7 Ways to Reward the Brain

Tom Chatfield’s TED talk comes down to one thing: engagement. All of his conclusions based on MMO games make perfect sense, and for the gaming companies they are also extremely important. They have to continue to engage their players so that the players continue to pay the monthly fees or buy in game items.

While all of Chatfield’s conclusions make sense, I’m not sure about his numbers. Chatfield said that they determined the ideal drop rate for items needed to be about 25%. My main experience with MMOs is with World of Warcraft (WoW). I played it for about six years. In WoW, a 25% drop rate would be considered pretty low. In fact, anything with less than a 75% drop rate, I’d consider low, especially if I had to collect 15 of them. Those would be the quests I would skip (back when one could still choose which quests to complete).

My experience with WoW does bear out Chatfield’s stressing the importance of having multiple goals that the player can choose which ones to complete. WoW always had these until the newest expansion, Cataclysm, was released. The new quest design gave out a couple quests at a time that all had to be completed before new quests could be accepted. I was forced to do quests I didn’t want to do. This was the main reason I recently cancelled my accounts.

What does this mean for designing games for learning? The whole idea of games being engaging because they hit the right balance between not too easy and not too hard is just like Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. The difficulty of whatever is being taught through the game ought to be variable in order to accommodate learners of different level s of expertise. Chatfield also talked about a window of enhanced engagement when learners are more likely to remember what is learned. I imagine these would come at the end of a level. When we would raid on WoW, we wouldn’t have to pay much attention during the trash leading up to the boss, but the boss fights took a much greater level of engagement in order to succeed. So in designing a game, the core skill, knowledge, or idea ought to be integral to the larger boss fights.

How hard should high school be?

After a class yesterday, as I reflected before the next set of students came into my room, I realized that I had spent much of the entire period explaining things at the literal level in the story the class was supposed to have read. This is something that I hope in general to not have to do. Later I wondered if I coddled them too much. Are my expectations high enough? Do I hold them to these expectations forcefully enough?

The students, of course, think I'm too hard on them. But sometimes I wonder. I've heard it said that a small school like ours can't adequately prepare students for college. I disagree, and can hold up any number successful college students that came from our school. On the other hand, there are a number of students that begin but do not finish college too. While college isn't, nor should it be, the only reason for a high school to exist, the skills necessary to succeed in college are the same that are necessary to succeed in life.

Why did we have to explain so much of the text to that class? Was the text too difficult? I don't think so. There are extremely bright students in that class. Is it just a boring story? I know I'm biased, but I don't think so. A man is leaving his wife at sunset despite her protestations to go on a journey that he must undertake that particular night. He meets the devil in the woods. Would it have made a difference if they would have had to write a summary, reflection, or anything else about the story? Maybe, or it may have just made more students turn to sparknotes.

I think a lot of it has to do with the mindset of the students. I think students are used to and very comfortable being the gadget but need to become the patient taking more responsibility for their learning. A question I like to ask students when they are having trouble with a math concept is "Did you look it up on youtube?" The look I get is the same as when I tell a student that they could buy a book for a class project: incredulity.

The mindset of the student is different in college (at least from my perspective it was). I expected classes to be hard and a lot of work. I looked forward to the weekends and holiday breaks because they offered a lot of time to work on big assignments. I expected to buy books for classes. I expected to have a journal, a group presentation, and a longer paper for every lit class I took--and those journals were a pain. In American Lit 2, we had to write a column about every single work we read for each class, and some classes we read upwards of 10-15 poems.

How much different would high school be if students were expected to and held accountable for having a more serious mindset? If my students expected to come to class every day having read the assignment and formed an opinion on it and knew that their grade would suffer if they didn't, would it avoid situations like yesterday? Are grades alone even enough of a motivator? If they knew and were used to being required to turn homework in on time or not at all, would more students have had their paper done to turn in today? Or would a lot more students fail? Three hours of English homework every night would be a bit ridiculous, though. Where is the balance?

Workspace

I'll readily admit that one thing I don't focus a lot of energy on in teaching is the physical space of my classroom. I don't think that my classroom has really been changed at all since the early 1970s. Mr. Kemble's hole is in the tile in the front of the room. Cinderblock walls somewhere between white and beige. Puke Orange flooring tiles. I really don't care whether my bulletin board matches my border and my carpet (I have carpet? A border?)--one of a few reasons why I'm secondary instead of elementary.

Tonight, I received the monthly newsletter from my web hosting company, Dreamhost. They recently moved to a new office and posted some pictures. Take a few seconds to look at them, and don't miss the ping pong robot. How amazing would it be to work in a space like that? It got me to thinking about what my dream classroom would look like.

It would look more like a coffee shop than a classroom. Couches, la-z boys, and bean bag chairs would replace all the desks. Some students would want to sit on the floor, the carpet's so nice. A couple bar height tables would accommodate group work. My lovely class set of Macbooks would dual boot Windows. Kindles instead of textbooks? Maybe a couple generations down the road when they have color screens and amazing annotation tools.  The projector, smart board, and printer would all be wireless. Give me 40 feet of windows on the eastern wall instead of the 40 feet of concrete that I have. Let's have them overlook the ocean or Niagara Falls. These windows will be highly efficient, of course; no more drafts. The lights would be silent, and the speakers would be loud. I've always like the idea of a row of framed portraits of our literary heroes. And I'd have to get my Langston Hughes autograph up there somewhere. Last, but not least, triple the amount of bookshelves--a mini library instead of a coffee shop perhaps.

While a classroom like this would be really nice, students would still forget their books in their lockers, their homework at home. Would it have a huge impact on what happens in the class? Once basics needs are met--students are warm, dry, have a place to sit and a book to read--I don't know much physical environment affects student performance.  It would make an interesting study to take a class from the local public high school, and give them a room at Exeter for the year. I would think that the teacher would have a much larger effect than the environment, but it's fun to dream.

I'm a PC

I've used computers for a long time.  My first was the Commodore 64, and it was sweet.  Mail Order Monsters, Summer Games, Hard Hat Mack, and the adventure in Zork. I even taught myself a little bit of Basic programming to make it do stuff.  In high school, we got a new computer that had Windows 3.1. As a teenager, I spent my own money to upgrade Windows 95 and have had every version of Windows since then.  So I am a little biased.

This year, I was given a MacBook to use in my classroom. Having used it for a few months now, I have decided that I am definitely a PC. The advertisers say that Macs just work. Well, it doesn't. I tried to play an avi file in class yesterday.  Avi just may be the most ubiquitous movie format in the world.  It wouldn't play.  Five minutes later, after downloading a separate program, I could play it. Safari cannot use the same toolbars and extensions as Firefox. Programs never seem to fully close. My Word document is gone, but the formatting toolbar is still there? I can't see what documents are open in the dock.

The huge, multitouch touchpad on the other hand is fabulous. I can do most things with it now without missing the mouse. The battery also lasts much longer than any PC laptop I've used. It boots up like a flash compared to my windows laptops. So there are some nice things about it.

Aesthetically and ergonomically, the Mac's ok.  But it's not a couch or a painting. I'm a PC.

Diigo

This week two of my classes are venturing into the land of social collaboration with Diigo. It will allow social bookmarking, but more importantly it offers annotation tools for use on the web. Now we can write notes in the margins of web pages, and those notes can appear on any web enabled computer.


So far, I'm impressed with Diigo's education program. It gives enough control to the teachers to manage users in their class. Teachers can create accounts for students, set and retrieve passwords, and add and remove users from groups. After hosting my own moodle, online services that don't give teachers these powers seem woefully limited. If can't help student who has forgotten their password, that student will miss out that class.