Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
n
Backbone:
For commenting on something they saw in class that struck
them as inappropriate.
n
Eddie:
For the best performance in a blog.
Each week
s class started with the PowerPoint or Prezi presentation that
announced the winners of each award. Students who earned the second type
of achievement had the opportunity to discuss what they had written, which
would lead into a whole-class discussion. Often, this was the student
'
'
s oppor-
tunity to bring up topics that were not in the realm of the week
'
s presentation
subject, but that they were still curious or concerned about.
The results of this interaction and feedback were successful, but not as much as
they should have been, based on how I had witnessed gamers react when they
got certain achievements. At first, students were not excited about earning them,
so they did not strive to do so. I asked about this later in a focus group, and it
came out that there was not enough of an incentive for the students to do the
extra work, especially for the higher level Shine achievements.
Right before the midterm of the first session of the course, I made the
announcement that achievements would be converted into XP for the final
grade point calculation. Essentially, according to the number of achievements
they earned, I would add a percentage of that number of points to their final
grade. Once this sank in, students could be seen counting the number of times
they had been awarded an achievement. (PowerPoints and Prezis were available
for them to see on the class
'
s online learning environment.)
Soon, students began to
metagame
the class. Those who usually did not
remember to participate were earning Super Shines. Students who rarely had
anything of reflective value in their blogs were starting to go back through to
previous winners
blogs to see what they had discussed to emulate the posts. So
while this may seem as if they were not getting the most out of the assignments,
especially the blogs, I felt they were working with an exemplar and now could
see what good reflection looks like. This also encouraged them to participate not
just more often, but also more substantively than they did previously.
'
'
Having seen this trend in the student
s behavior, I decided that for the second
session of the course that I would make this announcement at the beginning of
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