approached life the way you would play a
video game in games people choose to
spend hundreds and thousands of hours
working on challenging problems they
choose to enter environments where they
have little to no skill and explore an
experiment until they figure out how to
succeed they solve problems by thinking
about their own strengths and their
weaknesses and the circumstances around
them until they can come up with a
solution that works if you could take
that mindset that pattern of discovering
and failing and practicing and mastering
the willingness to work on it intensely
the confidence that you can achieve your
goal if you could apply that to your own
life what would you achieve the game
mindset tells us that any problem we
encounter is there for you to solve you
just need to think about it right work
on it enough build a community of people
to help you and try it one more time if
you could draw that mindset out of your
game controllers figure out what drives
it I am a gameful designer I study games
and the powerful learning environments
that they create and I use them as
inspiration to reimagine how learning
could happen anywhere I’m also the lead
developer of gradecraft
an application that we’ve built
specifically to support these learning
experiences because as we’ve found with
these spaces they need to be carefully
curated today I’m gonna draw out a
couple of motivational principles that
video games use to convince us to work
so hard I’m gonna describe a couple of
the techniques that we’re using in
courses to transform them into better
learning experiences
I’m going to call out a couple of things
that you can do to change any learning
environment that you find yourself in to
make it more engaging games are more
similar to school structurally than you
might have imagined games are formally
defined as systems in which players
engage in artificial conflict so any
test or assignment that you may have
ever taken defined by rules the grading
schemes that you find yourself measured
against and resulting in a quantifiable
outcome the grade you learn what makes
school and grades so fundamentally
different in experience I believe that
the core reason they are different is
that games leverage the power of what
psychologists call intrinsic motivation
to convince us to work us through the
process of wanting to learn while school
relies on graves and degrees extrinsic
motivators to pull us through what they
want us to learn but we designed school
this way and I believe that we can
change how this functions schoolers that
exist today is a relatively recent
invention modern education is a direct
product of industrialization grades were
actually invented in factories to
convince to help describe whether or not
the goods that were created were good
enough to be sold in order to
mass-produce education we grouped
students by age we standardized content
and assignments but it’s important to
remember that grades were never never
not from the beginning about good
learning or teaching they were brought
in to help sort students into categories
of whether or not how well they were
doing the industrialization of education
was a massive achievement broadening
access to millions but what did we lose
in that transition a tutor can customize
learning to an
student a teacher facing 30-plus
students in a classroom where do they
focus their instruction at any given
moment someone is ahead and therefore
bored and someone is behind and
therefore unlikely to succeed we are
just now approaching the moment where we
can imagine building technology that
enables instructors to personalize
learning for all while continuing to
broaden access the trouble is that we’re
building these innovative technologies
within the box of an educational system
that was designed for standardization
traditional school structures doubled
down on extrinsic motivation good grades
are an incentive to get students to take
action for the purposes of earning a
good grade I have written about topics I
did not find interesting or relevant to
my future I have subscribed to all sorts
of timelines and deadlines formatting
requirements length requirements that
had nothing to do with my own content
mastery and certainly weren’t good for
my health my social or emotional life or
my learning in other classes I have
crammed to earn good grades in classes
that featured final exams that were high
stakes but I really wish I could tell
you anything about what I learned in
those classes and to pull back the
curtain on the other side of this
endeavor ask teachers what it’s like to
grade mind-numbingly boring they will
tell you painful grades have become such
a powerful and effective incentive that
we have lost all sight of the learning
grades penalize us for what we don’t yet
know and fail to communicate to others
what we actually have learned we’ve
replaced the sense of achievement from
learning something new with the relief
of having been deemed just good enough
to go on think back about grades that
you earned and what they actually
represented
at the assignment level they usually
describe something about your
proficiency level how good you were at
something but they also probably
describe how good you are at following
instructions at the course level they
summarized a bunch of assignments and
they have it usually a stronger weight
on things like cumulative exams or final
projects or papers but somewhere in that
grade there’s also usually something
about how often you went to class
whether you felt comfortable talking in
class how well you and the instructor
got along how hard the instructor
thought you worked when we’ve inflated
all of that learning into a single
letter grade we have a remarkably little
idea of what a student has learned or
knows from any particular class 40 years
of motivation research has produced
self-determination theory it highlights
the powerful effect of intrinsic
motivation when you’re intrinsically
motivated you take action because you
want to you’re interested in the topic
you enjoy the activity and the research
shows tremendous benefits to both you
and the work you do when you’re
intrinsically motivated you work harder
you learn more deeply you’re more
creative
there are even ties to better health
grades are a powerful extrinsic
motivator but they fall flat when it
comes to nurturing the intrinsic
motivation to learn so how do we move
from a system that is built so totally
around extrinsic motivation and over to
one that can support learning in a way
that would do so much good research
tells us that you need three things to
support intrinsic motivation the first
thing you need is autonomy you need to
have meaningful choices over what you do
and how you do it the second thing you
need is competency you need to feel like
you have a shot at succeeding that means
that it needs to feel accessible to you
but also that it’s hard enough to be
interesting it’s
challenge finally you need to feel
belongingness you need to feel connected
to the people around you like they
respect you and think that you’re
capable of doing this work consider how
games and school compare on the three
principles of intrinsic motivation games
give us autonomy in spades
we make choices about when to play and
where to play and who to play as and
gonna play with what to pick up which
path to take school not so much in a
class together students will do these
same work in the same way at the same
time all for achieving the same learning
objectives without consideration for
where they came from or where they’re
going with that knowledge game designers
enforce competency players start with
easy tasks and they build hard ones if
you don’t learn you can’t go on school
on the other hand takes an assembly line
approach to learning students move
forward on the conveyor belt of
knowledge regardless of where their own
competency sits and a solely based on
the time in the course we set the
expectation of achieving competency but
we have such brittle markers for
actually managing it students might fail
a class and have to retake it and if
they don’t they can’t take an advanced
level course on the other hand maybe you
skip a class you test out of it or you
skip a grade but these are rare outcomes
it’s far more common to move forward
with a relative relatively mediocre
grade that has no information in it
about what the next instructor who works
with you needs to know about what you do
or don’t know for them to build on
finally consider the powerful way that
games use community to build
belongingness think back on the best
teachers that you had the ones who
changed your life the ones who made your
friends rave after class they
they have some magic about bringing
content to life sure but they also
shared with you the feeling that you
could succeed it’s a simple thing but
has it it has a remarkably profound
effect on our motivation and when you
find yourself in the opposite
circumstance and you’re fighting not
only to learn but the very perception
that you’re capable of learning it’s
incredibly hard to be motivated to put
in the effort in this fight so what can
we do to change how formal education
works to support intrinsic motivation
the first thing that we can do that we
are doing is change how these courses
actually work for the past five years
I’ve been working with a team of
instructors all over the country to make
courses gameful we have built gradecraft
specifically to support these courses
because the things that we’re changing
fundamentally alter how courses work and
the assumptions that and they question
the assumptions that other learning
technologies are based on the first
thing we do is we take a cue from how
video game leveling systems actually
work you start with zero you build up
every time you do something you earn
points and recognition of that progress
this steps away from the traditional
school model where you start with a
hundred percent you haven’t actually
shown that you know anything and every
time you do something you lose points
you go down next we build choices into
the course design itself depending on
the course and the instructor we have
had students empowered to make decisions
about which learning objectives to focus
on when to do assignments who to work
with whether or not to take final exams
how much assignments will count towards
their grades we make competency explicit
we create advanced assignments that you
have to do earlier preparatory
assignments in order to unlock you may
have to do the early assignments
multiple times before you show that
you’ve got the skill and the knowledge
to move on we say no to grading curves
because if your success depends on your
peers failure there is no chance that
you will be motivated to help each other
learn in these environments at any
moment in our lives most of us are
facing the need to learn something new
my work focuses on how to build
intrinsic motivation into our formal
education to improve the learning and
motivation in that space but the thing
that I’ve most taken away from my work
is that if we understand intrinsic
motivation it is such a powerful thing
that we can embed it in our own lives to
improve any learning environment we find
ourselves in so here’s my list on how to
do just that
one seek out the challenge whatever it
is that you do whatever space you work
within find the limits of your abilities
and your knowledge and push do not be
bored do not host find the hardest thing
that you think you can do and try it out
to allow for failure because if you
picked the right challenge it’s not
gonna be easy try it out again and again
practice ask for help ask the people
around you what it is but you are not
doing right and do just that and if
you’re not failing if you’re succeeding
at it every time you didn’t pick a hard
enough challenge up the difficulty level
work at the just that edge of your
ability that is where there is so much
learning to be had three collaborate the
group work that we do in school can feel
inauthentic and painful but most of life
beyond school involves working with a
team teams have been some of the most
profound spaces that I have ever
experienced it’s where you are pushed to
be your best self it’s where you are
pushed to grow figure out how to be part
of a good team how to communicate
how to learn some other people for Maude
teaching is hard and I have had a front
row seat to instructors choosing to up
their own difficulty level because the
impact that they’re seeing on their
students is profound so you have mad
props to the people that we’re working
with us on this but if you find yourself
in a course that has a more traditional
structure recognize how hard that is to
and don’t give up on the idea of the
internet being intrinsically motivated
find ways to make that course work for
you ask if you can customize an
assignment bring learning from outside
the classroom in take opportunities and
ask the instructor if you can expand
your knowledge and finally learning is
better than grades bad grades won’t get
you a job but good grades don’t mean
that you do we are increasingly hearing
from employers that they’re not looking
at GPA and transcript because they tell
such a limited story after school you
are left with whatever you’ve earned and
whether or not you have learned how to
learn today we have more resources
available to us to learn than ever
before we can learn anything so explore
diversify specialize but whatever you
choose to pursue to learn make sure that
you do it with your own goals in mind
you just may be surprised how you can level up your own life thank you