Philosophy Professor Kelly Parker is already having a pretty good day by 9 a.m. because he has restored the kind of order to his groaning office bookshelves that he knows aids his thinking.

“I like it orderly, but I’m not great at keeping it that way,” he admits.  This is perhaps emblematic of the way he approaches things.  Whether it is easy or not, sometimes putting in the work to create the structure where good thinking can occur is worth the effort.

In fact, this summer he is rethinking his approach to the General Education course on Aesthetics (PHI 220) that he teaches regularly.  With two sections coming up in fall term, Kelly is ready to experiment.

“At the Public Philosophy Network meeting last winter, I attended a session on gamification.  I want to improve the degree to which students buy into the Aesthetics course, and the PPN session got me thinking.”

The PPN session concentrated on the practical aspects of using online gaming to increase student engagement with philosophy.  The young faculty proponents running the session had even devised their own simple online game in which a character moved through the game world encountering philosophical issues.

Already familiar with the success of some of his GVSU colleagues using game techniques in Reacting to the Past pedagogy and with this additional input on using actual online gaming, Kelly started to think about the principles at work.  What about a game stimulates engagement?

“I was fortunate enough to have two students in a previous class with deep interest in online games who wanted to work on this with me.  The Philosophy Department for about 20 years has had an undergraduate teaching apprenticeship that is handled as an independent study.  It is great for students who see themselves going on to graduate school in philosophy.  They hold office hours and engage with the course students in other ways.  I imagine that this experimental gaming in my Aesthetics sections will be a special version of that.”

As he has pondered first principles, Kelly recalled his now adult son’s teenage online gaming.  Kelly had watched him play on a large screen and realized that he was very rapidly coping with five distinct channels of complex information: the character view, a map view, a readout of statistics, talking and listening on a Bluetooth earpiece to plan and coordinate, and also a running textual chat. 

“I can’t process all that.  I started to wonder if this is how it feels for my students when I walk into the class and start talking about Kant—with none of the helpful context around that.  Teaching is about enabling students to absorb and use complex information, but teaching is usually just one channel at a time, such as a lecturing professor, writing on the board, in-class writing assignments, and later receiving feedback.  There is no analog to the map or the coordination between players over chat or Bluetooth.”

Perhaps there could be.  While a professor is speaking, students could be provided with a backchannel to use to confer, for instance.  Kelly has experimented in the past with showing a documentary on Confucius while allowing students to use devices to chat during it (which seemed preferable to losing a couple students to dreamland during the video). 

“It worked.  I got good questions and observations, and a student volunteered that he had travelled to Confucius’ hometown.  The level of engagement with the material was way up,” Kelly found.  He notes that having a screen of the chat which is visible to the professor keeps the discussion relevant to the video.

Though he realizes that many faculty have a ‘no electronics’ environment in their courses, he is inclined to use technology to allow communication between students, not just with the professor.  Having a student assistant in the course will allow some monitoring of the chat environment during the professor’s lecture so that key questions or points can become a reason to pause the lecture and respond.

“I realized that a very important aspect of engagement in a game comes from the little rewards. They are very compelling.”  Just as with a one armed bandit or the flurry of balloons that launch when one keys in the word “congratulations” on Facebook, there is a psychological boost that comes from even tiny visual or auditory rewards.

“In the simple PPN game, that boost comes from figuring out how to get the sage to come to the door; it’s motivating. Rewards keep you going.”

Kelly realized that during his own undergraduate education he had gamified his own approach to his education.  “The professor would assign Chapter 7, and it was game on!  My task was to read and understand and come up with my take—which could become the subject of my paper.  I assumed that fresh takes on the material would be appreciated by my professors.  I had made my own rules for myself.  Now I want to see if we can overtly set out something like that as the game we are all going to play in the Aesthetics course.” This could help students who don’t have a coherent approach to their studies yet.

Kelly explains that his course is held at the downtown campus and that makes ArtPrize easy to tie in.  But when he gave an assignment for the students to snap images of two works of art, with brief commentary so that all the other students can choose three of their classmates’ choices to respond to, he didn’t get the desired outcome.  “10 to 15% of students just didn’t do the assignment.  So more incentive, a little reward, perhaps a new platform, is a worthy experiment.”

Kelly anticipates that it will take a great deal of experimentation to structure the course in a way the students understand.  He likens it to being a first year teacher again, using the sometimes mutually exclusive ‘best practice’ pedagogies to find what is going to work.  “You have to try every technique,” he smiles.  He adds that it is vital for faculty who have been at GVSU for 25 years like he has to keep working on their pedagogical approaches.  “Otherwise I could just laminate my teaching notes,” he quips.

“I am also very conscious of not wanting technology to become the content or to become a barrier.  I’ve used Flickr for group image sharing in the past, but that’s becoming a dated platform.”  Kelly is actively looking at various platforms that will be both easy enough to get students up and running easily and that will provide the experience he has in mind.

“In the first week of class, I think we will engage in a talking game with no technology.  I’m an intellectual historian at heart and love to have students read the primary sources, but I understand that this is challenging.  I find that a blog post equivalent to a couple pages can often help students to understand the primary source.  Familiar format, no expensive textbook, and it is easy to send students a link.”

“In the fall, with the help of the student assistants, as much as is feasible will be tried.”