I play EVE Online, and that was the advice I got when I asked more experienced players how to get better at player-vs-player combat. Regular failure is simply part of the game, so much so that one of the tutorial missions for players in their first week is a suicide mission where success requires flying Read more about Go Die a Hundred Times[…]
For the past few years I’ve been reading here and there about games in the classroom. The most provocative example I’ve found is Reacting to the Past, a role-playing game designed at Barnard College that has students inhabit historical events. The idea is that the game inspires students to prepare much more thoroughly than they […]
In the third week of the course we met the Blannelid, but only after we had exhausted ourselves defeating the Troll and its spider sidekicks. In fact, it looked very much as though we met the Blannelid b e c a u s e we were on the point of defeating the Troll; the Troll Read more about The GOBLIN learning experience[…]
I’ve been thinking a lot about failure lately. I’ve implemented Specifications Grading in Intro to Hispanic Literary Texts, Spanish Conversation, and Composition in Spanish courses over the past two semesters, with mostly positive results. The basic idea is that assignments have very clear requirements, are graded pass/fail, and that failure is mitigated through tokens students […]
This post was written by guest blogger Keegan Long-Wheeler and cross-posted from his blog, Keeganslw.com. Keegan is the educational technologist at the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Oklahoma and my collaborator on GOBLIN. My first experiences of online multiplayer gaming were dominated byHalo 2. This Xbox title was the most popular game of its time in my […]
One of the big benefits from GOBLIN training is that it gives you names for things you were already doing, but didn’t have a label for, like ‘scaffolding’. In my course on the Cold War, I originally designed a ‘General Knowledge Quiz’ to weed out unprepared students. The test asked for well known names and Read more about A general idea for scaffolding[…]
It seems like synchronistic timing that I am about to embark on a new adventure in game design as the blog approaches 10,000 page views. My day job is as a college professor at the University of Oklahoma. The Center for Teaching Excellence …
I’m currently teaching my 4-year old daughter, Evie, to play board games. Before we get to chess or Scrabble or even Sorry, we’re starting off with some really simple games that can demonstrate for her how games work. Candy Land is mind-numbingly simple and a great starting point for her. Players race down a string […]
While the thought of gamifying an entire class or even elements of a class will be daunting for many, GOBLIN also includes more universal and applicable concepts. Well designed games introduce game mechanics and then increase the difficulty of tasks to encourage mastery of those mechanics. They encourage team work, challenging players to combine the […]
