Joining me now from the University of Technology in Sydney is Claire Selden. Claire, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, my friend. It's fun to be here.
Now we're here to talk about the topic of gamification, and its applications to education and other sectors and other industries. But at the moment, you're working as a lecturer in learning design at UTS. And I just wonder, can you tell us a little bit about your educational journey and how you ended up where you are now.
So I worked in IT for a number of years. And it was sexist, and I didn't like it. So I decided I would go back to uni and retrain to be a teacher, because they had the greatest science teacher in the universe in high school. Shout out to Mrs. Ragland. She's listening. She was a genius, changed my life. And yeah, so that was awesome. But the whole time I was when I first went to uni. And I just always loved technology. So when I went to teach, I was integrating technology into just about everything I was doing. And I was really spoiled. I was at a Montessori school, and I was the only science teacher. And I taught technology, I taught integrated project based learning. And I got to basically, the syllabus was there and I got to do what I wanted with it, which was just super, super awesome and exciting. And it meant that I got to be creative and use all the aspects of my life. So my technology, but also my giant nerdery. Because I am a second generation Dungeons and Dragons nerdy role player, my parents bought the original red box in the 70s, and used to have their friends around, have an evening and my brother and I would get shoved to bed really early, so that mum or dad could sit up and roll dice with their mates. And so I just in my teaching, used all my tech skills and all my nerdy passion for games. And then after a while I I burnt out as I was doing, I was doing too much. And then I was really fortunate to get a job at the Department of Education. As a learning designer. I didn't even know what learning because I was I just saw they wanted somebody with tech skills and teaching. And I was really, really fortunate. My manager at the time saw you know, I hadn't worked in the government system, a lot of people who get jobs for the department have worked in government system for a long time. And, and I was really, really lucky that he saw my Montessori and my tech background. And were no she'll be different, should do something different. And he gave me a chance. And I just, I just loved it. And then he was the one who said, Oh, you know so much about games. Do you want to talk to us about gamification? I'm like, What's that? And he's like, Well, isn't that what you're doing? With your learning design? I was like, Ah, so I went and did some reading. And yeah, it turns out that I was actually implementing this known pedagogical strategy. And I think most teachers do really, really deep down. Like, if you say to people are I do gamification, you get, you get some people going, Oh, that's so cool. And other people going off? Because their definition of gamification is the urban dictionary definition, that it's, you know, pointless stuff designed to make you try when you really don't want to, and I get I do. But when I explained to teachers what gamification actually is, you see them go, oh, oh, yeah, I already do that. And they do. Almost all teachers implement some form of gamification into their practice. And so one of the things that I've been trying to do in my work at UTS, in my work as a learning designer, and whenever I've worked with teachers, helping them to integrate technology and gamification into their work, is, is to say, you're not doing something new. All I'm asking you to do is do more consciously what you're already doing.
Well, let's let's start by unpacking that a little bit, because certainly I've had the experience of people giving that ugh response to discussions of gamification. And I think, in my somewhat more limited experience, I think where people have often gotten burned out on gamification is that very marketing driven application of it, where the idea of making something a game gets boiled down to little more than points for doing things and collecting badges have little to no intrinsic value of their own and They're not given any contextual reason to care about them, either. And so they kind of, they kind of think, you know, I mean, in the classroom, people have been using those kinds of systems with reward charts and whatnot, forever. So when we look at what actual effective gamified learning is in a classroom setting, what does that look like? And what how would what would you say the key elements of designing effective gamified? Learning?
Okay, well, you know, five hours later. So, to start with the beginning, what does it really look like in the classroom? Well, it looks like a lot of things. It looks like adding elements of what makes game playing fun and engaging to an educational activity. And that can be as simple as randomizing. I guess, a big thing is for me, is that it's not a game. So I draw a distinction between gamification, which is the act of redesigning, learning to include elements of games, and gain based learning, which is actually using a game to learn, excuse me, and those are genuinely different things. So, for example, Minecraft, very popular education tool, and it has genuinely fantastic educational uses. I've seen teachers do seriously cool stuff with it. But that's not gamification, that using a game for an educational purpose. And then you know, things like, my beloved, where in the world is Carmen Sandiego, as far as I'm concerned, one of the greatest educational games ever created. But that, again, that's not gamification. That's game based learning. So the the thing, what we need to do is look at what are the things about games? What What are core elements related to games that can be applied across a really broad range of games. And so you do have the elements that you talked about before you have points or rewards, you have rules, you have competition, there's usually an element of repetitiveness. There, you can have conflict or cooperation. They'll be problem solving. There's almost always feedback, pretty much every game you ever play has some kind of feedback involved, where you do something and there is a response to action, either by another player or the rules or whatever. And, and then you have discovery, games give you a sense of agency, you're making choices, you're doing things. And very, very, very often games have a story. Now, that might be an external story that you are following as part of the game, or think that this recent soccer game, the utilisateurs. Yeah, like that game created a story, the tension, the moment of what's going to happen in this penalty shootout. So sometimes the story inherent in a game is created as you go through the rules or the systems or whatever. And sometimes it's an external thing that you experience as a player. And so I guess what I would argue is that, like you said, with the marketing thing, what's happened with gamification, when it's done poorly, is people will take the cheap, easy, quick things like points, or a gold star when you finish or something like that. And go, oh, look, I gamified it? Well, yes, you did. But if the point of gamifying is to increase engagement, and thereby enhance learning outcomes, if you if the points are not very engaging, and in fact, in some cases, genuinely disengaging to a chunk of your learners, then you haven't increased engagement, and you definitely haven't increased learning outcomes. And then you've got the other issue with poorly done gamification, which is where the reward, the reason why you are engaging in the activity becomes more important than the learning. So there are a whole bunch of gamified teaching apps out there for K to six students that I have a serious issue with. Because if you look at the purpose of that game and what the child is learning, generally what the child is learning is how do I gain the system to get enough points to move away from this boring learning business and get into the fun, stupid video game beat reward. Now, I can tell you right now parents love those. They say all but the kid spent half an hour doing it. Sure. But how much of that time was doing reading or math? And how much of that was playing the reward games? And is that act of clicking through the reading or the maths as quickly as you can to get it done so that you can play the game? Are they actually learning? And often? I'm not sure they are.
Yeah, I mean, I've certainly quite recently observed that with my own young children playing various or using various game based reading apps on the iPad, and I won't, I won't name any of them specifically for fear of legal repercussions. Perhaps
I haven't done that either. For similar reasons.
But but you know, there's one, the one that the one that my five year old son probably likes the most is the one that he has actually learned how to game and to skip the skip through. And he's quite, he's now quite adept at navigating the activities without necessarily engaging in the point of activity, which is reading particular phrases. And so yeah, it's interesting to see how, and I suppose is this. You mentioned before, when you use the Carmen Sandiego example of it being game based learning rather than gamification of learning? How fine is that definition difference?
Look, there are a lot of people in the world who talk about gamification, some of whom have, you know, PhDs and stuff, and I don't agree with them. Right? Despite I have no PhD. But the there's not a huge amount of research in the area. And a lot of it's called not quant research. So there is the definition, my definition is that they're quite separate. But there's a lot of people that don't that consider them very blurry and mixed and stuff. But for me, the thing is, is if you're gamifying, the activity, the activity should be a learning activity that contains elements of gain. The issue with some of these learning apps for young children is that the emphasis, like you said, is about what they learning becomes not how to read how to do maths how to do whatever the thing, they're the new literacy and numeracy skills, it becomes getting enough points, or score or whatever in order to play the game. But the game itself doesn't have a learning outcome. So as far as I'm concerned, that's not even getting based learning the game is a reward, the game that they get at the end is it is gamification. In that you do x, you get y and in this case, they have unlike, unlike your, you know, gold star points system, that the reward that they're being offered is very desirable. It's playing video games, of course, they want to do that. But if it was game based learning, the act of playing the video game would be a learning thing. And if it was good gamification, then the the elements of game would be making the child engaged in the learning bit of the app. But as it stands, it's like eat your broccoli, you can have your chocolate, but they're not loving learning to love broccoli, they're not understanding the depths and beauty of delicious broccoli, they are instead choking it down as quickly as possible in order to drown the flavor out with chocolate. And the chocolate isn't the good thing. So that's my favorite analogy about bad gamification is like chocolate covered broccoli. It's like it can force you to eat something that's meant to be good for you, but often that like the reward or the bribery or the chocolate wipes out any good.
Well, to draw on that analogy, then in the classroom, let's let's maybe look at a practical example. How would you go about designing a reading lesson say that's intended to get children to love their broccoli?
Broccoli, I really love broccoli. So, I think for me, it would be making the actual act of reading engaging ah, And to be fair, I think there are apps and activities out there that do that. But things like acting out the story, things like making the engagement with the letters or the literature, we come back to So so what are we got? If if we're not using out of those elements of game, if we're not using rules, competition, or points, what are we using? Well, we could use problem solving. We could use discovery. We could use scenarios, we could give the learners choice. We could create situations where they they create the story themselves where they have to act it out. So we're linking their physical action to and like I said, teachers do this stuff all the time. That's, that's not I'm not I'm definitely not till especially like reading and math, I'm there I got no, I don't think I have any new fancy tips. For what, for teachers, as far as that stuff concerns, they are already doing all that. I know, they are doing amazingly awesome things. And then the other side to that is that there's tons and tons of teachers who will take the literacy and the math and put it into some kind of activity where the literacy or the the, the act of reading becomes exciting and engaging and enjoyable, because of the other learning things that you do with it. So you read half the book, and then you get to the problem. And then the whole class has to invent the machine to solve the problem for the main character. But as well as problem solving and cooperation, and all those fabulous things that they learn as part of that you're engaging them with that literacy. They don't think they are taking part in the story they are engaged with what's happening. But I guess from a really practical point of view, for how can I help the teacher in the classroom? Well, when you are evaluating what app you're gonna use, because there are some great apps out there, too. Yeah, and I won't name names because I don't want to be, I don't want to be promoting something, I shouldn't do that. But when you're evaluating a piece of software, for gamification elements, what do you need to be looking at you need to be very specifically looking at is the emphasis of the the learning activity or that piece of software, the actual learning outcome of literacy or numeracy or whatever? Or is it do this thing, and I will give you a reward, because I have seen their son fantastic. I don't know as much about reading. But there are some fantastic new gamified numeracy software and apps out there, where there's, you have a cute character. So that's your story. And they have a problem to solve. And the screen moves. And there's things there are levels. But it's it's about there's no reward, the there's no beat that you're getting to the reward is solving the puzzle that gets a the character from one side of the screen to the other. That involves doing, like some quite cool interactive maths stuff. And one of the things I really like about that, is it this particular app that I'm thinking of, there's there's a lot of choice, you and you really need to sort of use that discovery element to figure out what works. So it's not just, you know, how fast are you at pressing the correct answer or, you know, things that involve hand eye coordination for myself, for example, I'm extraordinarily unco person, and I am never going to do well on a game that requires me to keep the answer quickly. Which is not to say that there isn't potentially some value in that, but a learning tool that actively asks me to try answers and figure it out and find a pattern and solve a problem there. And, and particularly if it's, you know, leveled enough so that a student that needs a bit more time is given a challenge at the level that they are at, but that if the student is getting the answers correct quickly either it'll move them along. But there are there are there are some really great, genuinely educational gamified tools out there. It's about being really mindful when you're choosing is what is this thing actually promoting in my students? Is that promoting? How do I gain the system? Or is it promoting the literacy or numeracy skills you're actually looking for?
Well, can I can I go back to something you mentioned earlier, that, you know, with all these elements, you're talking about, with gamification, the providing choice, providing a sense to discover and solve a problem or, you know, do things repeatedly until you overcome an obstacle. The one element that you mentioned before that kind of unites all of those was the idea of story. And, you know, you mentioned yourself coming to gamification, through playing story based games. As you describe yourself as second generation Dungeons Dragons nerd, but I'm just wondering how, how essential is that element of a story uniting all those elements. For gamification to be effective? Can you implement those elements without some kind of narrative framework? Or is the narrative framework an essential unifying element?
No, it's not essential. So to give you an example of a really great gamified activity that I created a long time ago now, I made a virtual reality bushwalk in partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens, it's very cool. It's on their website. It's a tiny little walkthrough of the Cumberland plains woodlands, which is really endangered bit of ecosystem. And it is a it's a loop where you can walk forwards and backwards. And it is full of hidden things. And when you you don't know what you're going to find, you might get a bug, you might get a plant, you might get an animal, you might get a video, you might get some links out to other stuff. There's no story. Again, I would argue that as a class, going through it, or a student going through it, you sort of create your own story because you're making your way through and woodlands finding out learning about its flora and fauna. But there is no story to it at all. No, no underlying narrative. What I would say though, is quite a long time ago now, um, Stephen Colbert and I were trying to find a way to map now Scott semer, we were trying to find a way to map the Samer model to elements of gamification. And we spent a couple of evenings together Nutting this out. And what we came up what we decided was we couldn't, and we ended up coming up with a sort of a ranking system for how effective we thought the some of these different elements of game were. And what we settled on was that story by itself, can gamify and activity really successfully. So you don't have to have a story to gamify you don't. But I would argue that without a story. You you have you're limited. And that a story with only a few other elements of game or even by itself will give you a really engaging educational activity. Because humans just stories work for us. Thinking about it from a really like base classroom. If I'm teaching you nine science, then the story that I'm going to use is going to be completely different to somebody teaching you to PHP. But if I'm teaching in the Sutherland Shire, the story that I'm going to use for my students is going to be different to somebody teaching out at berwarna because their kids are different, your context is different. So you need the right story. And you need to know your learners well enough to choose the story that's going to engage them. Super cool example of this actually, is a really cool science teacher from sort of think regional, not rural but regional. who'd been working with disengaged boys. And she had came up with an idea to teach basic science skills or those sorts of working scientifically skills that we want all still Didn't to get a decent grasp on in a digital escape room. And she wanted the story she basted around was their local soccer competition, because she knew for those students the most engaging thing, the thing that they cared about far more than anything to do with their education was their soccer games. And they and so we linked everything, all the learning activities, related to soccer games, soccer stats, soccer tickets. Everything was was around that. And now I know for a fact that there's lots of kids throughout the state or even Australia, I think, for whom that would be the perfect engaging thing. But at the same time, there's also tons who'd like soccer or whatever sport or incidentally, you seven me would have been like, whatever. So obviously, whatever story you pick to wind around your learning outcomes has to work for your students and who they are, where they are, what time of the day, it is, like I would, I wouldn't do this definitely certain stories or activities, I wouldn't do last period on Friday, for example, because but on the other hand, if I've got my year 10 science class last period on Friday, and they're in a mood, then sometimes a story to get them going to get them thinking. I'm going to get far more out of them in that last period on Friday, when it's summer, and they're hot, and tired and cranky than I am if I'm trying to get them to do an experiment, or, you know, like, focus on something technical, because I'll engage them emotionally first. And I guess that's the thing about a story is generally if you've chosen the story, well, you will get some kind of emotional response, and then you've got engagement. And then you can take that elsewhere. And Ben before you know it. They're they're eating the broccoli. But without the chocolate.
Well, I mean, something that came to mind while you were describing the, you know, the Botanic Gardens example of going and finding things. I mean, there's, I suppose there's a fundamental difference. There's a fundamental difference between like a fictionalized narrative framework, you know, you even I get that the escape room example that you gave was based around some very practical real world scenarios, but even something as basic as an escape room usually has a narrative conceit.
Oh, and that did No, no, that 100% did. It was all about the competition. And and as you went through the they were making it to the final stages, I definitely had a story.
Yeah. And, and I suppose what I'm, what I'm thinking is, there's a, there's a difference between that kind of narrative conceit, where you're given, like a fictional role to adopt within a narrative conceit that's removed from yourself, as opposed to where you are, perhaps playing out that narrative of discovery and experience with a sense of yourself. Like, they're still they're still engaging in those same kind of motivators that drive a narrative forward. But they are, you know, fundamental human experiences and, and engaging with them in that way. As you said, before, narratives emerge out of our, out of our experiences and out of out of the situations we find ourselves in and, you know, obviously, normally, I recognize that I kind of adopt the role of a novice in these interviews, I'm not gonna lie, that, you know, a big part of my master's was in studying the psychology of roleplay and learning. But, you know, there's a whole theory of psychology called the narrative theory of reality, where people see themselves as narrative agents, building cause and effect. And what I see in that example, you described of the Botanic Gardens, almost like treasure hunter quest kind of model, is there's a clear sense of cause and effect because I did this, I achieved this, I go on to this next thing that is in itself motivating without the fictional narrative construct.
Yes, yes. 100%. And that the thing is that that I really like about that. That bushwalk example, is twofold. One is that as I helped, there's a fabulous teaching principal at the kemei Botany Bay Environmental Education Center and she made a really awesome Dr. Walk on one of the excursions that she normally took. And she used to give it to the students after they'd come to visit, because that there's a creek there that that was visited by Captain Cook to refill. And it's in his diaries, but it only runs about three months of the year. And there's a whole bunch of plants and animals that are only there at certain times of the year. And so that the idea is that you can create this experience that is more than what you would get if you were actually in that space or place. And what I did with the Botanic Gardens, one is all the information that was in that bushwalk, you could have made a website, you know, you could have made it you could have made a textbook that had headings, and a picture of the animal and a bit of info or big picture of the plant bit of information about it, you know, a link out. The only thing that makes that more interesting than a webpage with a whole bunch of species is the act of choice is that I get to a 360 environment, it's got sound, it's not, it's it's not a video, because that just takes too long to load. But I choose if I look up or down, I choose, there's more than one exit. So I can go in and go out whichever way I like. And the environment, all the environments are scattered with little yellow question marks. And so I choose what I look at, I choose where I go. And I used to when I took my kids on excursions I had, I had really delightful monsters. And they ranged wildly between, I have the attention of a net, and I want to run backwards and forwards. And I really want to look at everything really clearly carefully and slowly. And neither of those students got the best experience out of an excursion to a two, because we all have to work at work at the same pace. And we will have to see what's there in that moment. Whereas in in a gamified virtual space like that, you get to go at your own pace, you get to make those choices for yourself and have the experience that you want to have. And I know that it got used in classrooms, both up on the big screen where people the students took turns making choices, and also in small groups. So that it wasn't always an individual activity, but but the idea for a lot of these gamified explorative situations because I would consider any sort of app or or situation where the students are exploring and making choices again, it's not a game, it's gamified in that they have that sense of agency and control. And, and it it is motivating. I mean I I kids these days don't actually get to make that many choices. You know, when Pokemon GO came out again this long time ago now, and one of my kids very wisely whinge to me when she said, If I sit at home all day playing video games, my parents yell at me. But now I want to go outside and run around and play video games. My parents are telling me I can't do it, and I need to stay home. So every time you give your students choice, I think you are you are giving them like some some power and agency over there learning in a way that is engaging and and should lead to increased learning outcomes because because I guess that's something I haven't said super clearly yet. But there's no point if you get half an hour's worth of engagement with no learning outcomes, and there are so if you are designing a learning activity, you need to make sure that it's not just about fun. I engagement doesn't have to be fun. Dan Meyer, he's this fantastic maths educator. He does these awesome three act problems that are really about problem solving. and thought provoking and they're very, very cool. If you've never heard of them, totally check them out. But he argues that when you are when you are giving kids a learning activity, and you just give them the solution, without giving them a headache beforehand, that there's no meaningful learning in that. So if if, before you give kids a formula for math, you need to give them a problem that creates a cognitive headache, in that they're like, Oh, this is really hard. And then you say to them, ah, but I have an easy way. And then the formula suddenly has meaning to them. Because it gives them a way to do things. And there's a reason for it, instead of here is a problem, you solve it like this, okay, whatever. And I think, game, good. Gamification should be like that, that it can be engaging by being challenging, or the right level of challenge, obviously, if it's too hard, but it's the same with video games, yeah, if the video game is too hard, you give up, if the video game is too easy, you get bored, and you know, you stop, or you want to go up a level. Kind of the thing with sport, though, you know, like sports too easy or too hard. So, when you are designing something in your classroom that uses problem solving, or story or, or challenge or whatever, like, engaging is not always fun. Sometimes it's hard and engaging.
Well, that's, that's one of the things I want to explore in a little bit more detail. And I suppose, dive into another aspect of both your experience, but also what is often seen as one of the barriers, I think, to effective gamification in the classroom. And that is, and again, I'm offering this as kind of an unquantified observation on my part. But I think there's often a conflation in people's minds of gamification, being an inherently tech based tool, because a lot of the learning elements that you've talked about, such as repetition, quick and instant feedback, the ability to provide choice that can be immediately serviced, through the learning design. Those are all things that are best done quickly, by technology in many ways, you know, a computer can, a computer can respond to something far more quickly than a teacher can to 30 students individually engaging in a learning activity. So what role does tech play in effective gamification? Like can? Can you design effective interesting gamified learning experiences that don't require any technology input? But even then, is it better if they do?
Well, heck, yes, you can. I can think of a ton of really great examples. So for me, I am a I love tech. I'm just a super tech nerd. It's I've always worked with it. I really, really like it. It's my thing. But sometimes as a science teacher, the best tool in my teaching tool book is OLED pencil and a ruler. So I Yes, I love tech. Yes, most of my examples are tech based. But gamification does not need to be. So gamification can be, you know, a deck of cards that can be shuffled gamification can be rolling dice. I was at an AI entrepreneur conference, that the DOE ran a sort of competition for a whole bunch of teachers across the state who wanted to do some really cool stuff with entrepreneurial thinking. And I forget the name of the school isn't brand new school and they were doing their new group of year sevens coming in, and they designed a whodunit mystery game, kind of like those dinner party murder mystery games. And all the teachers had clues and plot and the kids were given. But there's zero tech involved. The kids, it was about the kids getting to know each other, learning the school and going and finding and talking to all the teachers. And it wasn't it took it took I think it was a couple of weeks worth of work and learning to find the clues and solve the puzzle and talking to different teachers multiple times and all that kind of thing. And there, yeah, that that wasn't tech at all, it was really engaging and very clever, had multiple, you know, the kids working together getting to know everyone. But also, it was science based. So it was a was a murder mystery. And there was actual, you know, science working scientifically skills built into it as well. There's a there's a really cool game kit that I got from America called the I think it's breakout room. And you get a box with all these different locks, like color locks and letter a number locks, and a UV light, and a UV pen. And then there's all these different puzzles and games. And they've all got some kind of story. But again, the feedback is built into, you don't need to ask the teacher for help you, you work together. And you get I think most of the time, you get a certain number of helped me clues, like two or three clues where you can go and ask the teacher, but technically, it's the puzzles are designed so that it's often used as like a summative activity, you know, you've done a topic. And now let's use all our knowledge from the activity to solve a set of problems, get the code to unlock the box. So you do things like, you know, you put posters up on the walls, and you hide things under the chairs. And then you give clues and then they have to figure out the code to open the box. And then inside the boxes, that UV light that then you shine on the posters to see the next. Like, it's cool. And that and that's, that's completely physical, there's no digital, I mean, well, technically, the teacher has to print out the pictures. But you can do. So you can absolutely do really cool stuff. But then you can do things that are a combination of tech. So I made a game where what you do is you give the kids two boxes of Lego bits, identical Lego bits, and one team is on the spaceship, bringing oxygen to the other team who's on the moon base, because otherwise they're going to die. But the ship has broken. So the people on the moon have the completed part that's needed to fix the spaceship. And the people on the spaceship have all the Lego bits but not it's all in a jumble. And so they type to each other in 140 characters, instructions on how to build the parts, and there's a timer. And if they build the part in the time, then then everyone leaves because the spaceship gets to the moon. And so it's it's not it's cooperative, because both teams have to work together. And because it would probably work be a lot faster and easier if you had one person on the moon base and one person on the ship. Because you don't, you've got a whole team. And so the whole team on the moon has to figure out what communication to send. But the only tech involved in that is I used to do it with a shared Google Doc. And you had to type your commands in the box, but you couldn't have pictures and it was only text. And as a group, you had to figure out what instructions to give the people on the ship to get them to build the part. It's fun, but it's very low fi because you could technically do that with post it notes and and having somebody carry the post it notes backwards and forwards between the two groups. For example, you wouldn't need tech for that.
But I suppose here's the other. So you know, obviously some great examples there of completely tech free gamified learning. But then the other barrier that I can see coming out of that is that's a lot of design and preparation time. And I suppose I suppose this kind of ties two questions together. You've talked about and you've said several times throughout this interview that there's not really much point to engagement without learning and there's not much point to gamification without it being built around learning outcomes. And I suppose, for want of a for want of a less economic rationalist bit of slang. Does gamification provide a bang for buck? When it comes to the amount of time it does take to design and employ meant that kind of learning experience for the learning benefits of student gets out of it.
For me, yes, yeah. 100% Because they'll talk, they're still talking about a year later. So yes. Will it be every time? No. On the other hand, there's this really awesome thing where people like me, and a million other humans all over the world teachers, the most generous people I know. Like, seriously, if you want help, you want someone to help you move. You want someone to lend you a book, you want a free teaching resource. Teacher, yeah, and ask the teacher. And so that, that breakout room, kitting, there are 1000s of free pre made things out there on every topic known to humanity, and you can always change that, you know, if the topic isn't, if it's art, but the topic isn't quite right for what your kids did, you know, it's a lot easier to retrofit something that somebody's already done 90% of the work for you then make it from scratch. So that's, that's one thing is that the back, you don't always have to spend that much time and effort. But the other thing I would argue, so I was I'm a Montessori trained teacher actually did full on Montessori adolescent training in America. And Maria Montessori, she was very cool, she had a lot of really cool interesting things to say about education. But she, one of her big parts of her philosophy is the idea of a prepared environment. So the idea is that you, as a teacher create an environment conducive to learning, depending on you know, your kids, and whatever it is. And so, as a Montessori teacher, there's often a lot of prep at the beginning. But if you create the environment, well, then the learning happens within that environment. And I would often find that, although my planning investment, at the beginning of term, and maybe the first couple of weeks of term, were really full on that, as the term progressed, I had less to do, because the students would work. And I know that's not going to work in, you know, for some subjects, and in really like rigid mainstream schools, potentially, that isn't going to work. But in that case, don't reinvent the wheel go out there and find cool stuff that other teachers have made. And road tested already. and adapt. Like, if you because teachers are so time poor. But but if you have time, to if you're already out there looking for something on the internet, maybe instead of a worksheet or a YouTube video, maybe look for a little gamified activity that somebody's made, you know, like, the I know, teachers spend heaps and heaps of time looking for resources. It's it's, I mean, it's very interesting, because the Grattan Institute came out relatively recently and said that teachers need resources. And, and so governments were like, oh, we'll we'll, you know, we'll give you mandated resources. So you don't have to look for anything. And I was like, Are you kidding? No, that's like, what teachers, my personal opinion, anyway, what teachers want is more time to do good planning, and less credit admin. But given that at the moment, we don't necessarily have a ton of either, what I would say is in the small amount of planning time that I know you have that you scrape out because teachers genuinely enjoy that most of the time. It's fun, figuring out what you're going to do and having an overall plan that there is cool stuff out there really, really, it's there's tons of cool stuff out there, tech and not tech based, so that you can dip a toe in and not feel that you need to spend 20 hours doing something. Because you don't have 20 hours to plan even though you should all of you listening teachers, you should be paid more, and you should be having half your time for planning.
Well, I disagree with you there. No. So speaking of resources that are easily able to find, I know from our past conversations that you've been gathering and collecting things on a website that people can use as a starting point. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Yeah, so I started it a while ago now and I have not kept it as up to date as I should. But yeah, there's just like I said, there's lots of people out there doing really cool stuff. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, and the it's a little Google site, it's really ugly needs updating. But it, it's got links to Siri, a whole bunch of cool stuff that other people have done videos. And also some some games I made. So that communication that space, space station one, there everything you need. There's a really adorable version of a board game called Robo rally that I made for teaching coding to really small kids. It's super cute, you just print the cards out and laminate them tons of fun. Yeah, all sorts of stuff, links to things other people have done, which may then help you with search terms for going out there and finding more modern stuff. The other thing I did at some point was made a whole bunch of Google templates for little games. That just and they're all there. So you can you make a copy of them. And away you go. Just be because there's a ton of cool stuff out there. There's definitely links to the breakout room, Kid website on there, because I've used that a few times. And some and some theory, because there's some really great theory out there. And it is worth reading some of that, just to get that idea behind the scenes of of why not? Not what the marketing people want you to know. But what actual researchers have actually discovered and thought about it. Because yeah, that's that some interesting stuff, what you will find is that my definition of gamification is not the same. There's there's a lot of different definitions out there. And I massively insulted a one of those fancy PhD holding people by saying that there wasn't one agreed definition. She was like, yes, there is it's mine. And I'm like, there's like a whole bunch of people out there with PhDs who have different definitions, and they don't agree. I know I'm still not sure that there is one set definition. But but within so I guess as a teacher, you need to find what works for you, in your space, the resources that work for you the story that works for your students in the definition of gamification, whether it's text based or not, that works in your classroom. And if if you take one thing from listening to this long rambling chat, it is that try dip a toe in, have a go. Think about what you're currently doing, and how you could consciously do just a teensy bit more.
Excellent. Well, we will make sure there's a link to your site and your profile at UTS. If people want to get in contact and maybe even look into learning more about gamification.
Please, please do I really enjoy random people hitting me up for a chat in LinkedIn? It's yeah, I genuinely enjoy it. I will make time talks of give you links. Whatever you like.
Excellent. Well, all those links will be in the show notes. Claire, thank you very much for your time and it's been great getting to catch up and have this chat with you.
