“Dr. T! You can’t do that! I totally buzzed in first for the Plotinus question!” I’m standing in one of my campus’s largest auditoriums in early February. Roughly 80 students are seated around me, 60 of them currently enrolled in my Philosophy 201 class. Only one of them is a Philosophy major. The rest of the 60 are currently enrolled in my class to fulfill a university-wide requirement.
It’s a Monday night and the Sophists are engaged in vigorous debate with the Meditators and the Socrateam over who buzzed in first. We’re playing Jeopardy tonight outside of class time to review for the midterm they have coming up and the hundred or so questions on the screen behind me are rapidly gone through and points awarded, though never without controversy.
But I can’t help but smile even wider as I look to my left and watch the 20 members of Team Xanthippe, named after the wife Socrates should have treated better. Team Xanthippe is my perpetual alumni team, composed entirely of students no longer enrolled in my classes, who were similarly required to take the class to fill a university-wide requirement. These members of Team Xanthippe finished this class last fall, but here they are on a Monday night during midterm season of their own volition to show Turnbull’s new students that they have nothing on Team Xanthippe.
And then pandemonium is unleashed. I’ve flicked to the question which requires the students to repeat the divided line from the Republic entirely from memory and Team Xanthippe is rapid fire buzzing in and screaming the answer. “IMAGES! Dr. Turnbull, are you paying attention?! THINGS OF WHICH THE IMAGES ARE IMAGES!”
As I approached fully remote teaching this semester, I sat down with my familiar copy of Bessel Van Der Kolk’s masterwork on trauma, The Body Keeps The Score,and my syllabi. I wanted to know how to meet this semester’s students’ need for the kind of joy and community found in that crowded auditorium that night in February. How could I create that for students whose brains are undergoing the trauma of a worldwide pandemic? How could I foster community and excitement, not just with me but with their peers, when going to class meant clicking a Zoom link three times a week at 8AM?
And in a moment of desperation, I opted for a grand experiment: throw out the standard learning management system, adopt the new gameful pedagogy pioneered by the University of Michigan and its associated LMS, GradeCraft, and start over. As I begin prepping for a Spring semester that will involve many of the same challenges that the Fall did, I can’t help but be excited. Because the experiment seems to be working. We’ve found community and joy, however imperfect, in Zoom calls and Discord chats.
Gameful pedagogy flips the script of grading structure. Instead of starting from 100% on Day 1 and gradually losing the possibility of a perfect score as students receive less than perfect grades on assignments, students begin Day 1 of my class with 0 points. They then have a menu of ways to earn points available to them. In my classes, every student is required to earn attendance points and points for several papers or even an occasional final exam. I tell them that if they don’t complete these four or five assignments, they can’t pass. Beyond that, students get to choose how they will earn points and how many points they would like to end the class with. There are roughly 50-75% more points available to be earned than are required for an A, so students have autonomy in which assignments they choose to complete.
We heal in community, not apart from it. So from a trauma-based standpoint, I wanted my students to be highly incentivized this semester to engage with each other and me, both in class times, and especially outside of class times, whether that be in groups with each other or in office hours with me. In the first week, I divided my classes into teams of 3-4 students. Teams have their own logos which give them an identity: in the core history of philosophy classes I teach, teams include the Golden Memes and the Autonomists, in core reasoning classes, Team Negation competes with Team Conditional.
I use the free app Discord as our primary out of class communication platform and each team has their own private channel in Discord where they can talk with each other. Teams can opt to complete team projects, like explaining a philosophical concept in a short 3 minute creative video. This project has resulted in comedy skits re-enacting the Phaedoas if it had been carried out over Zoom and a rap to the tune of the Prince of Bel-Air describing the major plot features of a Platonic dialogue arriving in my inbox. Teams also compete in weekly live class Jeopardy games I created through Factile. If their team places in the top 3 in Jeopardy, they get real class points! Students can earn points by studying together in their teams and sending me screenshots showing they did so. Individual students get points for asking and responding to questions from each other about course material on Discord (to reward students who don’t feel as comfortable speaking out in class times) as well as points for asking and answering questions in live classes. In my reasoning class, students get points for submitting completed packets of homework problems. If they come to office hours to talk about life or philosophy, they get points.
Since their main path to an A involves steady participation over the semester rather than a rushed meeting of a deadline, I also created an accountability structure. I reward the Team with the highest average points with an additional 10 bonus points every other week. Teams go online and see how they’re stacking up with other teams in the class at any time in a leaderboard feature on GradeCraft which requires no work from me.
The prospect of becoming Champions of the Week has motivated students immensely. I’m not reminding them to ask questions in class; their teammates are unmuting their mics and encouraging them to engage with the material! I’m not reminding them to make friends with other students. They’re scheduling their own study sessions for points and getting ready for Jeopardy together. The conversations about their lives that have resulted from my making it worth 2 points to come to office hours to tell me a fun fact? Two points for them, priceless for me.
This might sound like a lot of extra work to faculty right now. And I was concerned that the experiment would tank my semester’s sanity. But it hasn’t. The gameful LMS, GradeCraft, is intuitively built and lets studentsaward themselves points for their engagement. I run a double check that these self-awarded points are legitimate weekly, but it takes me minimal time. It certainly takes me less time and effort than hounding them about missed assignments did before! When Student Services reaches out about a student they’re concerned about, I have a student-logged record available to me of the students’ participation in daily classes on GradeCraft. My staff colleagues and I are catching the students long before they come near the cracks, even though I’ve never seen my students in person.
At the end of one of our first Jeopardy games, one of my students asked for permission to speak. “I’d just like to thank my team,” he said in a voice mimicking a college coach at a press event, “for really putting it all out there this week. I know we’ve got the next championship in our sight and I know we can do it.” Cheers from his teammates and boos from his competitors followed. As for me, for my adventure with trauma-informed gameful pedagogy, I’d like to thank my students. The community we’ve found with each other this semester has been more joyful than I ever could have anticipated.
Margaret Greta Turnbull
Margaret Greta Turnbull is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University. She’s been an advocate of gamified learning long before this adventure, and is deeply thankful for the hundreds of members of Team Xanthippe throughout her years of teaching whose enthusiasm gave her daily joy. Her research interests are in social epistemology and philosophy of science, and she has forthcoming and published work on disagreement, underdetermination, and Permissivism.
This is great to read and it’s good to learn about a success during the remote teaching era! The only thing that strikes me as wrong is the sentence that echoes the GradeCraft FAQ: “Instead of starting from 100% on Day 1 and gradually losing the possibility of a perfect score as students receive less than perfect grades on assignments, students begin Day 1 of my class with 0 points.” No course starts students off with an unearned 100%. I tell my students at the start of every year that they all have zeroes but will build their grades through the term. But I am leaning toward gamification in a course more than before after reading this. Thanks!