Until very recently, I’d always thought of video games as something for kids and teenagers – not something that busy adults would waste their time doing. However, that was until I discovered Yousician.

For as long as I could remember, I’ve wanted to be able to play the keyboard. So twelve months ago, I decided to tick off some items on my bucket list – and learning keyboard was write up there at the top of the list.

The barriers to learning previously had always been the time and cost of lessons; the answer to overcoming those barriers was Yousician – a music lesson app which uses game elements to reward and engage ‘players’ into learning their chosen instrument.

For the keyboard, the app shows you which fingers to press on which keys and the timing at which to do so. It then ‘listens’ to you playing your instrument and provides a score and a number of ‘gold stars’, which determines whether you can move to the next song, or whether you need to repeat the song with the gentle instruction of:

‘Let’s see if you can do better than that’.

As someone interested in education design, I found that it uses many of the standard gamification techniques to motivate and engage the users through the learning path. These included progression towards a goal, reward for achievement, competition and public recognition. Essentially, the app uses gamification ‘to re-frame a real-life goal to be more appealing and achievable’ by using elements from traditional gameplay (Denmeade 2017, p. 155).

The first digital learning games were introduced with Where in the World is Carmen Saniago by the Learning Company in 1985 (Haughton Mifflin Harcourt 2020 https://www.carmensandiego.com/).

Now, digital game platforms to achieve learning goals within primary school and secondary school environments are fairly well-established learning tools. Some examples used in Australian classroom that teachers, parents and students will all be familiar with are Reading Eggs in primary school and Mathletics in primary and secondary school.

A brief run-down of the key elements in classroom gamification and the possibilities are discussed in a special video edition, Edu-trends below:

https://youtu.be/6hFWkBoATrI

As a first-time adult user of a gamified digital educational environment, the most important revelations for me was how fun, convenient and addictive this style of learning could be.

Then as someone working in vocational education, I started wondering how I could transfer that level of engagement that Yousician induced into the vocational classroom.

The students who have been regularly learning through digital games are now well and truly grown up. The 10-year-olds in 2012 who were using Minecraft to build and design are now 18-year-olds, some of whom are entering vocational education.

However in adult learning, particularly in the trades, learning through fun, interactive and engaging games is pretty rare. This is despite adults gloablly spending three billion hours a week playing video games outside of work and school (Klopfer, Osterweil, and Salen 2009).

Unfortunately for them, once they enter TAFE their digital learning skills are not generally continued with many vocational classrooms taking them backwards in relation to their use of digital games as educational tools. Where they have been learning on Duolingo in high school, they get into TAFE and it’s back to 1990 and a teacher at a whiteboard talking at them. It is not surprising that drop-out rates are so high; Victoria’s TAFE students the least likely to finish with just 29.6% completing their qualifications (Carey, 2019).

Box Hill Institute’s welding department is one example of a trade training organisation using gamification tools to teach trades. Within the welding department are augmented reality welding machines which allow students to practice welding before they move onto the real equipment. The software associated with this technology includes gamified elements to the learning, such as scoring and leaderboards. You can see more about this technology in my previous blog and podcast on this topic:

Edu-Trends podcast Episode 1: Augment Reality, Image:by Julie Athanasiou created in Canva, All Rights Reserved.

So, what are some of the other options for using gamification in the vocational education space.

Based on the work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Moving Learning Games Forward, I’d like to make some suggestions as to how various digital gamification platforms could be used in TAFEs today:

• Authoring Platforms: An authoring system is a program that has pre-programmed elements for creating something digitally. So, for example, within the TAFE space this could be students using platforms like Starcraft to create a model in cabinet-making.

• Content Systems: These are games that deliver content about a particular topic. A challenge for trades teachers in including games in the classroom has been the lack of game-content specific to the various trades. However, this challenge can be overcome with the proliferation of relatively cheap and user-friendly game-authoring software which teachers can download to create their own games for their specific curriculum.

• Game authoring programs for students: Students can use authoring programs to design games, and in the process they research and learn about a subject. They then share the game with their classmates to continue the learning for others. For example, in the TAFE space, auto-mechanic students could make games in a game authoring platform like Rezzly about diagnosing a mechanical problem and the right tools to choose to fix that problem

• Documentary: While not ‘games authoring’ software, documentary software can contain gamified elements which are motivating and rewarding to students. By challenging students to document activities or asking them to create ‘how-to’ videos for the various trades weaves gamification-elements into the activity.

• Simulations: Simulations like Minecraft and Bridge Builder are existing programs which allow students to test theories in engineering in a virtual environment and are relevant to several of the trade areas (Klopfer, Osterweil and Salen, 2009).

As with any pedagogy approach, there is a continuum which can be applied. So, at the low-tech level would be including board games or other face-to-face games in the classroom. The next technological level, might be creating flash-cards and quizzes which students can access and answer on devices.

Gamifying trade education can seem like a big leap from where it is currently. But experiencing the fun of a gamified learning by downloading a learning app on a topic of interest, like I did with Yousician, is a starting point to experience the level of engagement possible and to provide inspiration on how the gamified learning approach can be transferred to your particular field.

References:

Carey, A 2019, ‘Victoria’s TAFE course completion rate the worst in Australia’ The Age, accessed 6 February 2020 at https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/victoria-s-tafe-course-completion-rate-the-worst-in-australia-20190829-p52m5l.html

Denmeade, N 2017, ‘The hero’s learning journey’, World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development, vol. 14, no. 2/3, pp. 155–171, viewed 31 January 2020, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsemr&AN=edsemr.10.1108.WJSTSD.06.2016.0042&authtype=sso&custid=deakin&site=eds-live&scope=site

Haughton Mifflin Harcourt, The Learning Company 2020, accessed 6 February at https://www.carmensandiego.com/

Interactive Games and Entertainment Association 2018, Digital Australia 2018 Report, Accessed February 4 2020 at https://www.igea.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Digital-Australia-2018-DA18-Final-1.pdf

Klopfer E, Osterweil, S, and Salen, K 2009, ‘Moving Learning Games Forward’, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accessed February 6 2020 at https://education.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/MovingLearningGamesForward_EdArcade.pdf

Image references

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