I’ve written before that I believe gaming, at its heart, is a study of motivation.

With that in mind, video games and board games can give us strategies to engage and motivate students to learn. So let’s start with my favorite style of game: Roleplaying Games (RPGS). Roleplaying Games are a pretty broad genre, but some famous ones are: Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy Games, and Pokemon.

Today’s article will be about RPGs in their video game sense, although I think a lot of these concepts apply to tabletop RPGS as well.

So let me begin by explaining 3 Common Features of RPGs. These are 3 strategies that game designers use to hook us as a players. They help us feel progression when we play, but also entice us to return to the same game over and over.

• Experience Points: Experience points give players instant feedback and rewards for making the right decisions. It allows players to track their own progress and incrementally leads to better rewards. In a video game, experience points (XP) is often tracked with a bar or number, and leads to increasing player strength after certain milestones are reached.
• Daily Quests: Daily quests train consistency. In games, you often get a reward for completing the first activity of the day, or even simply for logging in. Developers understand the power of building these habits. If a player simply logs on each day, they’re more likely to play a game longterm. Think about even how in non-gaming apps this phenomenon appears. Take for example: Snapchat streaks where two people try to consistently Snapchat back and forth… for no reward other than bragging rights!
• Choices: Choices give players agency. (Or at least the illusion of it). Games like RPGs often include a lot of different opportunity for choices. A player must choose everything from how their character looks to what their character’s strengths are. A player often (but not always) chooses where in the world they are exploring. Sometimes a player’s choices affect things like the where the game takes them, or even the ending to the game. Multiple choices engage different play styles. This also encourages replaying a game to see the effects of your choices. You can see how this is easily applicable to education.

So let’s break these down one at a time:

Let’s start with Experience Points. At traditional schools, the simple ‘participation’ or daily work completion points can be considered a form of experience points. As students grind away at the low-level assignments, they can feel confident that they’re building up the padding required to buffer any low test grades in the future.

At my school, which utilizes mastery-based-grading, a challenge can often be how to incentivize the basic work without these points. So what’s a possible solution?

Allow your students to track their progress visibly either in a chart in class or online. I’ve found that for encouraging students to make progress on a Mathematics computer program, that simply hanging up a graph or trail for each student to track their work on can be a big incentive for them to make progress in the program. To some degree social pressure plays a role here. It can feel good to be the person at the top of the chart, and it probably doesn’t feel great to be at the bottom. I’m careful not to use this to shame the students, but I definitely do explicitly acknowledge any growth made by the kids.

Daily Quests are another interesting phenomenon. The idea behind daily quests in video games is that you get more rewards for something a little bit of work each day instead of a bunch of work all at once. This is also a really good habit with learning, so how can teachers utilize this in the classroom?

For me…. I literally just introduced daily quests. My class used a classroom economy and although you’d always get a little reward for completing an assignment, for the first assignment that you complete each day, you got a double portion! This proved very effective. It was especially powerful for combating the procrastination inherent to middle schoolers.

Finally, Choices can be used both to encourage students to learn, and to help them learn better because they can pick a strategy that works well for them.

My school district has a big focus on ‘personalized learning’, which can a rather intimidating goal for a teacher, so giving students choice in their learning is always my first step on this path.

In my History units, I emphasize choice of both input and output. What this means is, if there’s a topic I want them to learn, such as Medieval China, I’ll try to give them about three choices of how they’re going to learn it, and about three choices for how they’re going to show me that they’ve learned it.

You’ll notice I usually limit the number of choices, this is both because too many choices can give students ‘choice paralysis’, as they overthink and become ultimately indecisive about which decision is best for them, but also because it takes a really long time to plan each of these alternatives.

In some ways, putting choice into your lesson plans means double, or triple lesson planning. While another teacher might have simply made a lecture about Medieval China, since I want my students to also be able to watch a video about Medieval China or read a textbook about Medieval China, I have to go plan and organize all three choices! This is a lot work to ensure they all teach the same thing with the same level of rigor, but it does make a lot of the other parts of your life easier: such as with student behavior.

Students are definitely more engaged when they feel like they’ve made a choice for how they want to learn. This is one of those ‘illusions of choice’ that adults use with kids all the time. You don’t ask a kid if they want to clean their room, you ask them whether they’d rather clean their room before or after having dinner.

Ultimately, I want to be sure that the kid has learned the material, but by putting this first barrier of choice in the way, students are less likely to consider the choice of ‘do the assignment or not do the assignment.’

Additionally, as noted previously, students definitely might prefer to learn the material a certain way. I know that when I was studying Spanish, I tried using books, Youtube videos, and attending classes on it, and I definitely preferred one of those methods far more than the rest (well really, I preferred Duolingo, that program is amazing).

As far as output goes, I highly recommend considering multiple forms for students to demonstrate mastery of a subject. A basic test isn’t bad, but it can be supported with rubric-backed art projects, or presentations which can also clearly show understanding of a topic. For Medieval China, I made a tic-tac-toe board of 9 different choices and let students pick any 3 in a row. No matter which 3 in a row they chose, they’d be showing me that they understood Chinese Dynasties, Philosophies, and Inventions, but it allowed them to be creative about how they presented it. This was a very successful experiment.

To Conclude:

Sometimes it can be really annoying when all my students get into a new trend. This year, it was Fortnite (and Minecraft, right at the end). I can’t count the number of times that I heard teachers complain about how everyone was obsessed with Fortnite.

That said, whenever something like this happens, I can’t help but ask myself: how can we as teachers use this to our advantage? I mean, if only Fortnite was really educational; all of the kids would be geniuses by now!

Ultimately, people won’t buy a game that isn’t fun, and this is an important attitude to bring to the classroom as a teacher. If a student isn’t engaged, they’re not learning at full capacity (if at all)!

Game designers and teachers share a lot of similar challenges. We both cater to a diverse audience of abilities, desires and needs. We’re often competing with a lot of other stimuli for kids’ limited attention, so why not borrow a few tricks from their book?