A popular reason for exploring gamification in online learning is because we want to increase student engagement with the content. Games are nothing if not engaging, and the very best games can give educators deep insights into how to get and keep users’ attention. After all, video game makers have been resarching what makes a computer game fun much longer than educators have been putting instruction online.

As I was playing Angry Birds on my Android smartphone, I started to recognize the excellent pedagogy at work in the design of the game. This article attempts to identify and apply the best practices evident in Angry Birds to tie together a few strands of current instructional design concepts. Ready? Let’s get smashing!

What is Angry Birds?

At this point, it would help if you, dear reader, had a basic understanding of how Angry Birds works. The object of the game sounds utterly moronic when you write it out, but here goes:

Angry Birds is a game where you aim a giant slingshot to catapult various colored birds towards a castle filled with green pigs. The object is to destroy the building and crush all the pigs.

No matter how dumb it sounds, Angry Birds has become a worldwide phenomenon because the gameplay is so engaging. Here is a video of a few typical levels:

If at all possible, I highly recommend you play Angry Birds for yourself so you can get a sense of what follows. It’s available for pretty much any computer and smartphone you have, and/or Chrome users can play it right in their browser for free.

So What Does This Have to do with Course Design?

The study of gamification in online learning provides an excellent blueprint for online course design, as successful video games strike the perfect balance of motivation, skill building, and assessment. The runaway success of Rovio’s Angry Birds could be expressed in light of the above criteria for an effective online course.

Online courses (and the software that power them) needs to help teachers and students keep the end goals (read: learning outcomes) in view at all times. A good learning management system needs to support good lesson design by providng an integrated interface for

• Defining intended outcomes based on content standards or other explicit professional proficiencies
• Identifying what mastery looks like– what can students “make” or “do” that will show they have mastered the desired content outcome?
• Breaking the task of mastery into discrete, daily skills that can be taught over the course of one lesson.
• Scaffold the discrete skills to keep students in the zone of proximal development and progressing towards greater and greater mastery of the content.
• Communicating the expected outcomes to students so they can take ownership of their progress towards mastery.
• Assessing students often on the mastery of discrete skills.
• Not allowing progress beyond one skill if it has not been mastered.
• Promoting synthesis and transference of discrete skills into general proficiencies.
• Assessing students based solely on their mastery of explicitly stated skills.

Many of these activities do not need graphics-intensive software (like a video game) to work– they are a lot more about sequencing information and structuring learning activities so students are assessed on the exact skills and knowledge they’re being taught. In other words, they require good instructional design.

Defining intended outcomes:

In the game, the object  goal is to effectively destroy all of the pigs and their buildings by mastering the destructive capabilities of the various angry birds. Each level is a scaffolded mini-lesson that moves the learner a step closer to that ultimate goal.  In your course, the intended outcome might be something like “be able to write a five paragraph essay” or “know and communicate how osmosis works”. Without clearly defined outcomes, you will have a hard time measuring whether students are learning. Once you have a clear idea where you’re going, you can backwards-plan individual learning activities that help students get closer to the intended outcomes every day.

Identifying what mastery looks like:

Each new level introduces one new skill at a time, and the player cannot pass the level until they have mastered that skill. You might ask– what “skills” am I learning playing Angry Birds?

Some of the skills and knowledge required include…

• learn the unique destructive properties of each type of bird
• learn  these properties can be used to destroy the various building materials and structural configurations in each level
• analyze each new structure to develop a strategy for destroying it with the given quiver of birds
• master the relationship between the force and angle of slingshot pull to the flight trajectory of the birds
• to achieve true mastery, users must destroy the structures using as few birds as possible. Users are encouraged to earn extra points for “above par” achievement.

Each level is designed to teach and assess one specific skill along the path to mastery.

Breaking the task of mastery into discrete skills lessons, and scaffolding lessons to keep users in the Zone of Proximal Development:

Each level constitutes its own “lesson” where the user learns (at least) one new skill towards the intended outcomes in each level. The very first lesson concentrates on basic launching with a simplified target and the simplest avian projectile in the game: the red bird. This helps the user get a feel for the game’s controls and environment because, at that point in the game, that’s what the new user needs to feel oriented.

As the levels progress, new kinds of birds are introduced, each with different flight trajectories, destructive properties, and mass characteristics. The skills build upon one another– the player develops a repertoire of choices that they could apply to the challenge of demolishing the buildings. The user must use his/her creativity and recall of the various mastered skills to effectively pass each level. This ensures that users are at an appropriate level of challenge at all times throughout the game’s progress, and have authentic motivation for recalling previously-learned material.

The path towards mastery is a series of tests, not a series of “tells”.

Lecturing is one of the most common activities that a teacher does, no matter how much evidence mounts that lecturing is

• an ineffective use of the teacher’s time and expertise
• not correlated with mastery of material
• a task that can be just as effectively performed by a video recording

In Angry Birds, you may noticed that the skills are not explicitly “taught” to us by the game. Instead, we are set free to explore, try, fail, re-assess, and try again. The idea is that the learner is not able to pass the lesson until they have mastered the (targeted and well defined) skill, but that they can keep trying until they do. The game (unlike most classrooms) is a safe place to fail. There are no punishments for not having the right answer the first time or being the fastest. Instead, video games reward users who keep trying, experimenting with alternative strategies, and even cheating looking up the correct answer.

This brings up a good point that I’ll paraphrase from David Wiley‘s talk “If the Book Didn’t Change Education, How Could the Computer?“. Traditional education grew up in a world where access to high-quality information was not available to everyone, so very few people could possibly become experts. In other words, we have been living in a world of “information scarcity” for most of human history.

This is the first time in history that students are living in a world of “information abundance”. Students are able to find high-quality, accurate information to answer any question imaginable– AND they can search for exactly the form of information (text, video, tutorial, encyclopedia, expert article, etc) that will most effectively help them meet the challenge.

In this world of abundant information, we do not need to spend our time telling students what the book says– we need to present them with targeted tests that reflect real world problems and applications of knowledge, and we need to coach/guide them in harnessing abundant information towards the task of solving these problems.

Back to Angry Birds, it is not uncommon to get “stuck” on a level the same way students get “stuck” in the classroom. You may try every trick you can think of to knock down those blocks and the right answer still eludes you– what do you do next? This is where many students give up because we have put such a taboo on researching information when we need it!

At this point, I can Google “Angry Birds Level 10-3″ and decide whether I’d like my answers in the form of a video tutorial, a written description of the problem, or some other format. The point is that “the answers are out there” and I just need the stimulation to search them out. That stimulation comes in the form of a tantalizing challenge that I know I could master if I had just one more bit of information.

I’d be very interested to hear your reactions to this theory, and to continue to explore the lessons that video games have for online educators. I believe that “gamifying” education does not mean that we have to turn learning into a video game, but that we continue to see what makes video games so engaging in the first place.

Related articles

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Image by Wisconsin Historical Images via Flickr

The adoption of Android and iOS smartphones “skyrocketed” in 2010, which means ever more health sciences students, faculty, and staff have access to powerful mini-computers in their pockets. With this rise came a new crop of excellent free medical apps that practitioners, faculty, and students can access wherever they go. According to the recent SMU Student Tech Survey, 70% of our students currently have smartphones, and 82% are interested in using health-related apps for smartphones.

Health and Medical apps for iOS and Android are growing more sophisticated as phones & tablets get more powerful. Now you can carry a guide to drug interactions, medical reference books & journals, and news about ongoing medical research in your pocket. Apps can help you study anatomy, diagnose conditions, or even provide care in a foreign language. If you have one of these information powerhouses already, it might be time to start exploring the many excellent tools available to help you and your students empower your practice. We look forward to supporting and expanding SMU’s use of mobile technology for education, and these free apps are a great way for you to explore your options.

Interesting Apps

• This article outlines the Top 15 free Android medical apps, and this one covers the Top 20  free iOS medical apps.
• This article on Recommended Nursing Apps for iPhone/iPod Touch gives a nurse’s perspective into each app’s effectiveness in practical use, just as 25 Android Apps Every Nurse Needs does for Android.

Please  post to the comments with any apps you find particularly useful, and we will add them to a central list where students and faculty can see & download them.

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Image by John and Keturah via Flickr

When you’re looking for work, keeping up with the online job listings is a job in itself. This tutorial will teach you how to automate your job search so you can quickly scan through lots of fresh, relevant job ads every day.

The Big Picture

We are going to put in a series of 5-10 different job search queries into our favorite job boards. The search results they return will have an RSS feed, enabling us to “subscribe” to the search results in a feed reader. After that, all we have to do is open the feed reader, and it will “re-search” all those sites and line up the freshest results in one list for us. From that point, you can just scan quickly down headlines, picking out your dream job. If this sounds too complicated, stay tuned– it’s easy.

You will need:
1) Your favorite RSS reader (I recommend Google Reader)
2) A few RSS-enabled job search websites (I used CraigsList and SimplyHired.com)

Step 1: Creating Good Search Queries

Let’s go to SimplyHired.com and type in a search for the perfect job we’re looking for.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

SimplyHired will return a list of search results fitting our query. This list is “RSS-enabled”, meaning you can subscribe to it in any feed reader (like Google Reader). Just right click ( or Ctrl+click for Mac) on “View RSS Feed” and select “Copy Link Location”.

Copy Link Location

Then you can paste that RSS feed URL into Google Reader’s “Add Subscription” button, and it will “subscribe” you to those search results.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

This means that you will have a long list of headlines for all the relevant job ads.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Step 2: REPEAT with different search results!

If I go back and repeat the process, typing similar search queries, such as “Computer Educator” or “Multimedia Teacher”, I can get several different feeds of good job results all aggregated in a list in my Google Reader.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Step 3: Easily Scan through as Many Job Listings as You Can  Handle– Even via iPhone!

Now, I have a folder of job searches I’ve subscribed to, so all I have to do is open the “Job Search” folder and I can scan through an aggregated, multi-threaded list of fresh job search results on my smartphonewhile I’m walking my dog in the morning.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

My method for keeping on top of them is to “Star” the ones that look promising while I’m scanning through, then follow up on the “Starred” ones later. That list of starred entries becomes my “application to-do” list.

Do you have a better way of scanning job ads? Discuss it in the comments!

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There’s no denying that the iPhone has become an amazing tool for taking your internet connected life mobile. However, many of its functions are available to even the lowest tech "dumb phones" on the market. This post will show you how you can use your dumb old RAZR phone to blog, tweet, podcast, facebook, HTML browse, listen to music, and Google Map just like those other iPoseurs.

Twitter/ Facebook/ WordPress/ Blogger/ Flickr via SMS or MMS?



Facebook allows you to keep up with your peeps via SMS. Twitter has it built right into the service. But my favorite way to post to several websites at once is Posterous.com.



Posterous

is a blogging tool that will auto-post to your WordPress/Twitter/Tumblr/Flickr/Facebook and many many more. People are

starting to use it as a first step in blogging because it’s so easy and reliable. Just send an email to post@posterous.com or send an SMS text message to 41411 and posterous will set up a blog for you. From that point, you can send images, video, photos, audio, and text (and probably a whole lot more) to the email address and Posterous will figure out how to post it for you. It’s an amazing service and might just help you participate in more online communities.










Podcast from your phone?



Drop.io is a great service which allows you to set up "drops" (which are basically blogs), each with its own email/SMS address, phone number, twitter ID, etc. You can set up a drop like I did at http://drop.io/smartdumbphones and then call it to record an audio voice mail. This voice mail becomes an audio post with an iTunes-ready RSS feed. Just send the feed URL to iTunes and you are in the podcasting business! Here’s mine:

Since its debut in 2007, I’ve been a fanatical iPhone jailbreaker and general enthusiast of the device. As more and more iPhones have begun bogging down the 3G network in the Bay Area, Apple/AT&T seem to be taking their customers for granted (charging ever more for data, texts, and increasingly bad customer service). When I got my new 3G S this summer, I discovered that every time I’d jailbreak it, the SIM card would die and I’d have to restore it back into Apple jail to make it work. >:-( The jailbroken experience is half the fun of the iPhone, so I was pretty frustrated that Apple wouldn’t just leave all us poor hackers alone.

The final straw came when I was scheduled for a telephone job interview– I knew I couldn’t get cell coverage at my house in the Berkeley Hills, so I went down into the flats, in an open air park, with nothing between me and the cell satellites but a sunny day. The reception was so bad, the interviewer couldn’t hear what I was saying and asked to reschedule the interview when I can get to a land line phone. It was then that I knew that AT&T had to go. I called AT&T to complain AND THAT CALL GOT DROPPED. So I went into the AT&T store, demanded to be let out of my contract without a cancellation fee, and finally broke free. (Actually it took two hours of standing in the store, being transferred on the phone from manager to “manager”, but I held firm and they let me out).

I went down to Radio Shack and bought three Palm Pres– one for me and each of my parents. Since then I have been amazed that I can get through a day without a dropped call, delayed text message, or bunged up internet connection. Sprint service is great here, and the customer service people I have interacted with are generally much friendlier and more empowered to help me out. In addition, the service plan for 3 Palm Pres on a 1500 min family talk plan with unlimited text and data is under $150. Let’s see AT&T do that with 3 iPhones.

As for the device itself, it is indeed a worthy iPhone competitor. The interface is smooth and intuitive, and the fact that it can multi-task means that I can get up-to-the minute notifications when I get a new email, SMS, IM, or call. The slide out keyboard is a great tactile experience, although I am still much slower with it than I have become with iPhone’s virtual keyboard. The web browser is comparable to the iPhone’s, having the click-to-zoom and pinch gestures that make mobile HTML browsing a joy.

It’s designed not to need to be plugged into a computer– unlike the iPhone which is dependent on iTunes for its syncing and updates. The Pre does it all over the air. This is good and bad. As a Mac head, I had my Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, and iTunes all dialed in to sync to my iPhone. The Pre uses my Gmail contacts as the address book, so I had to go through my old email contacts and delete old students, colleagues, and craigslist response emails to clean up my phone’s contact list. On the positive side, I can use the Pre as a simple drag and drop USB device, putting whatever video, audio, or documents into its 8GB internal memory and being sure that they will work from inside the WebOS interface.

As a jailbreaker, I LOVE LOVE LOVE that Palm has basically said “go ahead! hack it!” There is already a burgeoning hacker movement, supplementing Palm’s nascent App Catalog with over 200 “homebrew” apps. This is a far cry from iPhone’s vibrant app scene, but AT LEAST WE HAVE A GOOGLE VOICE APP (two, in fact). Seriously, the Pre needs more developers and more apps, but the conditions for developing these things are really good. The Pre is basically a linux box with a snazzy frontend, so linux apps can easily be ported over to the device.

Even though I have only had it for two days, I am loving the freedom and quality of coverage I’m getting on the Pre. Sure, I miss all my snazzy apps, but I have faith that once developers realize that it’s so easy and safe to develop for the Pre, the apps will come through, too.

STEP 1

Choose a VOIP (voice over internet) application. Skype is a good choice because they have a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Many other VOIP services I can think of (Jajah, Gizmo) work in a browser, so I don’t know how well they will work. You will see why in a minute.

STEP 2

Open the Preferences panel in Firefox. Go to the Applications tab.

STEP 3

Search for “callto”

STEP 4

Choose Skype (or your favorite VOIP app) to handle all callto links.

Voila! You’re done! Now telephone numbers on the sites you surf will automatically become callto links!

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Web 2.0 has beguiled us to forsake our old offline apps and turn to the online cloud for more and more of our data needs. CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast proclaimed that “Offline is the New Online” when Google Gears came out in 2008. Our email files are no longer downloaded into a desktop app like Outlook via POP3– now we get a browser’s eye view of our data on a remote server in real time. Netbooks, stripped down laptops whose appeal relies largely on web-based applications, are the new hot devices. Our newspaper companies are going bankrupt as we favor online RSS readers, but what about when we go offline?

I have started taking the Bay Area’s underground BART train to work, and ever since I have been obsessed with finding offline ways to work with my data. Especially RSS feeds, email, and twitter links are a challenge to work with, but I wonder what other online/offline travails people are having?

I tried syncing my Google Reader with Google’s Gears plugin and found that RSS feeds often link out to the originating site for the full story. This led me to research which news sites have full-text enabled RSS feeds, and I only found a few (including the Guardian.co.uk, Gawker websites like Lifehacker and io9, and some WordPress-powered blogs).

I’m starting to get into syncing my Thunderbird and/or Gmail for offline use, but I’m often thwarted when I receive links to outside sites whose content I cannot view. Twitter would be another great service to read on the train, but again, the links are half the fun.

I am discovering that there are a whole host of interesting Adobe Air Apps that specialize in giving you offline access to your online data. I just used Flump to download my Flickr library, Netbook to access Project Gutenberg offline, and Birdie to see my Twitter tweets offline.

Are you also interested in seeing your online data when you are stuck underground? How do you go about connecting with the online world?

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Evernote is a great note-taking application for Mac/PC and iPhone, as well as a powerful webapp. It gives you tons of ways to keep track of all the little bits of information in your life— that cool website you want to remember, your shopping list, a photo of your homework assignment, or the to do list you always want to have with you everywhere.

If you drag this button to your browser’s toolbar, it will allow you to clip any content from any webpage to your Evernote.

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Need an easy way to keep track of your assignments? iProcrastinate has been a favorite of Mac users for a long time. Now iPhonies and iTouchers can get in on the fun.

I’m sure there are as many ways to use this as there are teachers. I have used it to advance my classroom presentations, as well as to update my online gradebook from the back of the room. It’s good for attendance, too, but the greatest benefit is the shock and awe your geekitude will inspire from your students.