By Claudia Buttera, Lab Coordinator, Department of Biology
If you haven’t already heard of the absolute craze that is PokémonGo, here’s a brief overview from a non-gamer. The first Pokémon games launched in 1996 and were designed for Nintendo handhelds. The game is based on capturing, training, battling and trading virtual fictional creatures in order to become a Pokémon Master. The new version is an app, free to install on mobile phones, that unlike other phone games, uses GPS and camera features to overlap the game onto the real world, elevating the experience with outstanding success! Launched on July 6 of this year, the PokémonGo app is currently installed on more cell phones than Tinder and it is on its way to surpassing Twitter in terms of daily active users (Vox.com).
Who is playing? My daughter, who is 19, along with her boyfriend, cousins, most of their friends and hordes of others, including many university students. Players unpredictably congregate in parks, museums, trespass onto private property, and search campuses like ours where there are Pokémon to be captured everywhere!
I teach undergraduate labs in plant anatomy where students examine how plants are put together, macro and microscopically. A while back, if this lab had been a free, downloadable gaming app, very few people would have had it on their phones, with negligible daily use. This PokémonGo craze got me thinking that some of the things that make this new app so popular can be transferable to teaching and learning and may help get students more engaged in our arena.
Reviews suggest one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of the redesign is that it takes the game into the player’s real world. Players are more than just a participant, they are a part of the game as much as the game is a part of their life – Pokémon can show up at home, school, on the street, in a bar, restaurant and at any time.
Does your course content and/or delivery allow students to be active participants in the classroom? Do you use exercises and examples that fit into their world, and further, are there ways you can make your course topic unexpectedly pop up in their daily lives? Students in my lab are, by default, participants, but I intentionally throw out questions or examples during the lab that pull their lives in to the learning space:
“Look in your fridge when you go home tonight and figure out if what you have in there are stems, leaves, flowers or fruit. Tell us next week in the lab.”
“Why does the plant in your room droop if you forget to water it but the corn plants in the fields around Ottawa are upright when they are bone dry in late fall? Let’s talk about it.”
Second, the game is designed to encourage players to move forward, get better at the game while playing, with increasing yet attainable challenges/obstacles but no penalties for failing. Does your course design allow students opportunities to participate, get better, experience successes, near misses or even failures and learn without penalties?
Finally, and perhaps unexpectedly, the game is social, in that players are part of a global community with a common objective of catching Pokémon. Players are getting out there, gathering, learning from and helping each other, chatting about the game. Wouldn’t it be great if students did all of those things in our courses?
Is your learning space a social one? It can be. Begin by self-identifying (you, your TAs and students) as a learning community with a clear shared goal. Create time and opportunities for students to talk to each other, the TAs and yourself about the material while they are working on it, with the understanding that you are all equal learners. Labs in my course are now ‘learning communities.’ Chatty, noisy, relaxed, fun and productive, where we all learn from each other.
By creating conditions where course content is not trapped in the textbook, classroom or lab but where students participate, contribute and see the presence and value in their daily lives, they will be more engaged. Students now often tell me, “I thought I would hate plants lab but your labs are so much fun and interesting,”; “I see plants and plant cells everywhere now!”; I went out for dinner and I was visually dissecting the vegetables on my plate “; “I realized that learning to pay attention to details in the microscope has helped me become a better rock climber”; “I found this plant on a walk at our farm, can I bring it to lab to examine it?” Absolutely you can!
These students are ‘playing the game,’ it has become part of their world, and they want to play more. Solidly on the path to becoming Masters of the game.