The ideal classroom project is addictively engaging. Students don’t want to leave class, they ask to come in during their free time to work on their project, they spend their time with friends talking about their project, and they lay in bed at night thinking about what they can do to make their project better. This type of engagement might also be called, more simply, fun. This unicorn level of engagement is not easily obtainable, but game design techniques can help get us a little closer.
To begin, what is “engagement?” In 2016, a group of researchers described it as “the heightened, simultaneous experience of concentration, interest, and enjoyment” (Shernoff, 2016). According to those researchers, engagement in learning is brought about through “multiple aspects of environmental challenge, including clear goals (Dickey, 2005), clear and high expectations (Wang & Eccles, 2013), providing opportunities for exploring and solving meaningful problems (National Research Council, 1999), the mastery of new skills (Ladd, 1999), teachers’ high expectations for students’ success (Allodi, 2010), and relevance of school activities to students’ real lives (Meece, 1991)” (Shernoff, 2016). In other words, most of what engagement means in the classroom is also what engagement means in video games. Of course, when we’re playing video games, we don’t call it “engagement”, we call it “fun.” So it’s no surprise that game designer Raph Koster says, “fun is just another word for learning.”
So, what is “fun”? Nicole Lazzaro, a game experience designer and researcher, identified four different types of fun in games (Lazzaro, 2004). Hard fun is fun because it is challenging, it is focused on a goal and often involves obstacles or strategy. Easy fun is fun that comes from exploration and imagination. People fun is fun with other people and it comes from communication, cooperation, or competition. Serious fun comes from working towards a purposeful accomplishment. It can be repetitive but also rewarding. The best games incorporate at least three types of fun. The best projects should do the same. However, it’s not especially easy to figure out how to add “hard fun” or “serious fun” to a project design. So, in order to tap into the elements that make videogames fun in multiple ways, I have begun adding four specific questions to my project planning. Each question is based on an engagement technique that was intentionally implemented by game designers in many popular video games.
Student voice and choice is a key element of project design and good classroom teaching, but game designers have a more nuanced understanding of “choice” than most teachers do. In game design, “choices” fall on two axes: consequence and options (see figure 1). This combination of consequences and options leads to a greater sense of agency because it positions students so that they can make strategic and creative decisions towards a goal.
Figure 1: quadrant chart with project examples showing varying levels of options and consequences. (Image created by Max Cady)
This pushes us to consider whether the choices students are making are meaningful and strategic and if the opportunities for choice are maximized both at a project level (being able to steer the direction of the project, for example) and at a moment-to-moment level (having freedom to solve problems as they come up). Many game designers believe that it is having choices that matter that makes games fun. In fact, Sid Meier, designer of the iconic video game “Civilization,” once stated that “Games are a series of interesting decisions” (Meier, S. 2018). Choices matter when they are strategic choices that make a difference towards a goal, some choices are better than other choices (although it is not always obvious in the moment which is the better choice), and the choices you make have consequences. Some of examples of this include:
After guiding students towards a goal and providing space for them to make meaningful and strategic choices, the next important step as a project facilitator is to allow time and space for students to receive feedback on their choices. Responsive feedback can make choices feel more meaningful in a project. This feedback could come from classmates, mentors, an audience, the teacher or even the work itself (a sand castle lets you know when it doesn’t have enough structural support, which is also an example of hard fun and serious fun). The more responsive the feedback cycle the more quickly the students can learn the impact of their choices.[bctt tweet=”After guiding students towards a goal and providing space for them to make meaningful and strategic choices, the next important step as a project facilitator is to allow time and space for students to receive feedback on their choices. Responsive feedback can make choices feel more meaningful in a project” username=”hthunboxed”]
As a Media Arts teacher I think that one of the reasons students find coding and digital editing tools such as Photoshop engaging is that they allow students to make many choices. There is rarely just one way to achieve something: students can try out different strategies to achieve their goal and some of them work and others don’t. As a bonus, the feedback students receive when their choice doesn’t work, paired with the opportunity to try again with a different strategy, works towards creating hard fun. To create space in projects for choices to matter, educators should think about the ways in which they can increase agency and consequence with choice in their project design.
One additional way to think about choices in projects is to categorize them as micro or macro choices. Educators can then think about how to adjust options and consequences for those choices in order to maximize engagement and agency. Micro choices are small choices that students make frequently. Micro choices also have a more immediate feedback loop. Macro choices involve thinking about the future and usually have more delayed feedback (see Table 1 for examples).
Table 1: Examples of micro and macro choices:
Learning Outcome |
Student micro choices that matter |
Student macro choices that matter |
| Creating an animated story about a pollinator | What tool am I going to use to make this shape that matches my drawing?
How do I pick a color that matches the color I want? How do I make the arms move without spinning around? |
What is the story I am going to tell?
What pollinator am I going to choose? What social media platform am I going to use? |
| Creating a farmer’s market with harvested plants and compost made by students | Where will we place the compost bins today?
How can I get better at teaching a first grader to use the compost bin? How do I put compost into the bin without making a mess? |
How will we market what we are selling?
What method of composting are we going to use? When do we plant our seeds so we can harvest them at the same time? |
| Designing and implementing a plan to reduce rates of children drowning | How do I make my swim student feel comfortable enough in shallow water to learn to float?
How do I make water look transparent for my water safety poster? |
What do I need to teach first for my student to learn how to swim?
What water safety messages will have the largest impact? |
Educators are already aware of the fact that all learners learn differently. “Differentiated instruction” is instruction that is tailored to each individual learner through individualizing the concept, product, process, or learning environment. The concept of “low floor, high ceiling,” captures the idea that good learning tasks should have a low floor that allows for an easy entry into a task and a high ceiling that allows for potential growth.
Game designers are masters of adjusting for difficulty levels. The best games meet players at their competency levels and provide experiences for them to learn and improve their skills. Games that make it either too hard to show progress, or too easy to show mastery, are not fun. Adjusting the difficulty level is a way to add to the feelings of growth and progress. Mastery is the point at which games become unfun, which is why game designers are constantly challenging players with evolving environments in order to prevent the feeling of mastery and continue the fun associated with growth and progress. Additionally, failure is an integral part of game design. Often in the classroom failing is demotivating, or at the very least a cause for anxiety. Meanwhile, in the world of games losing is just an opportunity to revise and try again!
A great project should not only provide access points for all students, but it should also provide opportunities for all students to learn and grow at their own rate. One way to think about adjusting the difficulty levels in a project is to ask three questions: “How can a student feel consistently challenged at all points in the project? What opportunities does a student have to learn from failure mid project, and what opportunities does the student have to practice and try again?”
Another way to provide these opportunities and add to the complexity of work is to avoid prescribed solutions. The best games don’t prescribe solutions and neither should projects. A project with prescribed solutions will struggle to appropriately challenge all students as it may not be accessible for some students and it may be too easy for others. Game design asks us to consider how to adjust projects to adapt to the right level of challenge for each learner.
Some ways to adjust project difficulty levels are:
One reason that games are so motivating is because players always feel like they’ve accomplished something. Games constantly give feedback to make players aware of their progress and games provide opportunities to practice and make growth. Many games use an experience system that rewards growth with new experiences and challenges. The traditional letter grade system highlights failure and hides opportunities for progress and growth. In games most players start with no experience and as they improve, regardless of how many times they fail along the way, they gain more and more experience. When students start with 100% at the beginning of a class and only have opportunities to go down or maintain their grade, they are stuck in a system that highlights deficiencies and they miss out on the motivational potential of a system that highlights progress. To counter this and draw from the lessons of game design, it is important to design projects with opportunities for students to see their learning journey, and feel motivated by their accomplishments.
Break down project components into smaller tasks and use a Scrum board to capture progress (see figure two).
Figure Two: Example of a SCRUM Board using Trello from a 8th grade digital arts project.
Build a badge system with different competencies that are needed for the project. A badge system is a system where students collect various badges that reflect growth or achievement in various skills or competencies. The badges can be digital or physical and are often built into portfolios.
Use a Gantt Chart to show progress on a project. A Gantt Chart is a common tool used in project management that also works well in the PBL classroom to show tasks and project timelines.
Build a digital portfolio or project journal to visualize and document growth and progress. Digital portfolios showcase and capture student work and are often made available for a public audience. There are various online platforms that are specifically designed or easily adopted for this purpose (e.g. Inkwire, Weebly, Google Sites, etc.).
Build a digital portfolio or project journal to visualize and document growth and progress. Digital portfolios showcase and capture student work and are often made available for a public audience. There are various online platforms that are specifically designed or easily adopted for this purpose (e.g. Inkwire, Weebly, Google Sites, etc.).
Whatever system or strategy an educator chooses, if the goal is for students to be actively engaged with their learning, game design shows that feelings of accomplishment, challenge, and progress are motivational and increase engagement.
Stills from the short animated films that students produced in Max Cady’s “Pollianimator” project
One particularly engaging element of games is the story (as well as the fantasy world in which it is told). A project doesn’t need to have a rising action and a climax, but to increase engagement it should incorporate narrative and world building as much as possible. Learning happens when students have a conceptual framework to add new information to. Games either have a theme that players are already familiar with, (Tony Hawk’s Pro skater, Madden NFL, Fifa, Gran Turismo) or they build on a world through narrative and often fantasy (Zelda, Pokemon, Mass Effect, Witcher). Once the theme and story are established in a player or learner’s mind, it becomes easier to acquire new information. A good project narrative is usually tied in with the purpose of a project. When the project has a clear purpose, there are endless opportunities for students to connect and engage with stories related to the work. Engaging stories could come from mentors or experts who have personal stories related to the project. They could also include students’ personal stories and identities that they can then connect to the work and purpose. Ultimately, If a project has a good purpose it probably also has a lot of good stories that can connect to it and the more educators draw on the stories and narratives that matter to a project’s purpose, the more engaged students will be.
Learning is fun and fun is learning. Game designers are masters of engagement and getting us to learn things that don’t matter much in the real world. Educators should be able to take some game design ideas and get students to learn things that do matter in the real world. Feel free to use the questions below to help with project planning. Have fun out there.
Dickey, M. D. (2005). Engaging by design: How engagement strategies in popular computer and video games can inform instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 53(2), 67–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02504866
Lazzaro, N. (2004). Why We Play Games:Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story [White paper]. XEODesign,® Inc. https://xeodesign.com/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf
Sid Meier’s Interesting Decisions. (2018, September 27). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WggIdtrqgKg
Shernoff, D. J., Kelly, S., Tonks, S. M., Anderson, B., Cavanagh, R. F., Sinha, S., & Abdi, B. (2016). Student engagement as a function of environmental complexity in high school classrooms. Learning and Instruction, 43, 52–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2015.12.003
The ideal classroom project is addictively engaging. Students don’t want to leave class, they ask to come in during their free time to work on their project, they spend their time with friends talking about their project, and they lay in bed at night thinking about what they can do to make their project better. This type of engagement might also be called, more simply, fun. This unicorn level of engagement is not easily obtainable, but game design techniques can help get us a little closer.
To begin, what is “engagement?” In 2016, a group of researchers described it as “the heightened, simultaneous experience of concentration, interest, and enjoyment” (Shernoff, 2016). According to those researchers, engagement in learning is brought about through “multiple aspects of environmental challenge, including clear goals (Dickey, 2005), clear and high expectations (Wang & Eccles, 2013), providing opportunities for exploring and solving meaningful problems (National Research Council, 1999), the mastery of new skills (Ladd, 1999), teachers’ high expectations for students’ success (Allodi, 2010), and relevance of school activities to students’ real lives (Meece, 1991)” (Shernoff, 2016). In other words, most of what engagement means in the classroom is also what engagement means in video games. Of course, when we’re playing video games, we don’t call it “engagement”, we call it “fun.” So it’s no surprise that game designer Raph Koster says, “fun is just another word for learning.”
So, what is “fun”? Nicole Lazzaro, a game experience designer and researcher, identified four different types of fun in games (Lazzaro, 2004). Hard fun is fun because it is challenging, it is focused on a goal and often involves obstacles or strategy. Easy fun is fun that comes from exploration and imagination. People fun is fun with other people and it comes from communication, cooperation, or competition. Serious fun comes from working towards a purposeful accomplishment. It can be repetitive but also rewarding. The best games incorporate at least three types of fun. The best projects should do the same. However, it’s not especially easy to figure out how to add “hard fun” or “serious fun” to a project design. So, in order to tap into the elements that make videogames fun in multiple ways, I have begun adding four specific questions to my project planning. Each question is based on an engagement technique that was intentionally implemented by game designers in many popular video games.
Student voice and choice is a key element of project design and good classroom teaching, but game designers have a more nuanced understanding of “choice” than most teachers do. In game design, “choices” fall on two axes: consequence and options (see figure 1). This combination of consequences and options leads to a greater sense of agency because it positions students so that they can make strategic and creative decisions towards a goal.
Figure 1: quadrant chart with project examples showing varying levels of options and consequences. (Image created by Max Cady)
This pushes us to consider whether the choices students are making are meaningful and strategic and if the opportunities for choice are maximized both at a project level (being able to steer the direction of the project, for example) and at a moment-to-moment level (having freedom to solve problems as they come up). Many game designers believe that it is having choices that matter that makes games fun. In fact, Sid Meier, designer of the iconic video game “Civilization,” once stated that “Games are a series of interesting decisions” (Meier, S. 2018). Choices matter when they are strategic choices that make a difference towards a goal, some choices are better than other choices (although it is not always obvious in the moment which is the better choice), and the choices you make have consequences. Some of examples of this include:
After guiding students towards a goal and providing space for them to make meaningful and strategic choices, the next important step as a project facilitator is to allow time and space for students to receive feedback on their choices. Responsive feedback can make choices feel more meaningful in a project. This feedback could come from classmates, mentors, an audience, the teacher or even the work itself (a sand castle lets you know when it doesn’t have enough structural support, which is also an example of hard fun and serious fun). The more responsive the feedback cycle the more quickly the students can learn the impact of their choices.[bctt tweet=”After guiding students towards a goal and providing space for them to make meaningful and strategic choices, the next important step as a project facilitator is to allow time and space for students to receive feedback on their choices. Responsive feedback can make choices feel more meaningful in a project” username=”hthunboxed”]
As a Media Arts teacher I think that one of the reasons students find coding and digital editing tools such as Photoshop engaging is that they allow students to make many choices. There is rarely just one way to achieve something: students can try out different strategies to achieve their goal and some of them work and others don’t. As a bonus, the feedback students receive when their choice doesn’t work, paired with the opportunity to try again with a different strategy, works towards creating hard fun. To create space in projects for choices to matter, educators should think about the ways in which they can increase agency and consequence with choice in their project design.
One additional way to think about choices in projects is to categorize them as micro or macro choices. Educators can then think about how to adjust options and consequences for those choices in order to maximize engagement and agency. Micro choices are small choices that students make frequently. Micro choices also have a more immediate feedback loop. Macro choices involve thinking about the future and usually have more delayed feedback (see Table 1 for examples).
Table 1: Examples of micro and macro choices:
Learning Outcome |
Student micro choices that matter |
Student macro choices that matter |
| Creating an animated story about a pollinator | What tool am I going to use to make this shape that matches my drawing?
How do I pick a color that matches the color I want? How do I make the arms move without spinning around? |
What is the story I am going to tell?
What pollinator am I going to choose? What social media platform am I going to use? |
| Creating a farmer’s market with harvested plants and compost made by students | Where will we place the compost bins today?
How can I get better at teaching a first grader to use the compost bin? How do I put compost into the bin without making a mess? |
How will we market what we are selling?
What method of composting are we going to use? When do we plant our seeds so we can harvest them at the same time? |
| Designing and implementing a plan to reduce rates of children drowning | How do I make my swim student feel comfortable enough in shallow water to learn to float?
How do I make water look transparent for my water safety poster? |
What do I need to teach first for my student to learn how to swim?
What water safety messages will have the largest impact? |
Educators are already aware of the fact that all learners learn differently. “Differentiated instruction” is instruction that is tailored to each individual learner through individualizing the concept, product, process, or learning environment. The concept of “low floor, high ceiling,” captures the idea that good learning tasks should have a low floor that allows for an easy entry into a task and a high ceiling that allows for potential growth.
Game designers are masters of adjusting for difficulty levels. The best games meet players at their competency levels and provide experiences for them to learn and improve their skills. Games that make it either too hard to show progress, or too easy to show mastery, are not fun. Adjusting the difficulty level is a way to add to the feelings of growth and progress. Mastery is the point at which games become unfun, which is why game designers are constantly challenging players with evolving environments in order to prevent the feeling of mastery and continue the fun associated with growth and progress. Additionally, failure is an integral part of game design. Often in the classroom failing is demotivating, or at the very least a cause for anxiety. Meanwhile, in the world of games losing is just an opportunity to revise and try again!
A great project should not only provide access points for all students, but it should also provide opportunities for all students to learn and grow at their own rate. One way to think about adjusting the difficulty levels in a project is to ask three questions: “How can a student feel consistently challenged at all points in the project? What opportunities does a student have to learn from failure mid project, and what opportunities does the student have to practice and try again?”
Another way to provide these opportunities and add to the complexity of work is to avoid prescribed solutions. The best games don’t prescribe solutions and neither should projects. A project with prescribed solutions will struggle to appropriately challenge all students as it may not be accessible for some students and it may be too easy for others. Game design asks us to consider how to adjust projects to adapt to the right level of challenge for each learner.
Some ways to adjust project difficulty levels are:
One reason that games are so motivating is because players always feel like they’ve accomplished something. Games constantly give feedback to make players aware of their progress and games provide opportunities to practice and make growth. Many games use an experience system that rewards growth with new experiences and challenges. The traditional letter grade system highlights failure and hides opportunities for progress and growth. In games most players start with no experience and as they improve, regardless of how many times they fail along the way, they gain more and more experience. When students start with 100% at the beginning of a class and only have opportunities to go down or maintain their grade, they are stuck in a system that highlights deficiencies and they miss out on the motivational potential of a system that highlights progress. To counter this and draw from the lessons of game design, it is important to design projects with opportunities for students to see their learning journey, and feel motivated by their accomplishments.
Break down project components into smaller tasks and use a Scrum board to capture progress (see figure two).
Figure Two: Example of a SCRUM Board using Trello from a 8th grade digital arts project.
Build a badge system with different competencies that are needed for the project. A badge system is a system where students collect various badges that reflect growth or achievement in various skills or competencies. The badges can be digital or physical and are often built into portfolios.
Use a Gantt Chart to show progress on a project. A Gantt Chart is a common tool used in project management that also works well in the PBL classroom to show tasks and project timelines.
Build a digital portfolio or project journal to visualize and document growth and progress. Digital portfolios showcase and capture student work and are often made available for a public audience. There are various online platforms that are specifically designed or easily adopted for this purpose (e.g. Inkwire, Weebly, Google Sites, etc.).
Build a digital portfolio or project journal to visualize and document growth and progress. Digital portfolios showcase and capture student work and are often made available for a public audience. There are various online platforms that are specifically designed or easily adopted for this purpose (e.g. Inkwire, Weebly, Google Sites, etc.).
Whatever system or strategy an educator chooses, if the goal is for students to be actively engaged with their learning, game design shows that feelings of accomplishment, challenge, and progress are motivational and increase engagement.
Stills from the short animated films that students produced in Max Cady’s “Pollianimator” project
One particularly engaging element of games is the story (as well as the fantasy world in which it is told). A project doesn’t need to have a rising action and a climax, but to increase engagement it should incorporate narrative and world building as much as possible. Learning happens when students have a conceptual framework to add new information to. Games either have a theme that players are already familiar with, (Tony Hawk’s Pro skater, Madden NFL, Fifa, Gran Turismo) or they build on a world through narrative and often fantasy (Zelda, Pokemon, Mass Effect, Witcher). Once the theme and story are established in a player or learner’s mind, it becomes easier to acquire new information. A good project narrative is usually tied in with the purpose of a project. When the project has a clear purpose, there are endless opportunities for students to connect and engage with stories related to the work. Engaging stories could come from mentors or experts who have personal stories related to the project. They could also include students’ personal stories and identities that they can then connect to the work and purpose. Ultimately, If a project has a good purpose it probably also has a lot of good stories that can connect to it and the more educators draw on the stories and narratives that matter to a project’s purpose, the more engaged students will be.
Learning is fun and fun is learning. Game designers are masters of engagement and getting us to learn things that don’t matter much in the real world. Educators should be able to take some game design ideas and get students to learn things that do matter in the real world. Feel free to use the questions below to help with project planning. Have fun out there.
Dickey, M. D. (2005). Engaging by design: How engagement strategies in popular computer and video games can inform instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 53(2), 67–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02504866
Lazzaro, N. (2004). Why We Play Games:Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story [White paper]. XEODesign,® Inc. https://xeodesign.com/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf
Sid Meier’s Interesting Decisions. (2018, September 27). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WggIdtrqgKg
Shernoff, D. J., Kelly, S., Tonks, S. M., Anderson, B., Cavanagh, R. F., Sinha, S., & Abdi, B. (2016). Student engagement as a function of environmental complexity in high school classrooms. Learning and Instruction, 43, 52–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2015.12.003
