Level Up Crafting
8.4. SCAFFOLDING THE GAME-DESIGN
8.4.1. MOTIVATIONAL SCAFFOLDS
The motivational scaffold deals with the placement of game activities in the internal design grammar that supports the aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1980; Nardi, 2010) and telescoping of the content explicitly. These choices of activities are supposed to enable the student in the external design grammar to create personal learning trajectories (Dreier, 2008; Schatzki, 2017) and from this experience a form of concomitant learning (Dreier, 2008) that arises spontaneously through autonomous and curious behaviour.
Learning can be understood as a process that follows a path that in a metaphorical sense consists of different knowledge and experience episodes overlapping and building upon each other, while in practice, it would be a series of multimodal activities that
MOTIVATIONCOGNITION COGNITION
are constantly challenged by obstructions and disturbances (Schatzki, 2016). The motivational scaffold is thus about creating an autonomous behaviour through quest and level strategies supported by reward systems and the use of cultural artefacts.
The learning activities should be seen as indirect facilitation of processes through a playful and motivating aspect where goals that vary through different levels afford the student’s attention. The motivational scaffold has a similarity with Dewey’s definition of “aesthetic experience” where the ability to combine a wide variety of quests is supposed to create individual learning trajectories.
The first educational link of learning activities in the internal and external design gram-mar of the motivational scaffold is based on the following conceptual pairs:
Motivation (curiosity) – levels
An autonomous behaviour in an educational environment where contingency is the foundation of learning requires a secure environment for the student to act in an investigative and exploratory manner. The learning activities in the motivational scaffold, therefore, help the student to bridge what is known and unknown by stimulating a curious desire to explore the topic of the semester.
The game mechanism behind level up can be described as “successive phases” that are an emphasis on varied colours of quest activities organised as sequential structures.
When activities (quest) are divided into levels, it provides the students with the ability to review the next step. It creates a form of flow where the students actively and critical-ly choose and select activities based on relevance criteria in order to reach new levels.
Level thinking thus allows the students initially only to consider smaller parts of the process, which will open up in terms of complexity and extent as new levels are rea-ched. They are forced to consider activities they usually would not see the purpose of.
The students thus have the opportunity to work with their skills and knowledge at their own individual pace. It is also possible for the students to replay a specific level ‒ for example, to practise specific competencies. At the same time, the nature of the game is supposed to provide the teacher with the opportunity to influence the students’ progress as they are going to work with a certain number of activities in order to accumulate enough points to get to the next level. The teacher can thus place assignments strategically and thereby motivate the student to work with challenging assignments.
Figure 43 shows the structure of the relationship between levels and points. The gameplay at every level thus contributes to possible choices, each of which has some form of consequence dependent upon accumulating enough points for unlocking a new level. It is, therefore, essential to find the right balance between a level’s severity and the feeling of being able to complete (Daneva, 2017). Finding this balance in this PhD project has been an ongoing process of trial and error where adjustments of the score allocation in each quest, the scoreboard has been compared with the students'
experience of coherence and progress. Initially, this balance was based solely on intuition and the teachers’ immeasurable thoughts about the weight of student work.
During the three iterations, this balance was further eroded. Each new level starts at 0 points, but it is possible to transfer excess points from the last level. It is possible to earn points through quests (small cards), milestones/achievements and missions/
dungeons (small envelopes). Some quests are only rewarding if certain and previous quests are completed. Also, some quests are only rewarding when resolved as a group.
These criteria appear on the quest cards.
Figure 43 – The relationship between levels and the number of points needed.
The next educational link of learning activities in the internal and external design grammar of the motivational scaffold is based on the following conceptual pairs:
Autonomy (meaningful) – quest
The concept of quest is understood as a variation of activities to stimulate the students’
autonomy into following individual and unique problem formulations. By dividing the curriculum into a quest structure, the intention is that the students will be supported along the way by academic activities and material arrangements that hopefully challenge the learning process on several levels – letting the students create individual learning trajectories.
By considering learning as a complex landscape of personal learning trajectories, it creates a way of thinking that moves the educator’s focus from dissemination of knowledge to process thinking. If quests are to stimulate the students’ desire to challenge the prescribed syllabus, the assumption is that the selected quest cannot be built around a narrative story that points to a particular curriculum. Instead, each quest needs be focused on generic academic tools or material arrangement that can strengthen and support the students’ freedom to challenge their learning process.
This approach implies a constant shift of positions for the students created by the game activities, combined with one particular direction that leads them towards the final goals of their project. The structure of the quests can, therefore, be considered a landscape of practice consisting of a collection of unique quests.
Each quest is based on a professional topic within a particular practice coupled with
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a form of material arrangement. Material arrangement is interpreted as academic disciplines or methods that serve as tools for the learning process (see Figure 45).
Graphically this can be illustrated by describing a quest as a sphere constituting a practice coupled with an icon expressing a material arrangement. Each sphere thus becomes an expression of a bundle (see Figure 46).
This creates an endless number of different quests that set different perspectives on the professional content through different approaches and methods. The students will thus be able to experience a quest that deals with the same topic but with different ways of solving and unfolding it through different tools.
Figure 45 – Illustrates how quest activities can be interpreted as bundles.
Make 10 statements about the content you find inspiring - including the building
requirements Make 5 statements about interesting angles on the project not
described in the presentation Make 5 critical statements about the
con-tent described in the presentation
Figure 44 – A description of a quest card
Practice
Quest structure as “Landscape of practices”
BUNDLES
=
Figure 46 ‒ Schematic overview of academic disciplines or activities.
Through a brainstorm created in one of the design workshops with the teachers (see Chapter 11), various suggestions for academic disciplines or activities that point towards a reflexive, innovative and explorative learning culture were identified. When these academic tools or disciplines are combined with a professional practice it creates a bundle.
When students select and connect the many quests in serial relationships, the intention is that they are challenged to an autonomous behaviour where they independently evaluate which quests are meaningful to the current activity within the project. The chosen path will, over time, reflect possibilities for achieving specific learning based on the dependency relationship between the two concepts proceed and depends ‒ how the students are going to proceed, depending on what they have already learned (Schatzki, 2016b).
The quest activities thus present the students with new fields of study and theories that may potentially obstruct their process and challenge them to seek new and unknown solutions. Within that framework, students have the freedom to independently and actively mix activities and thereby create learning trajectories that follow individual problem formulations or project descriptions. The theoretical argumentation is that it opens up a puzzling mindset where the possibilities of combinations are supposed to contribute to depth in the learning process. Each quest activity triggers points that allow new levels and thereby new quests (see Figure 48).
Asking
Figure 47 - Schematic overview of how academic disciplines can be combined into a personal learning trajectories.
Asking questions Creating
obstructions Group
Work
Writing
Sketch and model
Generate ideas
Critical thinking
Tools Decision- making Defining objectives
Reflection Process
Analyse
Discuss
Exploration Reading
Planning Knowledge dissemination
Perspectivate Experiment Limits and framing Acquisition of
knowledge
DIFFERENT ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES PERSONAL LEARNING TRAJECTORIES
Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level X
Figure 48 - Activities divided into levels providing the students with the ability to review next step
The game design needs to contain a significant number of different quests, so the student has the opportunity to create a learning trajectory that is perceived as meaningful. Salen and Zimmerman (2004) make the point in the following quote that meaningful play in a game occurs when there is an interaction between actions and the desired outcome.
Meaningful play in a game emerges from the relationship between player action and system outcome; it is the process by which a player takes action within the designed system of a game, and the system responds to the action. The meaning of an action in a game resides in the relationship between action and outcome. (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 34)
Thus, based on Dewey’s understanding of learning, game design is a system that consists of different types of activities that mediate and support the students’ learning.
It involves a shift from an understanding of Game-Based Learning systems as a predefined narrative that is built around specific content toward seeing it as generic tools and methods that can stimulate and facilitate a learning process.