Gamification in Higher Education | Christopher See | TEDxCUHK

you that's really want to do is address a very serious issue at the start of this talk and that is obviously this rather ridiculous jacket partly ways it's a little bit distracting but probably because I think it rather neatly captures a concept which I'll be talking about throughout the rest of the talk so as you can see it's it's a lab coat so I guess that make unsure in your mind some image of medical ISM research academia these sort of serious academic things and at the same time it has this sub silly collar it's got the black villain splash thing in the middle and so it's a little bit different it's a little bit eye-catching but it's based around a familiar and academic concept and I guess that's the concept I'll be talking about today because I'll be telling you guys a bit about gamification or game based learning but particularly as it relates to a higher level of education so higher education particularly medical training but generally at university training as well and hopefully along the way you know banish some of the myths that you've come to grow with with game based learning and also I'll hopefully scare you a little bit there's a little bit of a scary talk so just to introduce myself briefly as they've already given me the big introduction and I come from very boring background I'm a sort of doctor interested in science like all those things and then nothing particularly special and interesting in that regard and I also really like games so this is this month's election this slide is obviously always very different depending order I've done you know I enjoy both board games video game strategy games I play all sorts of games and I really enjoy them but the reason I got into making game based learning for students is not because I think it's really fun and I heart games and I really enjoy them it's because I actually think there is a fundamental underlying structural overlap between what you do during a game and what you do or what you should be doing during education and I've been told the best way to illustrate things is with a joke and so I'm gonna take our first speakers advice and do a little bit of a local joke just to explain what I mean by the underlying structure okay so this is you guys ready this is a local Hong Kong style joke how does a bear say wife in Cantonese it's like this good so no one laughs and good that's exactly what I expect this is sort of a few giggles of anticipation as someone's having something over there but essentially no laughter let me just explain why this is funny or could be funny okay so Cantonese wife is known as la pau okay we say hello all right and if a bear this is bear these are his paws this would be the high pour and therefore this would be the Lowell paw right so this is I didn't I didn't didn't actually build that into the talk it wasn't expecting anyone to laugh but fine you've lost that's fine I'm more important than the joke is the fundamental structure of this joke okay so it really it's based on a very simple principle we have two words that sound very similar it's low paw and low paw and when you combine them in any kind of combination you can create humor and the important thing is this is the structure so you can actually use this concept whenever there are two words that sound the same and I do this all the time much the pain of my wife who's watching you know I make jokes like this all the time because it's based on a single structure this is very true of games too so whenever you're playing a game they may have a totally silly content it may be about camel racing space football strategy whatever it is the content is not so important it's the fundamental mechanics which I think are most interesting so I'm going to talk now about the fundamental mechanics of an escape room now has any of you guys played an escape room before a few of you guys it also quite a quite a few players around here so essentially what it is is people you'll be locked in a room with a team of participants and in order to escape the room you'll have to solve a series of challenges and this kind of all finding clues and solving a puzzle that give you another clue and then you eventually have to sort of escape doing all of these puzzles and it's tremendous fun it's all very interesting but when I first played an escape room I looked at the underlying structure and what I found it's it's really fascinating ly similar to what I want to recreate in the classroom or in a lecture hall or any form of Education so what you do to run around solving these mental puzzles you're thinking all the time you're trying to recall information you're looking for patterns in data you're communicating ideas with your colleagues and debating and arguing and possibly hitting them you're working on the pressure you are having some limited time period it's very very similar to an exam it's very similar to studying there's only one major difference and that is it's junk data so the data the Proms that you solve have no meaning it's sort of I have five wires that's red blue and brown black orange and if you line them up correctly gives you a number and that number makes you open a code so that sequence has no real meaning it's just junk and you just solve it but in my work I see these patterns all the time and these are patterns of how the arterial system in the thorax is arranged it's a is another similar pattern but it just looks at in a different way and then the endings of drugs based on systemic functions of you know what they do this is another pattern so what I wanted to do is develop this concept and use core content rather than junk data to do a very similar thing and I promise you it's gonna be a bit of a scary talk I've got three very scary slides for you here we go you ready this is the first one police don't read it's horrendously I don't really intend you to read it I just want to give you an idea of the content how we develop the content so with the escape room that we did I focused on the cardiovascular system and these are the various subtopics don't read the detail but essentially anatomy physiology the function of the body the drugs that you use and the diseases and things like that so essentially we settle on the content first it's the most boring part in fact if any of you think designing games is super fun you're wrong we start with the most boring stuff and then the fun is sort of a very very thin layer of icing on the top then so as you can see we have these concepts and then we build them into different challenges you know recall challenges data interpretation pattern and problem solving this sounds all very theoretical and I know it's Sunday Saturday morning in a university so I'm gonna scare you again with an even scarier slide are you ready whoo now this is scary not because it's written in sort of red blood writing it's scary because it's a list of all the drugs medical students will need to know for the cardiovascular system so you need to know all the drugs all the function what they do and how they interact okay so this is a scary list for particularly for medical students but anyone you know you should be quite horrified by this list so this is something that we developed for give you an example of one of the questions that we did so we lined this up as a big post at the back of the wall and the question says ABCD plus a or b of antihypertensives okay I'm not going to give you a medical lecture although that's slightly what I'm used to doing I just want you two guys to see what on earth you would do with that question you're given that question you've got this big thing I'll give you a little bit of a clue ABCD of antihypertensives they're just classes of different drugs okay and they all have very particular endings so here's the key to this puzzle they all have familiar endings and I'm going to tell you that the first one a it stands for ACE inhibitor the ending is P or IL pril okay so that's a type of drug can anyone I'm going to give you like a few seconds just to look at the list and see if there's any patterns emerging I'll be honest with you the students took ages for this so I'm gonna kind of skip ahead and just give you the live demonstration so this is the solution to this particular puzzle may I just demonstrate can you see with the prills and now parallel captopril lisinopril Parinda program provenza broken al prohm trend alla pearl you can see they form a shape that looks a little bit like a five or an S okay so that's one of the types of drugs we then have the other types like the beta blockers which would be B and you can see they're forming a line there see with me the calcium channel blockers and they form an X D would be a diuretics therefore Matty and a Y so this is what you get so this is 60 so the answer this puzzle is 60 and you need to enter into a device and it gets you the next clue now you're all looking exactly how I'd like you to look absolutely horrified thinking oh my god this is terrible and this is why I enjoyed creating these game based learning devices so much because this is what our students did as well then they sort of looked like you and they looked at each other and said I don't know what we're supposed to do with this but I can identify some of the drugs and the main thing that we got from this is they would get really clever people standing around looking at this puzzle saying well I'm not sure but I know this does this I know ramipril is kind of similar and they slowly work out what's going on with the puzzle all the while discussing fundamental things that they need to know they need to know two drug functions they need to know the names on how to identify them and that's what we get them to do and the most beautiful thing is if someone were to give me this list on a piece of paper I would never treat it in that way I'd never sit there going oh I really need to know this hey hey hey do you know this is it gonna be like this can I ask you a question can we debate this you'd never really get that so this is really what we try to recreate in the escape room this is one example of the puzzles that we try to get to stimulate the students thinking now this again is the third horrific slide really just to give you an idea that's one of these seven puzzles that we created and we used a number of kind of interesting tools and devices to create different puzzles based on the different curricular materials that we'd use ultraviolet light to hide things we'd use you know real torso models and things like that so from the academic design to the the creative design so really once the puzzles are set and that took a 95% of the work we get to have a little bit of fun okay so so we had a little bit of theoretical design I think the the the picture kind of looks a little bit like me and he's done quite a good job with that again if I may draw your attention please to the word play all your scape yeah that's good that's not my joke that was that was the antis joke and so we created a theme I think as Marvel and DC comics have shown us you can have any sort of silly storyline as long as people come it's fine so this was I think a crazy professor kidnaps students locks them in the lab for some reason and then makes them escape again for some reason so that was the story and then again we have this part again that in that 5% of the fun bit we have their physical design so we actually built it from scratch and a real abandoned laboratory built in sort of trapdoors so when people open a puzzle it opens a new other area into the game it's kind of fun but then again you can see we use some fundamental things a heart model a torso model that we'd normally use them to study on and we have some cool gadgets as well we have sort of the laser keyboard we have the baby monitor which is really nice so you can talk to people that those who are parents will know you can kind of scare them using the baby monitor and so on and so forth so this is sort of the physical design and we were very lucky to sort of be covered in the press a yeah looks a bit like that and you know we had a lot of people come across it was really just a local teaching experiment I don't know why it managed to reach a sort of really big audience this is something we were doing randomly in the lab up at Hong Kong you and we actually had some cuhk people come all the way across the pond to visit us and we had lots of random people and we even had people contacting us saying can we buy tickets or how where's the online booking form and that was really weird but really nice as well I think it was sort of great to get that impact just a few of the metrics you know we had about 220 participants scared their way through we had some funding from our the Hong Kong University and I was delighted to see the average completion time was 56 minutes and we set them an hour to do this now this is delightful for me because it means we've calibrated the difficulty almost just nicely because if they're finishing in 20 minutes you know there'll be a lot of blaming and a lot of upsetness and if then none of them finish it'd be terrible as well I want to discuss very briefly some of the outcome metrics that we had from this because it is an experiment we want to see really whether it works this is the very traditional really lame feedback form do you think you learn did you like it yes yes yes fine that doesn't show us anything I think the interesting thing that we did this time is can you see these two photos here can you see the perspective they're taken from so actually what we did do we strapped a GoPro camera to our students chest and we recorded all of their actions all of their movements all of their discussion as they walked around the room and then we plug this video data into some pretty sophisticated qualitative analysis software known as nvivo and what we can do with all of this video data is actually we can build up a decision tree at every single Junction for the students so if you imagine what that shows you about the students unlike an exam an exam you get it right or wrong and that's it but in this kind of sense that we can see okay how many people get it right basic metrics and then we can see what happens when they fail what happens when they get it wrong and this is a safe environment you know for medical people we don't like them to fail in the hospital but in the classroom it's great so we can see okay I failed so I'm going to discuss another valve I'm gonna bring in our idea I'm gonna can some kind of reframe the question and some of them and happily very few would resort to sort of random guessing and fiddling with lock and things like that a few but not very many so this is kind of one of the key outcome measures that we found from our game is really we can map the brain process the decision-making process of our students as they undergo challenges and innocence see a little bit into their own minds so there are two myths about game based learning that I sort of want to finish on this is the one one of two which really annoys me as a game based learning enthusiast a lot of people come up to me and say ah you're the guy you make learning easier no that's really definitely not what I do and I think it's really important that I should emphasize why that's the case learning is not about sitting there having fun relaxing at the spa pina colada putting your feet up it's actually about effortful deliberate process of learning and so when people say oh it's a game so it must be fun so it's must be very easy I think that's totally the opposite of what we're doing if you ever come to one of my classes you'll be worked out hard I mean if your brain could sweat which you can't you would be sweating extremely hard because we are gonna we're gonna sit you there and we're gonna work you out hard for the whole hour the beauty of game based learning is not that it's easy it's that you get people to do it themselves these people do the hard work themselves you don't have to sit then say hey do some work they will do it automatically so that is the beauty of it but it's not about making things easier in some way you know we're actually gonna work you out really hard and that's what I think should be a fundamental principle of game based learning and the second thing this is another thing a lot of people come and say well it's a game so it automatically is fun game equals fun thing and I really dislike that and this is because I play loads of games and they are some terrible I mean honestly there are some terrible games out there they're also some wonderful games and some medium games but I think this concept that a game is always intrinsically good it's just not true there are terrible game designers there are people who just have no idea what they're doing the people who don't like games but think it's a good idea and then do it so there's a real spectrum of games are there I think the second thing that games are always fun always better than a lecture I'm aware this ironic I'm kind of doing a lecture now but you know it's there's suddenly this thing about games they're not always always fun it depends a lot on a lot of moving parts and I think people need to pay attention to the detail and not just the fact that there's a game so I suppose in conclusion then when I about gamification for high education and where we can go with this I think the one take-home message I have for you is really looking at the structure I don't come that you were an angle of fun and inspiration and wonderful I have a really boring take I'll it take a game I look at the underlying structure and mechanics and then make it learning I mean that is a really boring message compared to some of the wonderful inspirational people that we've seen around today that's a really boring process but I hope that some of you can look at the fundamental mechanics and structure of your hobbies your interest in things and if you're interested in creative education or creativity in general you can extract something really valuable from just looking at this underlying structure thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 46,659

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Hong Kong, Education, Games, Learning

Id: d8s3kZz1yQ4

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2016