I've blogged about Gamifi-ED and shared it with you back during the holidays. As with all new projects, we've had some exciting thing. These are some intriguing things that have happened the first few days that are interesting to me as I teach.

Why we're working with Gamifi-ED

Many of us have family or children who play Minecraft and as we see kids doing history reports in Minecraft and amazing things happening, we want to know how to do it too (thus the OOC event).

Additionally, many of us feel Jane McGonigal's challenge about understanding gaming, serious games, and questioning the kinds of games we're playing. Until we're better at developing and understanding powerful games that can improve our world, we won't have games to play because we have many important things to tackle that are serious: poverty, drop outs, hunger and so much more. We want to act.

How the Wiki started:

1) Examine and investigate: Serious Games

Their task:

Students will examine serious games, game design and why games can be considered a learning tool. Students will create assessment tools to measure how “serious” games can be. These will be done as project wikis and shared publicly.

Quest 1 Questions:

---

1. What is a serious game? Is there such a thing as a non-serious game?
2. What are examples of serious games?
3. How can serious games be evaluated? (Done with higher ed research and input)

Our Quest

---

1. Evaluate the serious games that have been discovered and create recommendations and opinions on the usefulness and value of the games for improving the world and the lives of those who play them.

2. Prepare a presentation to share the findings and create a public wiki sharing the findings.

What is happening now:

Takeaway #1: The interaction between highered and the students is AWESOME.

So, we had no idea what would happen when we had higher ed students belonging to Dr. Lee Graham making and working on wikis in their section of the project and my ninth graders working on their work in our section of the projects — and we asked them to comment on each other's work and learn from each other. But yesterday, this conversation happened on highered Project #3. Jason is my 9th grader and sllambries is a higher ed student. Jason was reading the Team 3 page as he did research to understand how educators evaluate games. (The students say they know what is fun but they have no idea how to determine educational value.) This is just beginning but I had no idea how amazing and useful this would be.

Takeaway #2: Tags are amazing ways to organize workflow on wikis

Note that we've given everyone read/write access to each other's projects. This wasn't intentional but now that we've done it, it is great. Students are also using tags on the wikis in powerful ways. So, as shown in the screenshot below, when students need feedback from someone else, they tag it “feedback” and it is automatically added to the feedback list. (This is done on wikispaces by using the insert a list of wikipages widget where you filter for pages with a certain tag.)

Figure 1: Students tag pages “feedback” and it goes on this list. This list is generated automatically by the wiki – all wiki pages on that project tagged “feedback.” After a student leaves feedback, they delete the tag and it is no longer on the list. This is how students can tell who needs help. They are working across two class periods and have been challenged to develop asynchronous work flow methods.

Takeaway #3: Students will hack and enhance when you ask them to.

All I gave these students three days a go was one page with three questions and 2 quests. That is it. I challenged them to set up ways to help work flow between their two class periods because they will have team members who are not in class at the same time. They can see each other's wikis and it was fascinating to see best practices flow between the wikis. (They are in competition to see which is the best wiki on serious games in education.)  They used chatango to embed a live chat in the wiki (shown below) and also found Getting Tricky with Wikis, a site that lets you supercharge your wiki.

Figure 2: Chatango. You can see the conversation between classmates on chatango. While they are using the wiki comments to discuss content, they wanted to have a chat to talk about workflow because they said it was more in your face and noticeable. They set these up on their own. Every wiki has one now. I never even mentioned it – they just did it, shared, and now some of the highered teachers are using this technique too.

Next week is the OOC. The students will participate in some of the live conversations but will also be watching videos of the chats and activities after they happen. Please join everyone who is talking about games for two weeks.

2) Participate in the #Gamifi-Ed Open Online Community (OOC)

The Gamifi-ED Open Online Community is a two week networked experience. (Feb 12-Feb 26, 2013) Learners from around the world will participate in Google Hangouts, facilitate Twitter chats, create videos, sit on panels and provide webinars that will be recorded and curated in the #Gamifi-Ed OOC wiki. Students in the project and future students will be able to use the experts in their personalized research of serious games and game design at the end.

You can participate – it is free and Open

Verena Roberts, our leader in this project, masterminded this. As we discussed serious games and started looking, we realized that there are not enough open education resources talking about serious games in education. They are out there but quite a bit of it is “we could” or “we might could do that” but not “we are doing this now and this is how it is working.” So, the conversations are free, open, anyone can join. No one “official” is sponsoring these and no one gave us approval to set this up. We will be recording it and Verena will post every session as an OER (Open Education Resource) which means you can use, remix, and share in your courses and however you like.

While our goal was one session per day, we have more than that and Verena @verenaz has still been talking with others behind the scenes. If you or your students have something to add let her know (but we may need a few more facilitators if we add more.) If this is your thing, join in.

Anyone is welcome. It is one of those things that started small and has just grown because of interest.

Here's the Google calendar and wiki.

Here's the Google Doc with Presenter Info

Upcoming Gamifi-ED Presentations (in EST)

Wednesday, February 12

2-3 pm EST – Kyle Gomboy – the Potential of Unity 3D

8-9 pm EST – Round Table Opener w/ Organizers – What is going on in Gamifi-ed and why the OOC? How is all this being done and why.

Thursday, February 13

12:30 – 1:30 pm Gaming Design as a Career – Raymond Yan, DigiPen University

8:30 pm – 9:30 pm GAmifi-ED Kickoff with Dave Burgess (Teach Like a Pirate)

Saturday, February 15

12-1 pm Drakkart – Creating Minecraft Videos for YouTube
(I'm attending this one with my 6th grade – he is so PUMPED! – this is an awesome one to be on a Saturday because you can tell all those kids who love Minecraft in your school. This is a flipped learning session – you'll have a video to watch ahead of time before we interact with Drakkart.)

Monday, February 17

9-10 pm Colin Ousterhout – Minecraft Basics

So, if you don't GET Minecraft but want to use it, start here. I will be at this one but my son won't – he's modding already.

Tuesday, February 18

5-6 pm “Entering the Realm of Nobles” – Gamifying and Curriculum Design in Grade 6 – Michael Matera

8-9 pm – Higher Ed Panel – Why Games? – Jackie Gerstein, Ian O'Byrne, Beth Ritter-Guth, Alice Keeler, Lauren Ferro

Wednesday, February 19

1-2 pm Atlantis Remixed and Transformational Learning Gord Holden

Thursday, February 20

12 – 1 How to get started in GBL – Alice Keeler

8-9 pm Virtual Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Augmented Reality- Games or Not? – Beth Ritter-Guth

Friday, February 21

1-2 pm The Potential for Gamification in Early Childhood Education Margaret Powers, Jen Deyenberg, Sharon Davison

Sunday, February 23

9-10 pm – Twitter vs. Zombies Pete & Jesse 

The designers of this game talk about the why and how of the game: Twitter vs. Zombies — another REALLY COOL session set up by Verena. Wow.

Monday, February 25

12-1 pm Towards Personalized Gamified systems: an investigation into game design, personality and player typologies – Lauren Ferro

Wednesday February 26: Student Spotlight

9-11 pm A Smackdown of Good Serious Games – Westwood Students

12 – 1 pm Students in Hawaii using Growtopia to learn about Japanese Culture with their teacher.

This list isn't complete and will change, so go to the website for all final information. This Group has a hashtag #gamifi-ed and an Edmodo and Google Plus Community. Pretty much it. Join us if you want to.

My biggest takeaway from the OOC So Far

When people are interested in things, they have a life of their own and people just join in. It is crazy and like nothing I've ever seen. We meet each week and go — what is happening? Cool to see the community emerge from nowhere to create. Join in.