Ninja Status- Stealth Learning through GBL

I can't remember not wanting to be a teacher.

I can't remember not having some weird awareness that I am capable of leading discussions and transferring information effectively.

From third grade to sixth grade, I taught kids my age, some older, how to read. From fourth grade on, was the leader of NEED, the National Energy Education Development team; we took turns instructing classes once a week on conservation, recycling, and renewable resources. This pattern continued through high school and brought me here, to a GTA position at Virginia Tech where I instruct English 1105 and 1106.

Through all these years, one habit remained constant; it wasn't homework.

I was six years old when my Dad brought our first console home: the glorious original Nintendo, complete with painfully rectangular controllers and that one weird cable you had to practically hammer into the back of the TV. We all played together and spent countless hours solving puzzles, mapping out dungeons, finding secret quests, strategically destroying secret bosses; we spent hours collaborating with each other to reach a goal. And when we met that goal, we moved on to the next game and faced a completely new set of challenges. 21 years later, I'm still gaming as hard as graduate school allows (which, admittedly, isn't very much these days).

Though I've listened attentively to numerous conference presentations demonstrating game based learning methods with various dramatic productions, I've never been able to fully buy into the idea of using games to teach students. The closest I've come to it in my own career (all three whopping semesters of it) is allowing my students to rhetorically analyze speeches from games and constructing debates and argumentative essay prompts around popular game- related topics; in both of these instances, the learning isn't game based. The game is an artifact, like some dusty old tome from Special Collections. It wasn't until I watched Digital Media- New Learners of the 21st Century that I actually understood how it was possible to combine these two seemingly distinct facets of my life. More importantly, this documentary lead me to have one of those famous "Aha!" lightbulb moments; roughly twelve minutes in,  Al Doyle, GBL advocate and educator, calls Game Based Learning "stealth learning" and offers that the students are "still learning, but they're having fun doing it." Students learn willingly when the lessons aren't being shoved down their throats via traditional lecture; they can learn without even realizing they're learning. They can learn without the negative connotations that they have likely attached to that verb since college started (or maybe even before).

I wanted to use this space to share a few different resources for Game-Based Learning that I have tried or am considering trying in my classroom.

1) Grammar Jeopardy!
    I know that doesn't sound exciting. Even with the exclamation point that *I* added for fun. It may not be much to look at, but you'd be surprised at the level of engagement that occurs with this kind of grammar lesson. Granted, it's more of an overall review approach after a unit on grammar (or perhaps even an entire semester of mini grammar labs), but you can make custom versions of this game for the specific lesson. Sure, the competition between teams plays a role in the level of student engagement and enthusiasm, but to see students excited to answer a grammar question, disappointed when they get it wrong (which indicates that they care), and asking why (yes! please ask me why!) they got it wrong so they can get it right next time--indescribable.
    I've used this in all of the classes I've taught so far and I've noticed considerable sentence-level grammatical, mechanical, and syntactical improvements. The greatest side effect- they don't shiver and curl up in the fetal position when they hear the word "grammar" anymore. This may seem insignificant, but grammar anxiety (think "the opposite of math anxiety") inhibits student writing more than anything else (except possibly procrastination). When they shed their anxiety and fear of grammar, their writing improves drastically.
     I think it would be easy to customize something like this for a STEM class. Again, it would likely function as a fun, engaging review activity.

2) MinecraftEdu
     Minecraft, a sandbox construction game, came out in 2011 and by last fall, it was the bestselling PC game of all time. At my secondary job, I've sold this game to kids as young as three and adults as old as eighty- eight. I've never seen a game foster creativity, exploration, collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving like this one. The link provided above, however, is not a link to the standard PC version of the game. MinecraftEdu is officially supported by Mojang, the developer behind Minecraft, and offers instructors in all disciplines a "school ready remix" of the game that is "made by teachers and fine tuned for the classroom." They also offer the "Library of Lesson Worlds": a collection of sample lessons and activities that real instructors used across disciplines.

3) Beta The Game & Hack 'n Slash
     I found these a few months ago while compiling ideas for an online Arthurian Literature course and fell in love with the idea. This would take a little more customizing for me to use, but computer science and any discipline the requires students to learn coding languages could benefit from trying this approach.
     Beta the Game is a platformer that requires the player to input code in a custom built language (codePOP) to alter the environment. Hack 'n Slash is similar, but it has a Legend of Zelda feel to it. Tanner Higgin, Senior Manager of Education Content at Common Sense Media, offers that these "games...represent and expose a key quality of play that’s often lost in stuffy, overly-scaffolded learning games — subversion. While code might be all about rules and procedure, play isn’t. Games are the things that harness play through rules, but play — and players — can never quite be tamed. Play is too big and too slippery, ever redefining itself and evolving. Yet code — and in some sense games — are defined by stability. How can the two be reconciled? By letting games be games — finicky and structured — and players be players — risky and inventive. This offers an appealing counterpoint to the dominant and perhaps tired code literacy rhetoric: stop ‘learning to code’ and start messing with it."
     My idea is a simpler version of this game (that doesn't require any scary coding or being able to reconcile that I live in a world where math exists) that requires players to enter certain text from Arthurian tales, re-enact quests and recite lines from legends and poems to progress through the game. Students would have required reading that would equip them with the necessary knowledge to move to the next level of the game until that certain story was complete. Even if this was a really simplistic interactive fiction game, I think it would be more engaging than simply rehashing the high points of the plot via Power Point and conventional lecture.

I know that I have a long way to go until I'm able to offer an Arthurian Literature GBL course. So, for now, I'm searching for new ways to employ Game-Based Learning in freshman composition courses. While it may be easier to make a dizzying Prezi and transfer information from the podium, thinking critically about how to change composition instruction is the only promising way to address major shortcomings in our field. GBL could transform required English courses into fun, exciting, engaging courses that don't feel like work.