Games, Gamification, and the Death of the Textbook

I know Spanish school teachers and publishing giants alike developed an eye twitch and heart palpitations after reading that title so I'll give everyone a moment to recover before continuing. Only joking, may this burn deep into your workbook loving soul - the textbook is dead and has been for years, you just weren't paying attention.

Look, I get it, textbooks are useful. You are absolutely correct, they serve as a fabulous guide for the order of a class. Someone spent a lot of time analyzing what should and shouldn't be taught and when it should or shouldn't be taught. However, the days of the textbook being the biblical guide for how to conduct your class should be dead and gone. I remember sitting in a fifth grade classroom around 20 years ago and learning about math and reading while being paid in rice bags. You read that right. We were all members of various Japanese clans from the Sengoku Jidai period. Our grades, behavior, and effort could all be converted into rice bags - the equivalent of a points system. These points could then be used to pay for "soldiers" (colored push pins) that were used on the gigantic Risk-style map of Japan plastered up on the wall. Classes battled it out to see who the dominant clan would be at the end of the year. Don't worry Pearson and Houghton-Mifflin, we still learned math from a textbook, we just knew that it was life or death to finish our math facts before the other 5th grade class. Our soldiers were counting on us.

That was twenty years ago and, at the time, it was innovative, but not insane. Imagine that same activity today. It still would be outside of the "norm", but now it fits into a category known as Gamification. Gamification is using elements of games in your classroom to serve as a motivational tool for your students. I will say, I am not a math person, but I did more facts in fifth grade than ever before or after, and I did it for the good of the clan. The problem with gamification is twofold. First, not everyone is motivated the same way and second, it takes time and effort to build this kind of narrative and system. These are unavoidable facts, but even if a student isn't motivated by the Japanese narrative they may still be motivated by winning, or the gameplay elements, or even just by the content of the class itself. Gamification allows you to cast a wider net than you would normally be able to. This hopefully ensures a higher probability for student motivation and success. The time factor is the unavoidable downfall of gamification. You cannot get around the fact that it takes time, but don't reinvent the wheel. There are plenty of resources online to "gamify" your class. Sites to make your own points systems, build your own trading cards, your own video games. Anything you could want, someone has probably already made it for you. This is beside the fact that there are gamification tools in existence already like - Classcraft.

Games area completely separate topic which could be even harder to convince your school to let you include in your curriculum. I battled with my principal for around a year to let me use games in my classroom. She was specifically leery of video games, but after I snuck them into class a few times and showed her the results of my assessments, she was completely on board. Games are useful for lots of different purposes, but I tend to use them in my content classes to give students a chance to experience something they've merely learned about before. There is no way for a textbook about Ancient Egypt to compete with having students walk the streets of Memphis in Assassin's Creed.

So, which is for you games or gamification? Neither? I encourage you to at least begin to implement games into your classroom and from there, maybe you can even implement some gameplay tools into your classroom (essentially gamifying it). Then if you get real wild, you can even skip a page in your textbook! Wait, this is how people get addicted to drugs, isn't it. Be careful, it's a slippery slope!