The Learning Matters Podcast captures insights into, experiences of, and conversations around education at the University of Sussex. The podcast is hosted by Prof Wendy Garnham and Dr Heather Taylor. It is recorded monthly, and each month is centred around a particular theme. The theme of our seventh episode is ‘gamification’ and we hear from Dr. Jennifer Mankin from Psychology and Prof Paul Newbury from Informatics.

Recording

Listen to the recording of Episode 7

Transcript

Wendy Garnham: 

Welcome to the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, where we capture insights, experiences, and conversations around education at our institution and beyond. Our theme for this episode is Gamification and our guests are Doctor Jennifer Mankin from Psychology and Professor Paul Newbury from Informatics. Our names are Wendy Garnham and Heather Taylor and we are your presenters today. Welcome everyone. So, can you tell us a little bit about the context of your scholarship, Jennifer, in the area of gamification?

Jennifer Mankin: 

Yeah. Certainly. So I teach statistics and research methods, and I particularly teach first years now. So I’m working with a large group of students in psychology who are being asked to learn something that they might not have expected to learn as part of their learning journey, that is a bit more complex and technical than they might have been expecting. And so my scholarship kind of revolves around trying to make that thing that is unexpected and difficult and stressful also fun and engaging and worthwhile so that they can really kind of get a handle on what is it that I want to get out of this, why is it important, and maybe have a little bit of fun along the way. So we’re trying to support them to engage with their studies in a positive light, even if it’s something that they might not be it might not be their favourite subject. Let’s put it that way.

Wendy Garnham: 

And, Paul, could you tell us a little bit about your scholarship?

Paul Newbury: 

Yeah. So I’m from the Department of Informatics, which is essentially a computer science department. And we have a range of degrees, including one on digital media and games. So my day-to-day job is teaching students how to produce games, mainly sort of 3D games, but thinking about what makes enjoyable games. But also, I have several PhD students who work in the area of e-learning and where we’re looking at both gamification and sort of game-based learning as key concepts which enable people to learn difficult subjects.

Heather Taylor: (02:09)

 What issues do you see as being particularly pressing in this area?

Jennifer Mankin:

It sounds like for both of us, sort of the overarching theme is that we want students to not only learn, but also enjoy learning and also include fun things as a way to learn how to enjoy learning something that they might not have expected to enjoy learning. But for me, I’m also very involved in areas of accessibility, and there’s kind of a lot of friction sometimes between things that are fun or gamified elements and that also put pressure on students who have accessibility needs so that they are able to enjoy those fun things at the same time. So my scholarship often sits in that sort of place between what makes things more fun and engaging, but also what is accessible and meaningful for all of our students, not only the ones who have, for example, a fast reaction time or who are already on board with the topics, but who might be reluctant or who might have dyslexia, who aren’t able to kind of engage with those things in exactly the same way as other students.

Paul Newbury: (03:22)

I mean, I think the key thing that sort of game-based learning and gamification can provide to students is the thing that Jennifer was saying then about engagement, is trying to get the students to be engaged with the material that you’re teaching them. And, obviously, we hope that by introducing some points of gamification, we’re making it fun. We’re making it more exciting, more engaging. And I guess what we’re trying to really trying to do is to try and sort of remove some of this sort of the ordeal of having to learn stuff and trying to get them into a situation where this sort of key term of flow, where they’re sort of engaging with it and they’re learning and they really realize they’re learning. Now that can be quite tricky to do with gamification with just sort of simple things, and there are issues that Jennifer’s talking about in terms of if you have a point-based system attached to some of your learning, well, how does that affect some of your students? But I think there are things in terms of sort of giving goals and making sort of the progress enjoyable that you can get in terms of easy wins in terms of your providing the material and making really engaging and particularly when you’re dealing with students where that what you’re teaching them isn’t necessarily their core thing that they’re interested in learning, but something they have to learn as part of their degree.

Wendy Garnham: (04:33)

So I’m going to delve a little bit deeper now because I’m going to ask each of you in a moment just to give us an idea of what scholarship projects you are, or have been, working on. So I’m going to address that to you, Paul, first.

Paul Newbury:

Okay. So, I mean, in terms of sort of general scholarship, my day-to-day job is teaching game design and development to our second-year students. So that is very much thinking about what makes games enjoyable, getting the students to think about what makes enjoyable games and goals within a sort of a game context. But that is about producing games rather than gamifying learning. But in terms of research, I have students who generally work in the area of sort of e-learning and that’s quite a range of things. But several of my students have worked in gamification and game-based learning. And they are two nice sort of adjacent subjects, which, I mean, often used interchangeably, but they are slightly different. So the idea of gamification is sort of adding game components to existing learning, whereas game-based learning is sort of doing it from the other way, of designing a game that has components of learning in it. But one of my students had a lot of success in terms of actually looking at very young children learning the alphabet and actually rather than just as we normally would with small children learning the alphabet by rote and giving them basic things to do, actually changing that into a game. So you’re getting achievements for accessing the material, but also always being cognizant of the comments that Jennifer made about it has to be engaging for everybody. So it’s not that we want to remove some of that competitive edge, which often is very key in games, but and learning content can often affect the way the students interact with it. And then but try and keep the enjoyment part the, ‘oh, I’ve achieved this’. ‘Oh, look. I’ve got this badge’. All those components of gamification, which really help, particularly with young children. But even when we get to a higher education where we’re looking at different components. I think rewards and these type of gamification components work really well. And that’s even before we look at maybe more intense things by looking at from a game-based learning perspective.

Wendy Garnham: (07:04)

That does raise another question for me, which is just I wonder what either of you think about the idea that gamification is popular or successful because it personalizes learning?

Jennifer Mankin:

I’ve seen a good tool – I’ll talk in a moment about what the context is for this as well. But the challenge that I’m particularly facing is that my students aren’t expecting to be confronted with what we are asking them to learn. And I think it often feels to them like they are kind of being forced to do something that they don’t really want to be doing. And I think you’re right that that gamified element allows them to, like, decide that this is something that they want to do and take that on for themselves. We also make use of some badges and points and that sort of thing so that they can see their own progress. And it’s another way for them to quantify ‘I have actually achieved something. I’ve learned something, even something that I thought was difficult or I didn’t want to do. I’ve been able to kind of conquer that or make progress in that’. And I really do feel like that underlying core, though, is that they are making the decision to engage with that, and it’s not just being foisted upon them. And that might not be exactly the same thing in terms of, like, personalization, in terms of individual learning goals, but I think that first step and I’m teaching on a very large module. So that first step of just getting people to show up and getting people to engage and give it a try is the main battleground that we are working on to try and make sure that our students are getting what they need.

Paul Newbury: (08:47)

Yes. So I think that there is a whole area of adaptive game-based learning and e-learning around adapting it to individuals. But I think even at its most basic level, the way that gamification components enable people to achieve the learning goals in their own way and then get recognition for that, and moving away from the standard way that we teach, which is, look, here’s a load of teaching material, and we’ll give you a test. Maybe we’ll give you a test in the middle, and maybe we’ll just give you an exam at the end. But you’re actually having that structured feedback as an individual as you go through. And, I mean, you could consider that that is giving each individual learner that sort of rather a bespoke learning environment; they are getting individualistic feedback on how well they’re achieving the goals and how they’re engaging, as well as that extra motivation that we hope that sort of gamification components can give.

Wendy Garnham: 

Going back to scholarship projects, Jennifer, do you want to give us an idea of any that you are or have been working on?

Jennifer Mankin: 

Yes. So as I mentioned, I teach a relatively large cohort. I believe this year, we’re at about 480ish. But in the past few years, it’s been over 500. And the struggle with that not to standardize experiences, but to make them fair and equitable and interesting and fun without compromising kind of the integrity of the fun bit. So I spent a lot quite a lot of time thinking about, you know, do we want to individually generate a dataset for every student so that they all had different answers? And it would be wonderful if we had the resources to do that, but it’s just not, not something that’s really achievable or practicable. So, what I’ve been doing is focusing a lot more on, things that we can do in large sessions that are easily available to large groups of students. They really don’t have to do much except show up to the sessions. So for example, we make use of Kahoot to do in session sort of fun quizzes at the end of our coding sessions to revise, but also we have stickers that we give out to people who kind of score highly. And we also just give people these little sticker badges, which are also part of the coding community that we’re part of. We teach R, which is a coding language primarily for statistics, but also for quite a lot of things as well. And the R community has developed these, like, hexagonal stickers that you can often see at conferences or online for packages. And so we give out these stickers to students to make them feel like they’re a part of the community, but also as prizes. And one of the things I’m currently working on right now, actually, is that we are evaluating how well that is working. Because my colleagues and I who teach our modules, we love stickers. Like, part of it is that we just want stickers for ourselves. So, like and we might as well give them to other people as well because who doesn’t love a shiny sticker? But also, we really want to be aware of the things that we might not see in our student population. So people who are feeling maybe left out by that or who don’t quite understand things enough to be able to earn a sticker, but they’d really like to have one. So we’re trying to investigate the different influences that might kind of help us understand why people might choose to participate in Kahoot or not, might participate in the leaderboard or not, and to make sure that if there are any kind of influences that are preventing our students from engaging as a result of even that kind of gamification element, that we address that or we make sure that it’s equitable and enjoyable for everybody. So we’ve been doing that for a couple of years now, and we’re currently kind of having a look at what we are doing so far and trying to get some feedback from our students about what they like and don’t like about it so that we can make sure it’s fun because that’s the whole point of doing all of this work to gamify things is to make it fun.

Heather Taylor: (12:56)

I was just going to say, I really like the idea. I know it seems like a simple thing, the stickers, but, you know, you’re saying it being from like, that the R community has these stickers. And I think with things like statistics and R because it’s a new language, it can be really alienating. And I think that so the idea of gaining stickers and so on to be part of a community, I think, is lovely because it addresses that to begin with. But I actually really appreciate the fact that you’ve considered what if we don’t meet that aim. You know? What if even us trying to form this community is making people feel alienated? So I just think it’s I just wanted to say it’s really good all around thinking, basically, that you’ve considered the pros of it, but also the possible negative consequences for some students. And, yeah, that’s brilliant.

Jennifer Mankin:

I have to say that a lot of this reflection has come out of, like I did a workshop for the Active Learning Network a few months ago and talked about some of the gamification stuff that we did. And some of the feedback from that was about the impact on neurodivergent students and students with various reasonable adjustments, that even though I already spent a lot of time thinking about this, I hadn’t necessarily thought through all of the implications for everyone. And I definitely don’t want those things that we design to be fun and engaging to put people off. So part of the idea for this, which I’m working on with some students, is to really understand all of those impacts. But it’s come out of some of the discussions that I’ve had with other people about what they are doing and the concerns that they have, the pros and cons of these things. Because I think gamification generally is seen as a good thing. I think we’re all probably for it, but I don’t want to lose sight of the potential drawbacks as well, and I’m sure none of us would want to as well like to put any of our students off. I think on the whole, it’s a good thing. But I am aware that the people for whom it’s not a good thing might not be able or feel willing to speak up. So want to make sure that we give them a voice.

Heather Taylor: 

What impact do you hope your scholarship will have?

Paul Newbury: (15:05)

I think the key thing is to make the learning more engaging. So to get the students to properly engage with the subject and see it as fun really more than anything else. And that can be very tricky, particularly if you’re teaching a very dry subject. So if I’m teaching game design, it’s quite a fun subject. It’s quite easy to get people to engage with some of those components. But then when you start talking about computer coding that we do, then that is harder. So trying to get them to engage with that and make it more fun. I don’t have some sort of nice, core scholarship to talk about in terms of getting coding better, but one of my PhD students, Caran Anagnostopoulou, she got her doctorate recently, and she looked at game-based learning and gamification in terms of teaching maths and particularly in teaching high level maths like differentiation and the power rule and things which are really quite dry and quite tricky to incorporate, and looking at how you could put them into a game environment. So she chose to use role playing adventure games. And so you can actually have characters who are going through completing different tasks within this game. And as they’re doing it, learning sort of by osmosis, differentiation. Now it’s not a really straightforward thing. It involves sort of starting off with some basic symbols and then working through until you’re actually changing slightly until ‘oh, no. And now I’ve got numbers and algorithms in there’. But it’s a way of getting people to engage with the process and do the learning without thinking they’re learning and ideally with this idea of flow. So they suddenly they’re lost in it and they spent an hour doing it and they didn’t realize they were doing it now. And that’s the whole holy grail of sort of gamification. But I think even with adding sort of fairly straightforward things, you can get that level of gamification. But we have moved on a long way. So 20 years ago, ‘oh, yeah, let’s put a quiz in and let’s have some awards’, but now it’s very much, well, yeah, ‘what other components can we add?’ As Jennifer says, how can we get people to engage even though some people might not be able to? ‘Oh, I can’t get that badge because I just don’t understand this part.’ But how can we still keep engaging for them? How can we make sure they’re rewarded? How can we make sure it’s fun and the progression works for them? And that that is not trivial. That’s a fairly tricky thing to do. It needs a lot of feedback, and we don’t always get it right. And we’ll always come across students where they’ll struggle with that, and we might give them extra support. But it’s a lot better than just saying, ‘oh, here’s some learning material. You’ve got an exam in 11 weeks time’.

Jennifer Mankin: (17:56)

Yeah. I absolutely couldn’t agree more, like that balance of trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t and to, you know, connect with the students who are maybe not finding it as fun and engaging and trying to figure out how to support them as well. It’s such a challenge, but it’s something I really enjoy, and I’m sure you do too as well, Paul, because that’s like, as you said, the holy grail of gamification is to really get people enjoying learning so much that they forget that they are actually learning. I honestly don’t have too much hope for that in terms of teaching R. I know that I can get into a flow state and lose hours at a time, but I understand that that’s not necessarily, like, the level that I expect all of my students to achieve. And I don’t think that’s necessary for them to be successful either. They’re not all going to become coders or whatever, and that’s completely fine. For me, I hope that I understand better what works and what doesn’t about what I do so that I can improve on that. But I also I see my scholarship as sort of an over between the two categories of, like, both as a Education and Scholarship lecturer and also in my role supporting accessibility and supporting students with reasonable adjustments, that it kind of touches on both of those areas by informing both sides of my roles so that I can support my students best and really understand both the benefits and the barriers to introducing things like this. And as I said, I really enjoy sharing those experiences with other people who I mean, it’s hardly unique for us to be trying to make something complex and difficult to be fun and interesting. I know that people who teach maths and statistics and computer science and all kinds of difficult topics often encounter situations where they’re trying to help students get excited about something that, you know, might not be inherently exciting. And it’s really fun to see how all of those different ideas can be integrated together. So for me, I’m hoping to evaluate how well what we are doing now is working and see where there are opportunities that we can evolve or continue what we’re doing in a way that supports all our students equally.

Heather Taylor: 

I was just going to ask a question to both of you. So you’ve both mentioned flow, like being in a state of flow, and I’ve never really thought of it in this context before. I don’t know a lot about it. From my understanding, it’s like a almost like a positive psychology sort of term, and it’s about, you know, the good life, enjoying yourself, well-being. And I just wondered I mean, I’m assuming you’re talking about it in the same sense, though. You’re talking about fully immersing yourself in something, it’s like you’re saying, so it almost feels like you’re not learning because you’re so focused on what you’re doing. I just wondered if you’ve obviously, there can definitely be educational pros of that, well-being even in education, I guess. But have you considered, I don’t know, measuring well-being in terms of if they’re doing a flow activity. I mean, maybe they’re not getting to flow. I don’t know. But, you know, have you have you considered that, like measuring these sort of psychological outcomes?

Paul Newbury: (21:23)

Not specifically like that. I mean, I we do sort of get that because, obviously, we get feedback on our modules, and we can see whether the students are enjoying it, and you will get feedback, ‘oh, I particularly enjoyed this this thing when we did that’. So we are getting sort of some positive feedback. But, no, I mean, I think it’d be a really interesting idea to have a more sort of objective measure of that in terms of the teaching with gamification. It’s a tricky thing to measure, though. I mean, I think in a laboratory situation, you could say, oh, yeah, I can see that they’re now really engaged and let’s time this. But that obviously varies for different students. Somebody might only engage for a little while, but actually might find it really, really very useful. Absorbing might get a lot done, and some students might be engaged for a long time, but not at that level. So it’s a really tricky thing to measure. But I think in general from the feedback that we get, it’s the oh, well, yeah, we like the gamification code components. And you’d imagine that should have to mean, obviously, games are very exciting, but you only have to look at a number of mobile apps that are these sort of idle type games where you’re doing sort of progression and you’re adding things every time you use the app and how engaging they are and how many people download them that these things must help with engagement and flow.

Jennifer Mankin: 

I actually have just been struggling with this question as well because the study that I’m actually running right now is about how well students enjoyed the session, you know, and enjoyed participating in the Kahoot and that sort of thing. And I had quite a few conversations with the students who have been working with me on this project about how we measure this, and they’ve looked at some of the, like, questionnaire measures for flow and motivation and a few other elements that we expect to sort of feed into how well people engage. This kind of engagement giant, air quotes, measure of that we’re this magical thing that we’re trying to create and measure, but it’s very complex and has a lot of moving pieces. And as you said, looks different for different people. So we have developed a measure that we are using in our study that’s – novel makes it sound a little bit more exciting than it is – but we’re going to hopefully collect some data on that and find out whether it sort of stands up in terms of whether it’s internally consistent and measures more or less what we expect it to measure. And I have a student who’s going to be doing some analysis about that down the road. So at the moment, like, flow state or kind of some attempt to capture flow state is part of that measure. I think it is, as Paul said, quite difficult, especially because if you are in a flow state, you’re often not aware of it by the fact that you are so deep in it that you’re not paying attention. So that makes it quite difficult – the moment you start reflecting on it, then you’re out of it. So and we found it quite difficult to write questions about that. Things like, you know, I was so engaged that I lost track of time. You know? And then we thought, well, what if you didn’t lose track of time, but you were so engaged that it felt like time went more quickly or more slow you know? And so we had quite a lot of really useful conversations about what do we think this looks like, and what’s a reasonable thing for people to respond to so that we can measure this in a way that makes sense? So I don’t have an answer for that yet, but hopefully, we’ll be able to say something about at least how people responded to that measure and the patterns that we can find in those responses to see if we can come up with a nice way to measure engagement in the future.

Wendy Garnham: (25:06)

I feel another podcast episode coming on further down the line. It did actually make me think. I mean, at the moment, I’m just trying to learn Japanese using one of these sort of gamified language apps. And everything that you’re saying just really makes sense in terms of that, so you get little badges. You can see where you are on the leaderboard. You can get promoted to the next league or demoted. But it is really sort of based on short chunks of learning. So, you know, even if you’ve only got five minutes, you can go and you can do like one so called lesson. And it just is amazing, like, how much you pick up from doing that. But it is all presented as a game. You know, it’s like you’re doing like a little short chunk. And if you do that chunk, you get this much XP and that much XP will contribute to your place on the leaderboard. And so it is quite rewarding, but it is I think if it was like longer chunks that you had to complete, it would lose some of that novelty. And I think that sort of sense of, you know, what we’re calling the flow state would just disappear a little bit because you become much more aware that you’re spending a long time doing it. But I think it’s like that short burst of, you know, game-based learning and doing that sort of, you know, to achieve a certain goal, badge, position on the board, something like that is quite addictive, I think, and just really effective.

 But that brings me to the last question. And this is a big one, which is what advice would you give to anyone regarding scholarship in the area of gamification?

Jennifer Mankin: 

I mean, for any type of scholarship, for any type of research, you have to define ahead of time really clearly what is it that I want to know, but I think scholarship involving gamification is complex, not necessarily uniquely complex, but you are looking at several areas, which is not only what have my students learned, are they enjoying it, you know, what are their academic outcomes, but then what are the gamification outcomes, and how do those interact with the learning outcomes? And then there’s kind of quite a lot of moving pieces, and I think it can be quite easy to lose track of those things. And so having, like, some really kind of well defined, what is it that I want my students to get out of this? And I think the other half of that is that designing scholarship around gamification is intrinsically caught up in designing gamification, which I would say I have some experience doing myself, but I’m by no means an expert, like Paul is, for instance, in designing games. But it’s just like anything else. The longer you think about it and the more you look at it, the more complex it is and the deeper down the rabbit hole you’re going to fall. And I think it’s quite tempting sometimes to want to do a lot, especially to start out with, like, oh, we could introduce badges, and then we could have XP, and then we could have progression, then we can have leaderboards, and then we have blah blah blah blah. And it’s all very exciting, but I hope that other people who have more time than I do can do that kind of thing. But it’s so exciting to get started on, but then it quickly becomes very overwhelming. So, if you were thinking about introducing gamification into some of your teaching, I would say start really small. Start simple with something that’s straightforward, easy to explain to your students, easy to measure, like, easy to implement, and don’t get too carried away right at the beginning because any like, anything that’s fun, I think, will usually be beneficial and will have a positive impact. But don’t get too, like, stuck in straight away because that can really become overwhelming quite quickly for you and for your students.

Wendy Garnham: (28:54)

I think one of the big sort of misconceptions often with scholarship is that, if you are engaging in scholarship, it does have to be some major big project where I think quite often some of the more simple, small changes that we make can actually have quite a big impact. So I think that is a really important point to take from that.

Paul Newbury: 

Yes. I think Jennifer’s right. Start small is a good place to start. I think quite a fun thing to do at the beginning, just because gamification, it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Get an idea of what is meant by gamification and what those things are. A fun thing you can do is download a couple of games on your phone, and particularly these sort of free-to-download in-ad type games, they all have these a significant number of these gamification components that we’re talking about. And they are trying to sell that. They’re trying to make the game as engaging as possible. So if you download a little word search game, you could play it for a few minutes and think about how it is trying to engage you. So it’s not just a word search like you used to get those the magazines for the word searches. There’ll be a set number of levels you can go through and you’re getting rewards and you have leaderboards, but there’s lots of different sort of engaging components in each of these. And, yeah, you may play it for 5 minutes and go, oh, yeah. now I want to delete it because it’s making me watch ads every minute. That’s fine. But if you download a few of those, you’d get an idea about across the board how these gamification components work in a game and then think, well, how can that be applied to the learning components within my module and things I can do? So are there any other things there that were really engaging? And maybe even some of the sort of the gameplay functionality you might think, well, actually, I could incorporate that in terms of, oh, maybe I’ll actually put a word search in there. But looking at these games and the things that make them engaging, I think, is a really nice and easy way to start thinking about gamification in terms of your scholarship and in terms of your module development.

Heather Taylor: (31:05)

I would like to thank our guests, Jennifer Mankin and Paul Newbury.

Jennifer Mankin and Paul Newbury:

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Heather Taylor: 

And thank you for listening. Goodbye.

This has been the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, created by Sarah Watson, Wendy Garnham, and Heather Taylor, and produced by Simon Overton. For more episodes, as well as articles, blogs, case studies, and infographics, please visit blogs.sussex.ac.uk/learning-matters.