Tuesday, 10 May 2016

Looking Back: My Project's Critical Post Mortum

My Proposal and the Project in General

Now that I am fast approaching the deadline for my final year project, The Gamification of Learning, I am going to take the time to reflect on what I have achieved in the past eight months. This will be a critical look at the work I have undertaken, its outcomes, and all of the things I have learnt along the way.

First of all, I would like to look back to my project proposal (posted 2nd December 2015). This was the initial proposal which I presented to a panel of lecturers from my course. In this proposal I stated that I was going to take a slice of a pre-established national curriculum and see if it can be successfully gamified. The slice would be taken from Upper Key Stage 2 (specifically year 5 science students) and my goal was ultimately to increase and improve motivation, engagement, and retention of knowledge for the students.

In my original proposal I stated that I would create a tool kit which I could pass out to teachers and curriculum builders. This tool kit would enable those individuals to meaningfully and intelligently apply gamification elements to their lessons to achieve the intended increase in engagement etc. This ultimately changed along the way and my project focused less on creating tools for teachers and more on giving good examples and explanations. The tool kit materials and research are still present in my blog posts however after re-analysing feedback from external and internal teachers/lecturers, examples appeared to be of far greater use. This was further reaffirmed from Meetings I held with my course tutor, who stated that he would like to see a “before and after” comparison side by side.

At the foot of my proposals outline, I stated what I would like the focus of my mark to be on and is as follows:

I wish to be marked on my ability to gamify materials while staying conformed to the national curriculum. My ability to construct lesson and module plans, my ability to create easy to use tuition delivery tools and my ability to bring innovative methods to increase student engagement.” (Williams, 2015)

While I shifted my focus from making a tool kit to making comparable examples and the steps I took to get there, I believe I have still demonstrated my ability’s on most of these sections. I will break them down and point out examples where this is best displayed.

My ability to gamify materials while staying conformed to the national curriculum is shown throughout my final posts with the “Reassembled Lesson Plans” posts (21st April – 24th April 2016). 
In these posts I believe I have demonstrated how I have applied gamification techniques learnt throughout the project while retaining the initial learning outcomes as set by the national curriculum.

My ability to construct lesson/module plans is also shown in these posts. My process for this construction is again displayed throughout my blog, however the most noteworthy posts are “The First Step: Mapping the lesson tasks” (7th March 2016), “Adding Gamification Elements” (22nd March 2016), the “Adding Narrative” series of posts (31st March – 10th April 2016), and the “Reassembled Lesson Plans” series of posts (21st April – 24th April 2016).

While I deviated from my initial proposal by not producing a standard tool kit, I still created a step by step in my blog as to how to create a lesson plan to deliver. The system can be seen in the same posts as above but what is more important in my eyes for that statement is bringing innovative methods to increase student engagement. This I feel I have achieved well via the examples I have produced.

At this point I would like to go back to the proposal and look at the proposed bibliography for this project (the full bibliography at the close of my project can be found in a future post). I did manage to use most of the books proposed however I found that some were far more useful than others. Along with these I also found a lot more articles online which helped me out along the way. When making this initial bibliography I did not spend as much time thoroughly reading the information to discern how useful the entire text could be. At the time I had already noted sections which may prove useful but in hindsight I should have spent far more time delving into these books prior to my proposal.

Below are what I consider to be the most useful texts across the course of the project. Items not mentioned in my initial proposal are highlighted in red text.

Karl M. Kapp, 2012. The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. 1 Edition. Pfeiffer.

Karl M. Kapp, 2013. The Gamification of Learning and Instruction Fieldbook: Ideas into Practice. 1 Edition. Pfeiffer.

Brathwaite, B., Schreiber, I. and Media, C. R. (2009) Challenges for game designers. 1st edn. Boston, MA: Course Technology/Cengage Learning.

Kapp, K. and Learning, G. of (2014) Gamification of learning. Available at: http://www.lynda.com/Higher-Education-tutorials/Gamification-Learning/173211-2.html (Accessed: 10 November 2015).

DfEE (2013) The National Curriculum HMSO

Enders, B., Kapp, K. and The eLearning Guild Research (2013) ‘Gamification, Games, And Learning: What Managers and Practitioners Need to Know’, Hot Topics.

Clark, D. (1999) Bloom’s Taxonomy: The Affective domain. Available at: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/Bloom/affective_domain.html (Accessed: 22 January 2016).


Daniel Floyd (2008) Video Games and Learning. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN0qRKjfX3s (Accessed: 9 October 2015).


Finally, on my proposal, I would like to address the time line and milestones. In the run up to the Xmas break I managed to hit all of my weekly goals, however I was unable to post about them until December because I wanted to hold off until I had the narrative mapping information sent to me. This mapping then proved more useful in the project so I used what I could from my previous research and implemented it into my narrative mapping posts “Narrative Mapping” (6th December 2015) and “The First Step: Mapping the lesson tasks” (7th March 2016). Evidence of my initial research into the breakdown of elements and learning outcomes can be seen in the post “Learning Taxonomies” (22 November 2015). I also explained in the post prior “Forces Worksheets” (16th November 2015) that my initial plan for sourcing worksheets from teachers had failed and instead I had sourced sheets from Hamilton-trust.

Another issue I face was that I had underestimated how long it would take to get meetings with professionals relating to the project. Thus meetings were also pushed back and the feedback was further delayed. I will explain this further later in this post under what didn’t go so well.

Despite all of my set back and under sights I managed to get up to scratch prior to when I started back after Xmas on the 11th January. At which point I released an updated timeline for my project milestones. With this came the pipeline documents of which I was creating. After much work towards creating these documents, I managed to send them out for more feedback. While I did not get much feedback, the little I had pointed me towards scrapping the pipeline and just showing examples in different stages of the process. By the time It came to the presentation week I had built the first draft of the pipeline/tool kit, iterated it, and received feedback. Combined with the feedback form the panel at the presentation this moved towards my eventual final product.

At this point I have to admit that due to the drastic change in what I was working towards the timeline became abstract. I continued to work towards my goal but rather than iterating as I went along, I went step by step through the process. More about this in the sections below.

What I Have Learnt

In terms of the project there has been many things I have learned over the last year. These include general skills such as planning, research and scoping of projects. There are also general life lessons which I have gained experience on such as having contingency plans ready for if plans or meetings with other people fall through. This was a major issue with my project with being unable to obtain meetings and feedback with the contacts I had, as well as not receiving as many additional contacts from others as I was initially promised.

Technical skills include how to intelligently and meaningfully apply gamification structures and content as well as binding them together in overarching structure, how to apply narratives to learning, and how to compose lesson plans. Other skills I have learnt that cross over into game design include tutorial and instruction creation (how to lead a player and have their autonomy remain) how to avoid skinner boxing, how to craft user experiences, different types of work/time management (Addie and Scrum), and how to broaden a target audience.

Below are the posts that best demonstrate these skills.

  • Identifying Common Pitfalls and Issues with Gamification (1st November 2015) 
  • In Regards to Timescales and ADDIE vs Scrum (6th November 2015)
  • Learning Taxonomies (22nd November 2015)
  • Serious Game Attributes in Gamification (2nd December 2015)
  • Narrative Mapping (6th December 2015)
  • Structural Gamification (11th December 2015)
  • Learning Theories: Scaffolding in Games (12th December)
  • Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation (2nd January 2016)
  • Affective Domain Gamification Elements (27th January 2016)
  • The First Step: Mapping the lesson tasks (7th March 2016)
  • Adding Gamification Elements (22nd March 2016)
  • Elements of Story and Narrative (31st March 2016)
  • The “Adding Narrative” series of posts (31st March – 10th April 2016)
  • The “Reassembled Lesson Plans” series of posts (21st April – 24th April 2016)
  • Comparison of Old vs New pt1 and pt2 (27th April and 9th May 2016)
  • Linking Sessions with Structure (10th May 2016)


What Went Well

In my opinion the project outcome went very well. I am proud of the documents I have created and I believe with a little refinement a good step by step pipeline can be made from my blog posts. The amount of extra information, skills, and learning I have earned through this project is also a great point to raise as I believe that at its core I saw this project was a learning experience.

Also I would like to include here that all of the issues and problems I had along the way, while being an initial hindrance, resolved very well. When faced with challenges I managed to overcome them without losing too much momentum.

And finally for this section on what went well, all of the learning that I have listed above. These items have all be of great value to me, have helped me grow, and will continue to help me throughout my future endeavours.

What Didn’t Go So Well

Initially I had hoped to get far more external teachers involved with giving me feedback for my project. While this was initially met with enthusiasm form the externals, it became clear after trying to follow up for feedback that these externals were too busy. Unfortunately, this happened several times and I ended up with far less feedback than I wanted for my project.

Similarly, I had hoped to get more input on subject topics. I am not a qualified teacher (despite having lead several STEM sessions over the past year). I had planned to use additional information I had gained as an example of how tangential learning could be used to broaden the learning of students with intrinsic motivation (shown in “Tangential Learning” 8th October 2015 and “Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation” 2nd January 2016). While I could have achieved this via my own researching, it gave way to the more core elements of gamification when creating my own examples. You can however see elements that could encourage this tangential learning in my posts on Opposing Forces, the main bulk of which can be found in “Reassembled Lesson Plans (Opposing Forces) posted 21st April 2016.


Finally, on what did not go so well, I found that I allowed other tasks such as my group project module take too much of my time away. Motivation was seriously hit by this and the eventual issues that ensued became a burden and my engagement and enthusiasm for this project was directly affected because of it. If I could go back again, I would spend far more time on the preparation, have a much clearer picture in my mind of what I am aiming for, and I would have looked to get far greater input from external sources such as teachers and lecturers. 

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