The Game

Okay, it's time to get serious.  It's a week until we hit August, and the class starts on August 19. Also, concerning is the fact that the class enrollment right now sits at a grand total of seven.  I'm used to having classes in the high twenties or low thirties.  To make this work, I would ideally like at least sixteen to twenty students, although I could make it work with as little as twelve.  We'll see...

I'd also like to plug a book that I have been reading.  This one is more practical that Jane McGonigal's in the sense that the author discusses his own work with using gaming in the classroom.   The book is Lee Sheldon's The Multiplayer Classroom.   Although he teaches gaming, which lends itself to gamifying the class more easily, he still has a lot of ideas an experiences to share.

For my class, since it is an American Government class, I am going to design a game around an election.  The players will be divided into parties, and in the first phase the players will compete to represent their party in the general election.  Ideally, I would like at least four in each party to allow for bargaining and alliance building.  In the second phase, the nominee of each party (now with the help of their former rivals) will compete to win the general election.  Again, I would ideally like three or more parties to allow for bargaining.  I would also like to develop roles for the party members so that they can all participate in some way, as well as having something for the nominee to bargain with.

Players will be able to earn votes, as well as campaign contributions and volunteers, which would be converted into votes.  To get votes, I am tentatively thinking of quizzes on each week's material.  I am thinking at this point to allow them to take multiple quizzes to improve their votes, just as games allow multiple attempts at a level.  Thus, competency would be the goal with multiple chances to establish competency.  This may be a little labor intensive to pull off, but it should at least be a goal.

Another way players can earn votes is by converting contributions.  I'm hoping to figure out a way that they can covert them that's fun and not straight buying of votes, but we'll see.  I'm thinking that the contributions could be earned by a performance in a debate.

Finally, volunteers could be used as part of a Get Out the Vote effort.  This will teach the students that having votes is not enough, but the voters need to get to the polls.  I originally thought that this could be tied to attendance, but I got a better idea from a presenter at a recent Sloan conference.  The students would be given an assessment at the beginning of each class which asks them to critically reflect on the week's material.  They would get full points (volunteers) for a well supported answer, half points for an answer that is not sufficiently supported, and no points for not being their to take the assessment.  The percentage of volunteers that they earn compared to the total would equla the percentage of their vote that turns out.  This is equivalent to "experience points" that are earned in many games.

This is not perfectly fleshed out yet.  I would also like to have some kind of written assignment to factor in as well, so we'll see how that goes.  The next phase is to divide the material into units that will constitute the discrete stages of the game.