How One Educator is Designing Classes Around Games

84

Jonathan Cassie is head of the senior school at Sewickley Academy, just outside Pittsburgh. He has taught history, English, Latin, and game design at Dallas, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh schools.

 

Throughout his 20-year career in independent schools, he has been a student and practitioner of innovation and change in education.

He earned an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership from UCLA, has five level-100 toons in World of Warcraft (as of this writing), contributed to the first Game of Thrones roleplaying game, and has written two books on topics related to building meaningful roleplaying cultures and experiences for players. Cassie’s ASCD book Level Up Your Classroom: The Quest to Gamify Your Lessons and Engage Your Students covers:

• What happens to student learning when it is gamified.
• Why you might want to gamify instruction for your students.
• The process for gamifying both your classroom and your lessons.

Join the conversation about gamification at his website.

Transcript

Host: All right, Jon, you’ve set yourself up for success here. When I looked at your social profile, you’ve got pictures of you sneaking and smiling and looking like a fun guy (laugh).

Jon Cassie: Yes.(laugh)

Host: I love it that you’ve got some personality, and you were talking off air about education, your initial interest in game design and, game-based learning. The impact that games can have in educational settings.

Jon Cassie: Yeah. I’ve been a gamer since I was in kindergarten, right? All I ever wanted for Christmas were board games. I played Yars’ Revenge and Pac-Man back in the ‘70s. So I’ve always been a gamer, and I’ve always loved, board games and video games because, I think they’re a great way for a young person to meet other people (particularly if you’re not athletic.) Sports are games too, right? I talk about that in the book – I’ve always been a gamer.

After completing my dissertation in 2011, I started to think about the connection between games and learning. I hadn’t made a big connection before that point. I began thinking about designing a class like a big video game that might help students who weren’t terribly motivated. Developing for the kids in the class who viewed a teacher in control, as a bit of like a “straight jacket,” – these were older kids.

I said well, look, I play World of Warcraft. It’s a complicated video game. Why not see if I could design a class that worked like that? And so I did. Some people liked it, and some didn’t but that’s what got the inspiration going. You think about games, and you think about gamification, and you reflect on how gimmicky it can seem. And so I tried to think about, what if it isn’t gimmicky? What if it could do something meaningful to help teachers be more effective in their classrooms, plus help students learn more efficiently?

Motivation In Learning 

Host: What did you learn in that process, Jon? When you were looking at it and starting to deconstruct it, what were you learning? I would imagine there were some assumptions that you made as a natural starting point that you had to pivot along the way.

Jon Cassie: I started from the presumption that games had a way of working. There’s the famous quote that something like 15 billion hours of work has been performed in World of Warcraft since the game came out in 2004.

Just look at how people act with something like Pokémon Go? What causes the player to act the way that they do when they play the game. That to me was the heart of what game of that instruction might do or might provide. How do you harness that deep motivation to get students to learn something that they might otherwise not be interested in, at all?

It started from the presumption that games had a way of motivation could translate into learning. In my research and my reflections, there was so much more that games did and could do to help teachers, and learners, that it was sort of like, “I think I’m in this box,” But I’m actually in this box, and it’s probably even bigger than that. People ask me, “Well, I’m glad your book sells but what else what else can I read?” Well, if you want my approach, there isn’t all that much. It’s a lot more about how do you bring a particular kind of game into a classroom.

Win By Learning 

Host: That’s interesting, you’re not just talking about a specific game, you’re talking about the ways in which to level up. It’s almost like bringing a new student into a classroom.

Jon Cassie: Correct. It’s more about taking notions of sociality and community, self-empowerment, self-reflection and flow, and channeling them through a particular engine because every game is essentially an engine of some kind. Put that through the engine with a learning goal in mind. I mean, the goal of the game is to win. The goal of the gamified lesson is to win by learning something.

You can take a game that has a cooperative mechanic, a game like, Pandemic, which is very popular, very famous in board gaming circles. You don’t play Pandemic; you pull out of it the “Pandemic engine” which collaborates to solving problems. You put the players, the students all on one team and maybe you put other students on another team, or maybe you as the teacher create a challenge that these different teams have to try to solve in whatever way you think is most appropriate. I write about this particular example in the book, maybe you as the teacher set yourself up as the opposition.

Demonstrating a Mastery 

Host: Sometimes you’re seen that as that anyway. (laugh)

Jon Cassie: Correct, correct. (laugh). You put yourself as the opposition to a variety of student teams and set up a learning objective that would be appropriate. In the case of the book I suggested, each team writes an exam for a unit of content. The teacher writes an exam, and the teacher and the student then have to take tests at the same time under time conditions that favor the students. If the teacher makes a mistake on the exam, it’s like penalty time.

If the students make a mistake, the same thing applies. If the students end up completing that exam in a timeframe faster than the teacher, with accuracy, they get some benefit that they can use down the road. They get a chip that they could turn in on the next exam that says, “I don’t have to answer that question.” Or they get a chip that says, “I know you don’t answer these types of questions, but this time you have to.”

You want to make it playful; you want to make it fun, you want not to put students against each other when it’s more about luck than about skill. I talk a lot in the book about Games of Agon – skill; and Games of Alea – chance.

If you put a student’s grade under the same kind of rules that apply to Yahtzee, they’re not going to be very happy. But if they have to demonstrate something, demonstrate mastery of something in a way that a particular game asks them to, that’s going to be great for some kids. Not for everyone. But then I’m not proposing that you take every classroom in America and make it a video game.

Conclusion 

Host: Well, Jon, congratulations on the book. Everybody can go to ASCD to get Level Up Your Classroom: The Quest to Gamify Your Lessons and Engage Your Students, with the always fun, Jonathan Cassie.

Jon Cassie: Thank you, sir.

Subscribe to edCircuit to stay up to date on all of our shows, podcasts, news, and thought leadership articles.