the experience. So I think as we start to get the students start to get older, the play and the game base is actually more important, because what we’re trying to do is shake students out of the continuum of I’m being forced to learn this and kind of shake them into, oh, wow, what’s going on here? This is interesting. I want to explore this a little bit more once we do that. I didn’t talk about neurochemicals, but that’s literally when we have neurochemicals that are happening in our brain that make us focus on the task.

Jamie Turner: Okay. There is a whole plethora of questions here, Chris, but we do have to pause there. so thank you today. I just want to wrap up, and I want to thank you, Chris, for being here today with us. It’s an absolute pleasure to hear from your own experience, Chris, as a game developer, and obviously your research and knowledge of game design, thinking and gamification and education. So thank you so much. I do want to thank Digital Media Academy for sponsoring this series. you can find out more about Digital Media Academy on our website, digitalmediaacademy.org or contact us anytime at info@digitalmediaacademy.org.

Chris will be in conversation with Andre Noodleman and Professor Prashant Loyalka in November, so please do keep an eye out for those.

On behalf of, Chris and, and Digital Media Academy, I would like to thank everyone who was able to join us. Take care.