Brent Warner 0:00
We’ve all heard conversations and maybe explored gamification in our classrooms, but building out a system is a lot of work. Can AI make true gamification a reality? This is the HigherEdTech podcast season seven, Episode 17.

Tim Van Norman 0:16
welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director of Technology Services at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.

Brent Warner 0:38
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC, we both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:47
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So spring break is over, and second, eight weeks have started. And honestly, I think myself, yes, I’ve got a bunch of work that I’m working on for my class and stuff, but I’m also thinking about next semester. Yeah, and can I make some changes for next semester? And so this is where I really like this topic, as as you brought it, as we talked about stuff and we brought it up, I’m like, Oh, I have time now to think about next semester. Yeah, give me a couple months, and I won’t have time.

Brent Warner 1:20
Yeah, well, between between fall and spring, it’s always kind of like, oh, there’s no real time to plan. But like, hey, if we’re stepping towards summer and if we are going to have a little break time, yes, we could possibly do this. I’m not sure. Tim, we’ll have to see as our conversation goes on, what we’re talking about might need a little bit more time than even just so summer. But if you’re hardcore, and if you’re dedicated and you want to kind of do it by yourself, yes, but we’re going to be talking about gamification a bit here. Ai gamification. I think that there are two parts to this. We’ll get into this a little bit later. But one, you know, do your own AI gamification building, which is, you know, partly what we’ve talked about in the past, but still a lot of work. And then the other one is the concept that maybe LMS, like Canvas, for example, could have templates and AI conversations built into them, that you could then create a custom pathway, a gamified pathway through the content of the course that you know, kind of already has a structure in place. And then what would that maybe look like, right? So, so anyways, this is kind of big concept picture of what we’re we’re roughly talking about. But before we get into anything, Tim, we should probably, just in case people are listening, I want to define gamification one more time, because gamification versus game based learning, right? Those conversations are always the messy one.

Tim Van Norman 2:49
So you don’t mean we pull out monopoly and everybody plays monopoly all day.

Brent Warner 2:54
That is game based learning and and I’m not sure that monopoly is a lot of learning. It’s different. It’s got its own things, right? So game based learning is when you use games as part of your learning process, right? So hey, you know Kahoot quizzes, you know those kinds of things. Those are game based learning. You could do all sorts of cool things. So I’m not saying that’s not not a great thing, but gamification is putting gaming metrics into the learning process. So like scoreboards and leaderboards and, you know, having to complete one thing before you can get to the next thing. Maybe some side quests that seem not so important, but opportunities maybe inside of there for extra credit. And then put wrapping all of this. In theory, you don’t always have to do this, right, but in theory, if you wrap all of this around a theme. So I don’t know if it still exists anymore, but there used to be a a actual platform called Game craft, I think, or class craft, class craft. And it was kind of a you would actually build out, it’s kind of like what we’re going to be talking about today, which is you would build out your course process through this platform. And it was all, you know, kind of siph or fantasy themed, right? So you could be like a knight, or you could be an elf, and you would kind of work your way through this world as you’re doing games. So what I’m proposing is that possibly something like that could be built right into these systems. And we could, like, right into Canvas, and you could say, hey, I want to gamify my class. So it’s not going to be the traditional module system. I mean, maybe it would still use modules and the fundamentals, but, but it’s really about like, Hey, I’m now moving through my little Mario World, and as I step to each of the opportunities, new things open up. If I want to go explore them, if I’ve shown that I’m really good at this one thing, then I can move to the next part. And it kind of goes like that. So, so first Tim, let’s talk about what’s, what’s the current problem in classes, big, a big problem?

Tim Van Norman 5:12
Engaging students.

Brent Warner 5:13
Yeah, yeah.

Tim Van Norman 5:15
I mean the reality. And by the way, this is not a new problem,

Brent Warner 5:18
no, no, no. The current and forever problem,

Tim Van Norman 5:22
Exactly, and I mean, it’s always going to be an issue, but there are things that we can do now that help, and I think that’s part of what we’re it’s incumbent upon us to do is, how do we engage students? And this could be a face to face class. It could be a hybrid class. It could be a class like mine that’s completely online, asynchronous, and you know, how do I make sure that students are engaged? I had somebody three weeks into the class send me an email. How come you dropped me? I didn’t really, I didn’t even think about the fact that I might have class this month like, that’s why I dropped you. You know you’re a month behind, and how are you possibly going to catch up? And I had already sent a bunch of emails and everything else I tried, but, you know, had to drop them. So it can be that person, but it also, also can be the person who’s just they’re just trying to learn and understand and something doesn’t resonate with them, yeah. So there’s a lot of different factors to how do we get them engaged, right?

Brent Warner 6:33
And so we also recognize that a lot of times content itself can be dry, right? And I think a lot of teachers work to fight that or make it more interesting, or do the best that they can, right? But we have to recognize that we are competing with YouTube, we’re competing with Instagram, Tiktok, all of these things, and it’s not just attention, right? It’s also learning. I know people, I’ve heard students, I’ve heard friends say, Oh, I learned this. I learned how to do this on Instagram or, you know, I watch this, you know, teacher, and he explains and ideas really well. And so I like watching him on Tiktok, or whatever else it is, right? And so every individual teacher is now competing with the world of highly entertaining social media teachers as well, right? And students might rightly say, Well, I learned more from this guy online, even though I don’t interact with them, than I do from you. And so, how am I like? What’s the value here, right? And so, so you kind of have to, you have to play with this and kind of recognize it’s not just attention. It can be learning in the conversations that we’re working with. And I am a believer that, you know, games, and you know, we have fun with games. We have fun with little challenges and all of these things. And so once we start playing, even if they’re kind of simple fun games, we stop worrying so much about the learning side, and we’re kind of more on the engaging side, right? Like learning in quote marks, right? Not to say that we’re not learning, but like, once you engage, you start learning, versus I’m just learning without being engaged, right? Those are two separate things, absolutely.

Tim Van Norman 8:13
And I mean, one of the things that we have seen, and we’ve learned over and over again as people are playing video games, is they actually are learning. Now, they might not think they’re learning, but they’re learning. They’re developing skills, they’re developing thought processes. And so how can we pull that into the classroom? I think is a really key, and I think there’s ways of doing that with AI, yes, absolutely.

Brent Warner 8:40
So we’ll get into a couple of ways that AI might help. But I think one of the questions too, again, is like, if we’re, if we’re saying, hey, as you play these games, you are learning how to do things, whether it’s like, Hey, I’m, you know, it could be as dumb as, you know, dumb, quote, unquote, as, like, mastering how to beat a boss in a game, right? But it is a set of skills, right? Like, oh, I need to learn how to move in this direction. And every time I move in that direction, I have a set of problems, right? And, and when I swing this way, then this, this is what happens. And so, so, kind of looking at it from that side, versus, like, Okay, well, how about the same thing happens in our learning processes, right? When I you for me, when I use this grammar, the idea is communicated clearly. When I don’t use this grammar, the idea is not communicated clearly, right? And so you can still play these things, right? I could even imagine an AI game where you know, like you’re you’re at the Sphinx riddle, right? And you’re saying, Hey, I’ve got a I have to be able to communicate this idea really clearly, and therefore, I have to use the correct language to be able to communicate my response to the Sphinx. And that’s going to get me through the open gate and into the next magical world, or whatever else it is, right? That would be a lot more fun than just a worksheet saying you. You know, I did go, or I goed to the market.

Tim Van Norman 10:06
Oh, absolutely, absolutely, and I think about it. And so when I, when I took my MBA, which few years ago, and we’ve talked about on here and stuff like that, the last thing that we did was a project, and that project was basically a game. You were given a set of rules, and each quarter you had to go through six quarters. Each quarter things changed, things got added. You had to you had to come up with your balance sheet, and you had to come up with your income statements, and you had to do all of these different things and make decisions, and that affected the next quarter, and it might even infect two or three quarters down, yes, you know, and stuff like that. And so you you didn’t know if you did a good job until you got to that point. That is about mastery and developing skills, rather than if I had simply taken a test or written

Brent Warner 11:03
a paper, that’s right, yeah. And so we’ll talk about that too. We’ll talk about some of the problems that might come up with that in a bit. But let’s jump into, like, just theoretical possibilities. I think we’re having a big, a broad level conversation here. Tim, so some of the things maybe the AI can help with. Like, we can say, hey, we’ve got these cool tools with AI. And if you’ve never done, for example, if you haven’t gone into Canva in the Canva code and created, like, some vibe coding, some games or activities they do have, you can actually click a couple buttons inside. So this is game based, but just for an example, right? You can go, click a button inside of Canva code, and you can create a game like a hey, sort different ideas into different buckets, and kind of do that thing, but around all the content that you’re interested in. And then you can click a button, publish it, and all of your students can log in, log online, and play that game, right? And so we might talk about vibe coding in a future, future conversation. I think we should. But the concept behind that is that, like, when you’re building that, so I’ve built a few of these games, and when you’re building it, you can, actually, you can say, Oh, hey, I don’t like how this part is happening, right? Like I can, just like you can with a a text output, it’s with a with a game inside of there. So I built a game, you know, as a sample, where, you know, might be a science class, and students have to drag the mouse to show the different parts of a petal on a flower, right? And I said, Hey, or hey, let’s add in an option for Spanish language, and so you can, okay, so then I typed in, okay, this is really good, but I want it also to for students who speak Spanish to be able to click a button to flip the card over and hear the word in Spanish. So in case they don’t know it, they can get a, you know, vocabulary boost or whatever. And so it does that right, and that didn’t exist in the first level. I use plain English to change that. And so you can actually adjust if we had a system that was kind of like about building and creating interactive games, and it’s not working quite in the way that works for you, then you can fine tune it without having to be a coder, without having to think of all the logical connections that might miss from one to the next. You can just say, hey, actually, hold on a second. This part is creating some problems, or, you know, whatever else is going on and so. So use plain English to make updates to it, while the content, the learning content, stays the same, right? It’s just the output and how students might be moving through it,

Tim Van Norman 13:42
well, I would say the end goal of the content, the the outcome remains the same, yes, yes, but it may not. The content itself may adjust because that student needs it in a little different way. Yes, and it would be useful, absolutely. And I love the fact that we can use that AI it personalizes, because what is, what would be the difficulty of saying, oh, then do it in French and German and, you know, and Russian and, you know, whatever. If you can do it in Spanish and English, it’s another option. Yeah, yeah, you know, it’s and so that can actually make it much more useful to that student who doesn’t natively speak English, right?

Brent Warner 14:24
And so let’s switch this to another example, to the one we were talking about pre show. You were kind of talking about accounting, right? And you’re saying, Well, hey, what about in an accounting class? It might be, you know, it might be, just be kind of a set of skills, but I could say theoretically, like, if I’m the student coming into an accounting class, I go, I’m not really good with numbers, but I am really motivated to make my own business and have a coffee shop, right? Well, okay, so I type that in and I say, Hey, these are the things that interest me, and these are the things that I want to work. Towards, and now you and I are in the same class. And Tim, maybe you’re interested in, you know, building an online business of some sort, and I’m interested in a brick and mortar coffee shop, right? We could still learn the same accounting skills, but it gets all customized to me, because I start having to think about things like importing beans and renting the shop, and, you know, whatever all those types of things are where you have to think about server costs and, you know, like whatever else it is, same, same goals in terms of, like, do we have the skill sets to understand how the money is being used and how we’re following that? But to something that actually is important to me, or something that I could say, hey, actually, I could apply this to things that I’m really trying to get done, versus the general case study that we’re, you know, fairly have been given up until now, but it’s like, Well, okay, I’m not planning on ever being a farmer in the Midwest, right? So what am I supposed to do with that? Like, I will then have to transfer that understanding onto my own situation, as compared to doing the learning inside of my own situation. And AI can absolutely customize for that

Tim Van Norman 16:13
Well as well as, let’s say you walk into that accounting class and you understand what an income statement is. But do you really know what a balance sheet is? Well, maybe we spend just a little bit of time then making sure you’re really good on the income statement, and we spend more time on a balance sheet. But for me, I’ve got both of those down, but general ledger makes no sense to me. So now I can spend the time on what I need to learn more of so that all of our skills are what we need it to be. Yes, because if we’ve just spent, if you’ve spent time on an income statement, you’ve spent a week on an income statement, and you already know what that is, I’ve lost you by the time it gets to a balance sheet where you actually need to know that’s right, and me, I’ve already got both of those. I’m really lost by the time you get to the general ledger, where now I’m so far behind, because you lost me

Brent Warner 17:09
Two weeks ago. Well, and that’s I mean, think about how much you’re talking to the needs of equity, right? Opportunities for each student where they need the help to move up and balance themselves out with each other, right? I’m weaker in this area. It’ll give me more time. Maybe it builds more quests. And by the way, I want to be clear here, Tim, because I think you know, if we’re really talking concepts, and just like, hey, this is my, my dream for this it’s not just that. It’s going to give me a new assignment on this thing, right? It’s going to say, Hey, hold on a second. You are now the boss of Brent coffee shop, and it’s giving me pictures or even videos, or maybe even an interactive threed walkthrough of the setting. And then when I click on certain things, then that ledger opens up, and I’m like, okay, that’s my interactive zone for it. And then, of course, all of these things are tracked by both the teacher and the AI to say, did you finish the work? Were you successful with it? What were the numbers? How did it show up? Right? And so for us as the teachers, then we’re actually being able to spend time seeing what the students are really doing inside of these systems, as compared to, you know, just like, Okay, it’s just another spreadsheet to fill out, or it’s just another, you know, QuickBooks to create, or whatever else it is, and and it can be visually, auditorally, and, you know, activity wise, all themed to the things that you are actually interested in. So we so if you’re really looking at it, you’re like, Wait, hold on a second. It’s not just okay. I’m going to give you an extra activity. It’s really about creating almost an interactive, custom, personal universe that is kind of your learning space around the things that you’re interested in.

Tim Van Norman 18:51
And what if those activities could be, for instance, for you, you’re doing things that are about a balance sheet. Okay, I don’t necessarily need that. I’ve already demonstrated that. I know that. So mine are going to be about general ledger, and in the end, we’re both going to be presenting to our boss or to a board of directors or a bank or, you know, and and in that, this is why it’s important. Now you you see that chain, and now you have a reason for doing this. That’s what to me, the possibility of why. You know, getting that why in front of students. I remember when I every time I’ve been a student, if they wouldn’t tell me the why, it really, really hard for me to learn. Yeah, but if I could get the why, now I can apply it.

Brent Warner 19:42
That’s right, yeah, I mean, and that’s our whole, you know, Andrew Goji conversation, right? Helping students through that process, really understanding why they’re doing something, and then stepping into it. So I think this, this concept. I think we kind of get it. And by the way, Canvas, if you’re out there listening Tim and I did. And a 20%

Tim Van Norman 20:02
No, I just want him to implement it. I don’t need anything. If we could just get it done.

Brent Warner 20:08
Yes, well, I mean, by 20% so 20% of Canvas wouldn’t be too bad of a deal, right? That’s let me take that, that gamified class and check out and see how that would work out for me. Okay, so, but we do have problems here, Tim, because it’s fun to talk about and it’s nice to say, Hey, this is cool, right? Like, this would be a fun thing. It’s not as easy as just saying, okay, just make it happen, right? There’s still a lot that goes into this. So let’s talk about a few of the little problems that might exist.

Tim Van Norman 20:34
Absolutely and so one of them is our current concept of grading. Are we grading for mastery? Is that our intention is for all students to get mastery, or are we grading because, well, this is the number of points you get.

Brent Warner 20:51
Yes, this is a huge one.

Tim Van Norman 20:53
We’ve had conversations about stuff like this many times.

Brent Warner 20:57
Yeah. I mean, there are definitely lots of wonderful people out there exploring alternative grading features and systems. But it would have to be considered inside of here, because it’s like, okay, if you’re really showing me mastery, like, are we talking now about things like specifications grading, or are we talking about things like ungrading and showing, you know? Like, you know, it could be all sorts of these different set sections here. And so definitely worth recognizing that it could be quite upsetting to your traditional grading formats, because it’s not meant to be set up in well, it, I guess it could be set up however you are intending it to be set up, but you have to figure that out, right? And especially as you’re the more and more you’re customizing it, you’re going to have to say, Well, how am I sure that my student actually understands these skills? And what is the outputs that prove that to me, as compared to, you know, documents every time it may be or whatever parts they are. So how are you going to grade is, is a question. The next one to Tim, for me, a difficulty is like, I don’t think that most teachers would do anything like this unless they kind of had a click button start to the process, right if Canvas or Blackboard, or whoever has this built in, and you can say, Hey, I am opting to do Mine by traditional modules, or I’m opting to do mine in a gamified setting. And you click on that, and then it’s like, okay, let’s build it. And then, yeah, you probably have to spend at least the first time. You have to spend probably, you know, days of like, working through and seeing what that looks like, and testing and checking for errors, and, you know, all of those kinds of things. And essentially, I don’t think most teachers would figure out the process for all of this without it being already embedded into a system that they can use,

Tim Van Norman 22:52
Agreed Absolutely

Brent Warner 22:55
So that part’s hard (laughter)

Tim Van Norman 22:57
It is and especially because each subject can be different, each teacher can be different. There’s so many variables here I get it. And so how do we standardize something that is also supposed to be we need to standardize on variability. Yeah, right, because

Brent Warner 23:15
it’s standardized customized. Yes, you know information that’s a that’s a whole different mindset in terms of building content and information,

Tim Van Norman 23:23
Absolutely, absolutely. The other part is, as a difficulty, it’s working to change this theory into practice, and that’s really what we’ve talked about this whole time, is, how do we get we haven’t even talked about how we’ve been talking about theory. Because the how is the hardest part on this is what, what can we turn into practice, and good practice at that. So in the end, the time that it’s going to take, it’s so easy to just say, Oh, I’m going to go with the publisher content and give me all of these assignments. And here are the due dates, and here’s the questions. Done, yeah, sync into Canvas. And, okay, that’s done. Next is, you know, and while, oh, man, that was a lot of work, it really isn’t somebody else, okay, this, this can be, this will be significant time spent right now. Yeah, yeah.

Brent Warner 24:23
I mean, what? Again? Like all courses, once you have things built, and then you’re kind of fine tuning and adjusting over time, right? But the upfront lift is theoretically huge, right? And even with the AI support going through it, it’s like, okay, you’re doing all this back end stuff, but I still have to test these things. I still have to build it in. I still have to kind of make sure, and it might make suggestions on doing this and this, but I also have to think about, I mean, we’ve seen AI make weird suggestions, and it’s like, wait a second, there’s no way that’s going to work. Or, like, that’s way too complicated for what I’m trying to do with this course. And so we still have to understand that, like, AI is not going to. Get that perfect output on a first run of doing it. And so you would expect to spend, I don’t even know how to imagine right now, like you’d have, we’d have to start doing it to actually see how much time it takes.

Tim Van Norman 25:11
Absolutely, absolutely.

Brent Warner 25:13
So there’s a lot of fun things to possibly play with here. I love the concept here, Tim, and I hope that, like, this is not just a you and I kind of theoretical vision, but maybe something these, these companies, can move towards in the future, or, you know, some of us as teachers can move towards in the future. I really think we need this, because we need things that do better jobs of, you know, engaging students. But is it going to be a reality right now, or do we need to kind of move for further down the AI line to be able to say, like, Hey, I just want to be able to get this going quite quickly,

Tim Van Norman 25:49
Absolutely, and I look forward. I would love to hear from people what their ideas are, both ideas and implementation. Hey, this worked, and what fails? Because the reality is, until we try, we’re not until we fail, we’re not going to succeed.

Brent Warner 26:05
Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Van Norman 26:07
You really do need to try things, and we need to hear from people who this didn’t work for me, but this is what I tried.

Brent Warner 26:13
That’s right, yep, good old, fall down six times. Get up seven, right?

Tim Van Norman 26:16
Exactly.

Brent Warner 26:19
All right. Well, yeah, send us your ideas. If you think, Hey, this is how I want to play with it. We would love to hear from you. But Tim, for now, I think we’re going to wrap things up. Sounds good.

Tim Van Norman 26:31
Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website, at theHigherEdTechpodcast.com

Brent Warner 26:38
as always, we do want your feedback, so please go to theHigherEdTechpodcast.com and let us

Tim Van Norman 26:43
know your thoughts for everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me. Tim Van Norman AT tvannorman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner 26:56
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner,

Brent Warner 27:02
I’m Tim VanNorman,

Brent Warner 27:03
And I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.