A couple of years ago Sarah Brown wrote about gamification strategies and the new wave of activity trackers—many of which have game theory elements built into them, e.g. leaderboards, badges, levels, etc.—and how these elements helped her re-imagine how she approached running.

While there is much talk about how adding these types of elements into classes may help to engage our students, the question, at least in my mind, is how much of this do we really want to add to our classes? Does everything have to be a game? At what point are we dumbing down the educational delivery method in order to make it more fun? And if we do this what message are we sending our students? If it isn’t fun, is it not worth doing?

I think these are large philosophical questions that bare a closer look, at some point, but, even given these questions, I do think there are ways to make parts of our classes more fun. At the D2L Fusion Conference (June 2015) in Orlando I was able to sit in on a session conducted by Vincent King-Spezzo, an instructional designer at Valdosta State University, about gamification. What was interesting about his presentation was the way he implemented game theory in his class. It wasn’t used for learning the “meat” of his course, but as a way for students to earn extra credit points.

In particular, he was interested in providing multiple opportunities for extra credit that were spaced throughout the quarter versus just providing opportunities at the end of the quarter or when students requested them. He believed that setting these opportunities up as a game would increase student participation and engagement. (And smartly, doing this as an extra credit activity meant that if it was a complete failure the “meat” of the class wasn’t affected.)

Vincent created opportunities for students to earn extra credit points that could be redeemed for up to 5 percentage points. Students achieved these points via in-class activities, optional assignments, pop-questions and other activities. The activities were varied as were the points associated with them. Pop-Questions, for example, were short answer type activities that required more commitment from the students. The questions were meant to check understanding and scaffold the concepts in the class. These activities were worth a variety of points. Optional Assignments (referred to as Boss Fights) were worth the most points and required higher level thinking from the students. And finally Grinders—repetitive tasks like defining terms or creating flash cards—rounded out the options. Grinders were worth the least number of points.

I won’t spend time going into the specifics of how he set this up in D2L (you can learn more here), but instead want to talk a little about the results. Interestingly, he found that all the students, to some extent, participated. He found that the students who tended to struggle actually spent more time on these activities (although in at least one case it was to the detriment of the graded work). He also found that Leaderboards were motivating students to maintain their rankings among each other.

This was an entry level course that required students to do a lot of “drill and kill” type activities to internalize the material. Gamifying these activities increased student engagement in a way that they found fun. What really drives game theory is the fact that when you are having “fun” you don’t mind the work. This is certainly one way to look at delivering education and in particular foundational-level classes where you “just have to learn” the material. That being said, life is not a game, and there are many other ways to engage and motivate. Think about your best teachers, they likely made learning fun, not because it was a game, but because they were so passionate about the topic and you felt like they cared about your success. But, if you do find yourself wanting to experiment or simply want to add a game element into a class, extra credit opportunities could be just the place to do it.