Game Elements and Instructional Design

6/12/2019

One of my long time interests in education is the use of games for instruction. I believe that games have something significant to contribute to human learning and flourishment both in themselves and in their influence on instructional design.

In particular, I believe that game elements can inform instructional design by pairing learning goals and objectives with appropriate game elements. This can be as a holistic approach to teaching and training, or through the use of game mechanics to demonstrate meaning and facilitate engagement with instructional content.

Below is a workshop presentation that I delivered at the Faculty Summer Institute at the University of Illinois Champaign in May 2019. In it I introduce a 'game-based' approach to instructional design, including a few essential concepts from James Paul Gee's classic "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy," as well as game-design concepts from Jesse Schell and Joe Bisz. At key points during the presentation I held large and small group discussion and prototyping sessions with my attendees as we explored their instructional design challenges and how they might benefit from games and a game-based approach to their instructional designs.

Attached are some of the resources that accompanied the presentation. The Game Mechanic Reference is a list of identified game mechanics pulled from a popular board game forum (I take no credit outside of reformatting.), a list of James Paul Gee's Principles of Good Game Design (again, reformatted), and a worksheet for drafting learning games and game-based instruction (I can take credit for this!). Please feel free to use these resources in your own work.

If interested, please also see Jesse Schell's Art of Game Design and (more directly related) Joe Bisz's What's Your Game Plan?