Teaching design thinking through gamification
We know we’re creating problems that the next generation will be left to fix, so the least we can do is to give them the skills to fix them, and yet we’re still failing on a grand scale. The good news is that we’re discovering new ways to help them work out how to do this for themselves.
Design Ethnography is a discipline which teaches you how to observe what people do in order to identify hidden needs for which you can design new solutions. It’s one of a group of skills that have never been part of the early educational curriculum before. Recent experiments in imparting these skills using ‘game dynamics’ show that it’s astonishingly easy to quickly turn places where learning motivation is often almost unattainable into a hive of surprisingly self-motivated promising design-thinking innovators.
Here’s a team talking about doing this kind of thing in Pittsburgh
Here’s the introduction to the first video:
What if there were a basic literacy, beyond reading, writing, and arithmetics that we missed, or that wasn’t really necessary until this moment in our history? What if that new literacy were MORE important than STEM education to the future of our children? Or if it helped rationalize STEM and SEL (social, emotional, learning) in a way that organized these two, at times mutually exclusive, threads of critical thinking? What if other countries were figuring it out and America was caught fighting over educational approaches mired in philosophies and patterns suited for the 1900s instead of the 21st century and missed the boat entirely? What if it fostered thinking so that kids could grow up to be critical, creative, collaborative, and resilient? What if you did something about it before it’s too late?
Here’s the speaker’s bio from that video:
Mickey McManus is president, CEO, and principal of MAYA Design, Inc., a technology design and innovation lab focused on meeting the needs of people in the connected world. To maximize opportunities for innovation at the intersection of users and information, he leads a team of cognitive psychologists, ethnographers, computer scientists, mathematicians, visual and industrial designers, architects, and filmmakers. This team works with a range of clients from Fortune 500 global companies to foundations, government organizations, and startups.
In 2005, Mickey spearheaded the launch of MAYA’s Pervasive Computing practice, which focuses on ways to take connected experiences out of the lab and into the marketplace through smart products, services, and environments.
Here’s an introduction to the second video:
This 8 minute film documents two one-day sessions with a wide ranging group of people who are passionate about kids and creativity. Participants included teachers, community leaders, artists, representatives from the public television station that brought the world “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood,” game designers from Disney, computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon, and leaders from non-profit organizations. This session was sponsored by the Grable Foundation and held in Pittsburgh, PA in July 2010. The goal was to foster a shared vision and identify potential projects around the kids & creativity movement.
I was not able to get the second video to play, but the first one was amazing and inspiring. My comment for you is that this first video is virtually the *opposite* of gamification, so your headline surprises me. Given that today’s definition of gamification uses the operant conditiong game mechanics based on extrinsic rewards, what is in this video is much closer to an actual game… A simulation… than any form of gamification/extrinsic reward structure. In fact, I plan on referencing this video as a near-perfect example of how NOT using gamification can lead to the most dramatic results.
This camp program got the participants engaged in the actual process of design. They weren’t doing it for any kind of points, badges, levels, achievement, leader boards, and so on… The standard gammification elements. It did, however, use exactly what real games (the good ones) use… intrinsically motivating challenges, coupled with the ability to learn and develop the knowledge and skills to meet those increasing challenges.
Hi Kathy, I’m delighted to have your comment! That second video is playing OK for me in Chrome, but I get a pretty big green rectangle in IE9. Gamification was a new term for me, before Peter (who has also lived for a while in Pittsburgh, where that second video about the design thinking simulation game was filmed) wrote our article: ‘Does the idea of “turning everything into a game” just sound silly to you?’
http://www.iijiij.com/2010/10/03/does-the-idea-of-%E2%80%9Cturning-everything-into-a-game%E2%80%9D-just-sound-silly-to-you-05938
The main video in that article features a mind blowing seminal talk by the legendary Pittsburgh (Carnegie-Mellon University) games guru Jessie Schell. Jessie also makes an appearance in the second video in my article. I suppose, in the light of your observation, there is perhaps an aspect to gamification which is ‘the introduction of game dynamics’ where the thing in question is ‘not turned into a game’ at all (does ‘being gamed’ also suffer from the same ‘reappropriation of the term’?) Design thinking exercises (such as in those in the videos) are the sort of thing that can involve either, neither or both kinds of gamification. You raise what seems to me to be a vital question: “What are the questions that we should attempt to answer when considering introducing either or both kinds of game aspects (content-based or behavioural) to some non-game exercise?” I suppose that with any new kind of input to a process, there are risks. Behavioural gamification can distort. Content based gamification can too. You’ve made me think that this needs working through. Please let me know what you think, Kathy.
[...] Design Ethnography is a discipline which teaches you how to observe what people do in order to identify hidden needs for which you can design new solutions. It’s one of a group of skills that have never been part of the early educational curriculum before. Recent experiments in imparting these skills using “game dynamics” show that it’s astonishingly easy to quickly turn places where learning motivation is often almost unattainable into a hive of surprisingly self-motivated promising design-thinking innovators. [...]