Gameful Praxis for Learning - How can designing and playing games help learning?

 Let me take you back to my first experience with coding. To 1984, fourth form (year 10) at the computer studies class. My very first attempt to code was in a room full of boys. I was the only girl and if there was a social ladder I was probably lower than the bottom speck on the floor. It was a very lonely term and I had to do my coding at lunchtime since none of the guys would let me in their teams so I just sat there watching them. But I did it. I made a spider web in binary code on a floppy disk and I walked out of that room floating on air. Watching those lines of code build bit by bit just right was one my most satisfying learning experiences in high school (other than my super cool English teacher, Mr. Steele, using Bob Dylan songs as poems for English- well deserved Nobel Prize).

I first saw Jane McGonigal speak about game design for learning at Ulearn (2006?), explaining the many benefits for students to develop skills soon to be sorely needed. To be honest, by then I was trying to get my head around teaching all this content stuff meaningfully and coding or gaming seemed like another universe.

Years later, her amazing TED Talks, and this one, in particular, spoke to the neuroscience nerd in me in a big way:

Fast forward to this year, and my exposure (thank you Mind Lab) to the incredible real-life examples of ways to gamify learning such as Quest to Learn school in New York and the Maker Space movement, made the game bug seriously set in like a self-replicating nanobot. 

Sure, I've done the fun "Design a Board Game" challenges with my students plenty of times, but I'd never really understood the underlying concepts that these wise souls were trying to exalt, nor had I connected the dots between the body chemistry of gaming and motivation, and the opportunities it offers for learning. (If you'd like to see some of the dots that helped me connect it all I have a resource bank in this link).

Today, at a very casual gameful praxis meet up, entered this lady:

Dr. Bron Stuckey (yep, she's that cool), and the incredible Gameful Praxis crew:

Leanne Stubbing (Churton Park School), Rachel Bolstad (NZCER) and Dan Milward (Gamelab) (Dianne-Grace Morris from Ridgway School was unable to be there- next time!)

Plus a room filled with game designers and teachers interested in gameful praxis.  

After a brief intro from Rachel, Leanne Stubbing shared her experiences of gameful praxis with her class, with great examples of how her year 3/4 class create games and where games fit into the New Zealand Curriculum (Key Competencies come alive, folks!).

Dr. Bron Stuckey explained the purpose and value of gameful praxis and the main takeaways for me were:

• Gaming builds Identity and community, engagement and motivation 
• Kids being agents of design is powerful 
• Socially constructed- it's how children interpret the word that matters
• Games don't have to be digital.Games can be physical as well (e.g. Breakout EDU- breakout challenges)
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She then gave us a simple challenge: what is one area of learning in your class that's a bit stale and boring? How could you gamify it? (No, not spelling, she said, there's a billion game apps for that already). 

The result? A wonderful collaborative session with this amazingly cool young game designer called Rachel, and next week at The Lab (my classroom) we are going to design a game to help us play and practice Reciprocal Reading strategies. I will challenge my young design team with the following:

- Create cards or icons to represent reading comprehension strategies.

- Create a game where children read two pages of a story at a time and play the icons/cards to activate the strategies.

- Create ways for players to earn bonus 'somethings' when they use collaborative skills (we've already made a list in term 1).

- Trial the game.

- Create a short sales pitch.

Dr. Bron is also looking for teachers to join Getgamehub.net and share their adventures into gameful praxis.

After lunch, Dan and Dave from gamefroot.com took us through a session on how to build a game using block coding. No more spider webs with I and 0's . I'm now going code way cooler stuff.