According to Marc Prensky (2001), a leader in the field of GBL and the keynote speaker at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) General Education Conference in 2009, our students today have little tolerance for our carefully scripted lectures and “tell-test” instruction. They prefer image-based learning and receiving data quickly, and perform better in an environment of rewards (Prensky). In short, they desire games.

Of course, your classroom does not have to involve opening boxes of games every day in order to reap the benefits of GBL. Yet it’s important to realize how much your learning environment might already mimic a game environment because of your teaching principles or beliefs. Keramidas (2010) has illustrated how the general principles of game design can apply to any discipline through an instructor making changes to the “timing of assignments... encouraging more student-led learning sessions,” and incorporating other active-learning concepts (p. 6). Also, I would argue that for students to fully retain a new concept, such as the model for a comparative essay or the model for a logical fallacy, you have to give them very small parts to practice, with just a few rules. In other words, you make the learning constraints narrow and understandable. In traditional teaching, we would call this “scaffolding.” In GBL, we would call this a game.

Whether you wish to bring actual writing games into your class, or just to better inform your pedagogy by understanding the value of games, there are fundamental principles behind GBL you should be aware of. Although Prensky does not classify his data as such, my close reading of his work led me to discover four of these principles, detailed on the right. Moreover, I have found that good games have many other principles that students respond favorably to. James Gee (2003/2007) was the first to recognize this, and lists 36 learning principles (later reduced to 13) in his famous book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. On the right are seven of his principles that I believe are the core of game-based learning. Gee, an Arizona State professor of literacy, is talking specifically about video games, but his principles apply to non-digital games as well.

PRENSKY’S ENGAGEMENT

PRINCIPLES

Your class is reading Julius Caesar, so you’ve decided to show them a documentary video, maybe a Google Earth video, about Rome. Showing a video will incorporate a few, but not all, of Prensky’s principles, making the lesson on Julius Caesar more interactive and thus more engaging to a digital native. However, Prensky’s principles do not automatically create better learning. They create engagement. (If they created better learning, the great debate about whether multi-tasking helps or hinders our students would be over by now.) Still, we all know that being engaged in material is the first step towards learning that material.

The two principles engaging students in your video lesson are “graphics,” and “fast or random access” to the subject. But perhaps you thought that watching a video wasn’t active enough, so you added a second assignment, a pop quiz, during the video. Then you asked them, “Based on their descriptions in the texts we’ve read, can you identify the famous buildings appearing here in this video? Write down their names for one minute, then we’ll pause the video and see who got the most correct—go!” Now you’ve incorporated “multi-tasking,” as well as the promise of “frequent rewards” during the inevitable review session, since I would classify instructor feedback as one the biggest rewards for students.

Engagement is never a bad quality to have in a lesson, as long as it doesn’t interfere with understanding. But when students are using the technologies called “games” in their lessons, the lessons will not just be engaging; they will carry equally addictive learning principles.

IDENTITY and CO-DESIGN (Gee)

Gee’s first group of learning principles, the principles of “identity” and “co-design,” are concerned with roles. Co-design is achieved when students have agency over their work, such as picking their research projects, creating their own midterm questions, or designing study aids for other students, since Gee (2003/2007) says, “critical learning in any domain should lead to learners becoming, in a sense, designers” (p. 96)).  Co-design can lead to identity, so if you have a student who was designing study aids for other students, designate him as the class “run-on sentence checker,” and ask him to walk from desk to desk helping students with their run-ons by showing them his own model examples. That student is now identifying with the role of a teacher. Likewise, if a student is told she must do a presentation on individual responsibility that argues from, say, Hamlet’s perspective, or Karl Marx’s (and maybe dresses up), Gee believes this creates powerful, immersive learning, and gives the student a sense of academic responsibility. The founders of the Quest Atlantis teaching with games project, Sasha Barab, Melissa Gresalfi, and Adam Ingram-Goble (2010), specifically identified this Gee principle at work in their school:

1. videogames—with narratives that are playable—have the additional potential to position players to experience [Gee’s] sense of agency and consequentiality (Gee, 2003). Realistically, students rarely have the opportunity or the ability to solve a real-world water-quality problem or to write a persuasive article to determine the direction of a community decision. Yet in the sheltered story line of a fictional video game world, we can create this opportunity and make the role […] quite believable. (p. 526)
   

WELL-ORDERED PROBLEMS and CYCLES OF EXPERTISE (Gee)

The next four learning principles are about problem-solving and strategic-thinking. Often in games, problems are ordered so that the “hypotheses” you learn will assist you later (Gee, 2003/2007, 2007). You master content by “routinizing” your earlier learned skills (Gee, 2003/2007, 2007), for example how to get information from townspeople in a video game, which is then used to practice mastery of new and more challenging content, like deciding which of the different options the townspeople have told you about are best to pursue. We see this in school when disciplines sequence their core classes so that (we hope) students will learn basic skills before advanced ones. If done correctly, this cycling of expertise allows a new obstacle to be intellectually challenging, yet relevant to your older skills (Gee, 2003/2007, 2007). School, says Gee, should be run the same way.

INFORMATION “ON DEMAND” & “JUST IN TIME” and

SITUATED MEANINGS (Gee)

Additionally, rather than overwhelming a learner, new directions should be delivered as needed or “just in time,” with the learning terms “situated” in respect to the items they refer to—which is what games do, constantly (Gee, 2003/2007, 2007). To show respect to Gee, let me situate the term “situated meaning” with an example: if you really want students to write a good paper on terrorism, or understand the gender differences they see in society, or to know what a thesis is, these terms have to be discussed multiple times, and compared or “situated” to other terms you are using, such as “war on terror” or “masculine” or “central focus.” As Gee (2007) phrases it, “If you can’t run any models in your head—and you can’t if all you have is verbal, dictionary-like information—you can’t really understand what you are reading, hearing, or seeing” (p. 43).

Situated meanings are based in situated learning theory, such as Piaget’s concept of assimilation and accommodation, whereby a learner tries to fit a new concept within a concept he already knows. As Piaget (1964) states, “to know an object is to act on it” (p. 7). Acknowledging a student’s need to relate to information, Elbow (1983b) also argues that a lesson’s rules are better taught when they are situated in reality (though he does not use the term “situated”):

1. Where a professor of jumping might say, in effect, “I will explain the principles of jumping,” a jumping coach might say, in effect, “Let's work on learning to jump over those hurdles; in doing so I'll explain the principles of jumping.” (p. 337)
   

It’s no coincidence that Elbow describes a game, since games, by situating the lesson’s principles in a graspable problem, can easily establish the relevance of what students are trying to learn. In fact, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, I feel that a student’s method of discovering how to relate to a newly taught concept is essentially a process of relevance-making (Bisz, 2005). In my own teaching, I still slip up by explaining a list of grammar rules to the students before providing them with actual grammar problems to solve, which prevents the students from seeing the immediate relevance or application of the lesson. Instead, I should present them with a problem (regardless of whether the problem is a “game” or not), then explain the rules as they work the problem through. For example, when my students practice vocabulary using the online trivia game “Free Rice,” we play it together for a few minutes, during which I sneak in a few comments about how wonderfully important word roots are, then a minute later I stop the game and give them a full-blown, traditional lecture on word roots. Finally we return to the game, and now my students are eagerly checking their notes on words roots so they can perform better on the trivia problems. My explanation might call to mind the question: why not simply give students problems-then-rules in this order, rather than using actual games? Because the more interesting the problem is, the more students will not need to feel its relevance: and an interesting problem is always a game.

SANDBOXES (“PERFORMANCE BEFORE COMPETENCE”) (Gee)

The last Gee principle, “sandboxes,” describes the importance of risk-taking and explorative thinking (Gee, 2003/2007, 2007). Game learning is different than passive or content-fed learning; it is what Thomas and Seely (2007) in their examination of games and virtual worlds call “learning to be” as opposed to “learning about.” By assigning less high-stakes schoolwork, and more short assignments or playful in-class questions, students will have the freedom to fail and try again, always learning from their mistakes—just as they do in games. This trial-and-error learning is the heart of what I earlier called “process play” in games, or process writing in writing, two concepts rooted in the explorative thinking that students get to practice in a constructed “sandbox” of learning, as opposed to among high-stakes tests and questions, where their learning and performance suddenly “count” and carry a great deal of pressure. For students with low self-esteem, playing in a sandbox is particularly important, since they are so cognizant of their weaknesses that often they cannot give their best efforts to even an ungraded exercise.

In summary, Gee sees his principles as the main principles of game-based learning, and the same principles educators should be trying very hard to place into their teaching exercises. Still, “game-based learning” is something of a misnomer; rather than advocating for a new age of (hyper-?) active learning where students can only shoot at math fractions or memorize flash cards with foreign words, theorists like Gee are calling for teachers to examine their overall teaching styles in light of the digital native audience, and because GBL is a modern summary of some of the best 20th-century learning theories.

Gee did a great deal of game principle classifying, but one thing he didn’t do is explain which games are best for which disciplines, or how to extract his principles into our teaching. Moreover, it can be a daunting task to pore over even a summary of Gee’s learning principles. Let me present you a much shorter list, a “backdoor” I developed called the Five Simple Game Mechanics. By incorporating just one of these simple mechanics into your lesson plan, you will automatically incorporate at least one of Gee and Prensky’s principles.