Why Playful?
Play is an important, arguably central element to the human experience. Like “flow,” play is an experience of being while doing (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2014). It has strong effects on short- and long-term cognitive function (Zabelina & Robinson, 2010), and, most importantly for our context in higher education, play enhances memory, attention, mental shifting, creativity, and motivation (Liu, et al, 2017).
Put more simply, play is fun, which brings joy, interest, positive emotions, and all sorts of benefits, especially to a learning environment. Play can also provided needed breaks to re-set attention spans.
What does play look like in a college classroom? It could be simply playfulness on the part of the instructor, such as the examples chosen to explain concepts, the injection of jokes, or jovial interactions with students. It could be a one-off game designed to apply (or sometimes even to introduce) a chosen topic. Or, it could be a whole-course design that alters the course into a semester-long game – see the Gamification section below.
Playful Techniques
These short techniques offer examples of ways you could inject playfulness or “one-off” games into your classroom experience. There is some overlap with our list of interactive techniques, especially in terms of the purpose for using either, but we’ve kept the more playful techniques on this list.
Materia
The Center for Distributed Learning at UCF has developed internal games that you can customize and use for free in Webcourses. These make ideal “one-off” games that are assigned for the purposes of practice applying the learning. Learn more about choosing Materia apps, or visit Materia directly here.
External Games
Many websites offer free games that could be applied to a college environment. Many of these sites use a “freemium” model, where the free account has a limit on how many games you can create, or how many users can play at once. In such instances, you may wish to have the students play/compete in groups instead of individually. Examples include:
Cards Against…
You may know the not-safe-for-work game Cards Against Humanity. One playful technique is to make your own cards that are related to your discipline, borrowing the Cards Against Humanity format and gameplay, but using displinary-specific cards written with a “safe for work” mindset.
Here are the rules of the game, plus a blank template to make your own cards. We’ve made the following sample card sets:
Gamification
To gamify a process is to make a repetitive or boring task somehow fun–an example might be the smartphone app Pokemon Go, which makes a game out of getting enough steps for the day. The most immersive use of playful pedagogy is to convert your entire course into a semester-long game.
Here are some principles of gamification:
- Display progress
- Maximize competition
- Calibrate difficulty carefully
- Provide diversions
- Employ narrative elements
How does this actually look? To preserve student privacy and FERPA rules, we recommend you group students in a team, where individual effort can earn points for the whole team (think of the “house” model in the Harry Potter universe). Then, you can display overall progress via a leaderboard without violating individual privacy. This could also be done with digital badges, individually placed onto an HTML table one at a time after being earned. Finally, some courses enjoy leaving Easter Eggs for students to find! Email fctl@ucf.edu for more ideas on gamifying an entire course.