Tag: games-based learning

Ghosts in the Library – A Collaborative Approach to Game-Based Pedagogy

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Mandy Babirad, Instructional Services Librarian at SUNY Morrisville State College, Heather Shimon, Science and Engineering Librarian at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and Lydia Willoughby, Reference Librarian, Research and Education, at SUNY New Paltz.

Mandy Babirad (now at SUNY Morrisville), Heather Shimon (now at UW-Madison), and Lydia Willoughby (SUNY New Paltz) created an instructional game called Ghosts in the Library (Ghosts) to use in English Composition I library sessions (Comp I) at SUNY New Paltz in Fall 2015.

The game aligns with established Comp I learning outcomes and includes self-directed learning, problem solving, collaborative learning, and peer review. In the game, students work in groups and use the library catalog and databases to research a notable person with ties to New York State (a “ghost” who is haunting the library), and then create a digital artifact based on that research to appease the ghost. The “ghosts” are people of color and women who have made significant contributions to New York State, yet are underrepresented in the historical record. With the library’s namesake of Sojourner Truth, and student protests against a predominantly white curriculum occuring in Fall 2015, the game was also an attempt to include marginalized voices within the library collection and course syllabi.

The primary goal for Ghosts was to frame a 75 minute one shot library instruction session with a pedagogy of possibility. Roger Simon[1], in work that drew from deep collaboration with Henry Giroux, thought about student-centered learning as a choice of hope, and teaching as an act of hope. “Hope is the acknowledgement of more openness in a situation than the situation easily reveals… the hopeful person acts.” (3) Being open to possibilities is the only mindful and clear choice for teaching librarians facing technology distraction and student disinterest in a required library session. Bringing in curiosity as play engages inquiry as an affective process that asks student and teacher to act and reveal a more whole self in the classroom.

Ghosts Game Play

The game has one central goal: to appease your team’s ghost so that the ghost will leave the library and our campus alone. Each team gets a ghost card, team members choose role cards, the team members then use the tool cards to hunt down information that will help them appease their ghosts, and the final and culminating component of the game is the team creation of a historical marker.

All game materials can be downloaded from the Ghosts research guide: newpaltz.libguides.com/ghosts/scholarship.

Players in the Ghosts game receive a packet that contains the following game materials:

  • Map of the Sojourner Truth Library (with corresponding key to call numbers to floors)
  • Worksheet for the game to be completed in class time (the worksheet contains the rubric that teams use to evaluate their work and the success of their historical marker at appeasing their ghost).
  • Game Rules (like all rules, this is probably more useful for the librarian and teachers, than it is used by students. This was a key element in our game design and creation process, though it is most likely the least utilized part of the game by actual players during game play.)
  • A Packet of Cards (each packet contains 1 ghost card, 3 role cards and a 3 tool cards.
    • Ghost cards are randomly given to each group and are all women and people of color from New York State history that have a tie to the Hudson Valley region.
    • The 3 role cards include a historian, a presenter and a facilitator. If the composition of the class that you are teaching needs the group to be divided into more than 3 people per group, you can double up on historian role cards. All role cards contribute to information gathering and drafting the text of the historical marker.
      • The historian takes notes on the worksheet and enters the team’s text on the historical marker that the team is working together to create.
      • The presenter is the person that presents the team’s historical marker to the class.
      • The facilitator keeps the team on track and ensures that all tool cards have been used in information gathering, and that the team’s work fulfills all the roles of the rubric.
    • The 3 tool cards correspond to the library research tools students use on the library website to conduct research.
      • A tool card for databases that guides students to Academic Search Complete to find scholarly articles
      • A tool card for the library catalog that helps them discover books
      • A tool card for reference resources helps students to find background and biographical information on their ghost using Gale Virtual Reference Library.

The final part of the worksheet is a space where they can draft the text of their historical marker, a synthesis of their respective roles and tools in the research process. Once teams have completed the worksheet, they go to our custom historical marker website, https://apps.library.newpaltz.edu/plaque/index/plaque, to enter their text. Once they publish their historical marker and hit “Create,” their original text will appear on a digital artifact that looks like a ‘real’ NY State Education Department 1940. The artifact creation component of this game is designed to encourage student learning with a pedagogy that helps students connect to something ‘real’ and physical in the research process. Students present the historical markers, and all game players receive a ghost button and a FAQ zine about the library. Summary discussion concludes the session focused on what kinds of information the students gleaned from which kinds of library resources.

The game was tested with library staff, librarians, and student staff before being used in the classroom for the Science and Technology Entry Program program and for one Comp I in Spring 2016. Ghosts launched as a pilot in Fall 2016. Since that time, the game has continued as pilot for Comp I sessions in Fall 2017. Ghosts has been taught in roughly 42% of Comp I sessions since its launch. The assessment and feedback that we have is based on the worksheets from students, a survey given to faculty and students

Student, Teacher Feedback on Ghosts

We found that student input on the worksheet question, “Why did you choose this?,” to be the most valuable question to assess student learning. Even though only 52% of students reported that they would definitely use the resources from Ghosts again (and 42% reported ‘kind of’), their worksheets suggested otherwise. The student worksheets demonstrated skill in describing the research process in detail, showing an ability to evaluate information sources and needs. Even so, only 35% of student reported that the game had value to their course assignments, and 48% said that the game was ‘kind of’ valuable to their course work. There is a disconnect between the students ability to reflect on their own research and their view of the usefulness of those skills. Meaning, that as with all library instruction, the value of learning systemic thinking struggles to be visible and relevant to course assignments when structured in required sessions. The students were describing their research process, but not equating that task with the value of learning how to research. Interestingly, 71% of students definitely felt included while playing the game, and 31% ‘kind of’ felt included.

In the future, more evaluative questions will be posed in both the worksheet completed during the game and the post-assessment. The final product, the historical marker, won’t have a word count. Editing the marker down to 50 words took up a lot of time and stressed some of the students out which in turn may have influenced their evaluation of the game. The game could be tightened up and the worksheets could be transferred to online forms, so that the game is more of an online tutorial, which would facilitate flipped learning and provide the opportunity to use class time to have a more discussion based session informed by the work that was done outside of class. An idea for a follow-up assignment include writing a letter or postcard to your ghost describing how you research their history and what kind of things you found to encourage students to again practice being descriptive of their process. It is hard to get students to reflect on process; it is not practiced and it is rarely evaluated or asked for in their graded assignments.

The code for the historical marker would not have been possible without the work of software developer Andrew Vehlies. He created the marker from scratch in consultation with the librarians and posted the code on Github (available here) so that other history enthusiasts can benefit from his work. Once the code was developed and posted publicly, library technician (and human grumpy cat) Gary Oliver was able to post to local servers so that it could be used by students. Many thanks to instruction coordinator Anne Deutsch, at SUNY New Paltz, for letting us pilot Ghosts in the first place, and for supporting the game development in the library instruction program.

[1] Simon, R.I. (1992). Teaching against the grain: Texts for pedagogy of possibility. Greenwood Publishing Group.

Game Up Your Unconference

Last weekend I was delighted to head down to the University of Maryland for THATCamp Games, an instance of the popular humanities and technology unconference devoted specifically to games in education. It’s been a while since I attended an unconference — my last one was LibCampNYC in 2009 — and THATCamp Games reminded me how much I enjoy the unconference format. Capping registration at about 100 people and eschewing formal presentations means lots of opportunities for discussion and conversation among the participants, and lots of opportunities for learning. At this particular THATCamp the attendees were highly diverse, from faculty and staff in higher and secondary education to educational technologists to game industry folks to students. While there weren’t a huge number of librarians there, I wasn’t the only one, and of course the topics we all discussed are relevant to academic libraries as well as other educational organizations.

I’m an avid gamer and have long been interested in games-based learning, though it’s only in the past couple of years that I’ve begun to incorporate games and game mechanics into my own teaching. I’d like to use more games in my research and information literacy instruction, especially to leverage the research behaviors that are a built-in to so many digital (and non-digital) games, and I appreciated that the unconference began with a day of workshops called BootCamps which offered hands-on experience with thinking through and creating instructional games. I know of at least one library that’s used the application Inform to create a text-based interactive fiction game (Bioactive at the University of Florida), so I went to a BootCamp on Inform and had the chance to play around with the software, which doesn’t require much programming knowledge.

Two of the BootCamps discussed using ARGs — alternate reality games — in educational settings. I’ve always found the idea of using an ARG for education intriguing: ARGs are immersive experiences that incorporate many beneficial attributes of games, like asking students to take on a new identity, and scaffolding knowledge and skills. But many ARGs are long, detailed, and involved, and I’ve struggled with the practicalities of integrating something so time-intensive into my instruction, which tends to be mostly one-shots. During the two BootCamps we worked on specific activities that I found really helpful in thinking about strategies for my own teaching, one an example of a narrative puzzle, and the other an exercise in which we broke into small groups to brainstorm a subject-specific ARG. The facilitators emphasized that when designing an ARG the game objective and the learning objective must overlap completely, which seems like sound advice for designing any educational game.

I’m also interested in exploring ways that librarians can use games in collaboration with other faculty to strengthen students’ research competencies. During the unconference proper there were several sessions on adding game-like features to classrooms and courses. In a session on “Badges Done Right” we discussed using badges and other game structures like experience points for grading or other forms of recognition within a course. There was also a session about building gaming into the learning management system, with examples of both a commercially-produced and a home-grown LMS. There’s no question that the trend in “gamification” is complex, and we spent much time discussing the benefits of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. However, for faculty using game mechanics like badge or XPs I can think of lots of possibilities for librarians to collaborate. (“Wikipedia fact-checker” badge, anyone?)

Like any good conference there were lots of interesting-sounding choices at every timeslot (and a phenomenal number of tweets), so I’m grateful that a shared, public Google Docs folder was created early on. There are notes from nearly every session, and if you’re interested in games and education I encourage you to take a peek.