https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuDLw1zIc94
I thought this was a great video, albeit hardly scientific or pedagogically sound but interesting nonetheless. Really hits home with me as I am a gamer through and through and anything to make my classes more interesting/fun for me is always good (I can't control whether students have fun or not so if I can make my classes fun for me at least someone wins). This concept of gamifying eduation has always been in the back of my mind since I saw this video about a year ago and I've sort of implemented some aspects of it in my classes (See Arocena Cup).
This year I've had the 'fortune' of working at EBUS Academy, the school district's online distance learning school. Being at an online distance learning school has removed the need to make course material as the school seems to purchase the courses from other parties (part of my enjoyment of teaching is in developing my own course materials so this was kind of strange to get used to) and also the need to directly teach students as the course materials included fairly comprehensive tutorial videos. This freed up a lot of time to do marking, lots and lots of marking as all my classes tend to have lots and lots of students.
However, all that marking does have some benefits. For one I can listen to a lot of music while marking. Admittedly that got boring after a while so I moved on to podcasts. At first it was gaming podcasts like http://trinityforcepodcast.com/ and http://www.critjuice.com/ but I quickly listened to all those episodes. So I moved on to education stuff and ran into this https://www.coursera.org/course/videogameslearning
I signed up and have been listening to their videos for the past few days and it's got me thinking of how I can revamp my classes to be more enjoyable to teach and hopefully more engaging and interesting for the students; though mainly those students who aren't normally engaged. The good students are always engaged no matter what I do. In some cases a trained monkey clicking through slides would be just fine for those students.
My first step is going to be figuring out a proper XP system that incorporates delivery of course content as well as the assignments and tests associated with that course content.
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