The following’s a video and transcript of a presentation I gave at SECAC about my adventures in gamifiying my Intro to Typography class.
First a Little Backstory
I teach a Fundamentals of Typography class in the Communication Arts department (CommArts) at Virginia Commonwealth University. CommArts has a heavy illustration focus to their program, so students tend to come to my class unsure about why they need to learn about typography. Some are even hostile to the idea of learning something they don’t think is relevant to their careers as Illustrators. So I wanted to share how I’ve used a number of game-based techniques to drastically improve how I introduce Typography to these skeptics.
Picture, if you will, the first lecture of my very first class. Sixteen unsuspecting sophomores. In a class they don’t think they need. Sitting there listening to this bald guy with a weird accent lecturing on about the difference between Humanist serif and Old Style serifs. All the while wondering, “why am I even here?”
Needless to say, that first lecture didn’t go too well. And after a few more like that, it was no surprise that those students did terribly on the first quiz.
But it wasn’t all hopelessness and despair. I remembered my wife mentioning an Art History professor she had in grad school creating a Jeopardy-style quiz show for one of their classes. She recalled it being not just a ‘fun little exercise’, but a really good way to get her classmates to stay awake, interacting with each other AND remember the material.
So like any good husband I listened to my spouse. Stole that idea, rejiggered it to suit my class and… lo and behold it worked. Whereas before it was like pulling teeth to get students to pay attention to my lectures, now I had students actively engaged with each other and with the material. But more importantly, was the positive effect that had on their second Quiz scores.
After seeing how well students responded to that experience, I went down a bit of a research rabbit hole trying to find out how I could replicate that kind of engagement throughout the entire semester and not just that one class.
And so after plenty of trial and error, I ended up picking 5 of the many game-inspired tactics out there, to transform my boring Introduction to Typography into an enjoyable, effective learning experience. I’ve arranged them in order of how much time I think they take to prepare.
They are:
- Small Games. These are bits of interactivity that can be inserted into any existing lecture class.
- Side quests. These are optional tasks offered to give students more opportunities to explore the world of Typography outside of the scope of the course work.
- XP (Experience points) & Levels. I use these in tandem to create a secondary currency in the class, outside of the grade, to motivate students’ engagement with the class.
- Long games. These are more involved, competitive activities that usually last an entire class period.
- Storylines, or themes. This involves giving your entire course a quasi-narrative structure, where students assume the role of characters within a fictitious setting.
Small Games
Typography, like other creative disciplines, is best learned by doing rather than simply listening. So I do very few traditional sage-on-the-stage lectures anymore. But for the times that I do have to speak for an extended period, I break up the lecture with tiny games meant to reinforce the material I just covered.
So for example, you remember the horror story that was my first lecture? That was my History of Typography lecture. Which is the most information-dense session in my course so it tends to be the one where I used to speak the most. Now, instead of just telling them about typeface classifications and when they were invented, I have them create a timeline with a quick card sorting game. In a fully remote setting, I use a shared Google Slides doc instead of cards, but the principle is the same, the students are the ones putting the pieces together not me. The best part is even if they get the order wrong at first, their timeline works as a great jumping-off point to discuss each milestone, I just make corrections along the way as needed.
Additionally, after each major ‘chapter’ in the history timeline (say after Modern serifs before we get to the Industrial revolutions and slab serifs) I would take a break from talking to have the students complete puzzle-based worksheets recapping the material we just covered. From the results, I could see what areas they were still fuzzy on and make corrections in real-time instead of waiting for weeks until the quiz to find that out.
And these aren’t elaborate games at all. I’m just taking the learning outcomes for that particular lecture, and placing some form of restrictions on it. So for example with my Type anatomy lecture, the learning outcome is for students to be able to speak coherently about the appearance of words. So for that lecture, I make them describe popular logos with a prize for the student who uses the most correct terminology. This ends up being a win-win for me since it incentivizes doing the reading assignment for this class (where they would have been introduced to said terminology), and even when they get certain terms wrong, the immediate feedback they get after each round of the game cements the correct term in their brain.
I remember one student after class telling me she’ll never forget where the arm of the T is because she’d called it the “stretchy part of the Game of Thrones logo”
I’ve found that inserting these kinds of small games into lecture classes doesn’t require a ton of extra planning and isn’t very disruptive to your existing lesson plan. And when you consider how useful they are for formative assessment and retrieval practice, I’d say they’re at least worth a try.
Side Quests
One challenge I encountered when creating my course was whittling down the projects students had to complete to a reasonable number. So after I picked the ones that aligned with the learning outcomes the best, I made the others optional. Which sounds like a strange thing to do, because…
“Why would any student choose to do extra work?”
I found my answer in video games. If you’ve ever played a well-designed RPG you know there’s a main storyline but also these optional missions called side quests. These shorter tasks not only give players a chance to further explore the world of the game, they help players get better at the skills they’ll need to successfully complete the main storyline.
Likewise, my side quests provide a sandbox for students to practice their Type skills without fear of messing up their grade. And not only are they building their Type muscles, research shows that achieving these small victories builds confidence which bleeds into their performance in the major projects. For example, one of the main projects involves creating a ransom note using a sample from each of the major Type classifications we cover in the class. So a related side quest involves taking a selfie with an example of each classification out in the wild.
Extrinsic Motivation
Obviously students aren’t drawn to these side quests out of a desire to do more work. They need some form of incentive to make the effort worthwhile. One approach I tried was offering the chance to earn badges for completing a certain number of themed side quests. This in addition to experience points (more on that later) provide an incentive structure to entice students into engaging with the course material in new ways.
Intrinsic Motivation
Aside from the extrinsic motivation offered by the XP and badges, I think the idea of having some control over what they learn makes the side quests attractive to students.
Several motivational theories point to autonomy as a crucial aspect of a learner’s motivation. So I think offering students the freedom to explore on their own beyond the course content invites them to take control of their education.
An unexpected by-product of this freedom is that it gives them room to flex their creative muscles more. Each semester I’m amused by the novel ways they approach accomplishing the tasks. For example, one of the tasks involved researching a typeface, then sharing what they found to the class. An intentionally open-ended task, so students could get creative with how they present to the class. Three of my students got together and created a film noir-like trilogy where they played detectives piecing together typographic clues to discover the identity of a mysterious culprit. Now if I’d made shooting a video a mandatory part of the assignment it would’ve probably seemed like a chore, but leaving it wide open and letting the students choose meant they viewed it as a creative opportunity.
So optional assignments, incentivized with points, extra credit or badges, are a great way to encourage students to explore beyond the confines of the course material on their own, but they do require some time to prepare the tasks, and only a little extra time to keep track of their progress. But just like the small games these can be easily inserted into the flow of your existing course without much disruption.
XP & Levels
In addition to serving as an incentive for side quests, I use experience points to encourage other kinds of activities as well. There are some behaviors, like collaboration, participation & time-management, that are beneficial to students, but I’ve felt weird about making them part of their grade since they’re not related to their mastery of Typography. That’s why I’ve found it useful to have some other form of currency in the class, apart from the grade, to serve as both an incentive and a metric of how well they’re performing on these softer skills. Stealing again from video games, I use the currency of XP in my class, along with the ability to level up as these points accrue.
The way it works is that students can earn XP from a list of tasks. E.g. submitting in-class exercises on time, helping a fellow classmate with an assignment, participating significantly in critiques, and like I mentioned before, completing side quests. Now, what makes these XP valuable is that as they accumulate, the student earns an increasing array of perks that help them out with the class. So, for example Level 1, would earn them the right to resubmit a single project and an extra excused absence. And all the way up at Level 5 they could earn unlimited project resubmissions and the right to redo the Quiz.
Now depending on how many perks and levels you want to create for your class, this tactic doesn’t have to require a significant amount of extra time to set up. But for them to have any effect, you will have to keep track of each student’s performance on every XP-earning task. Which, I admit, is a significant commitment of time. But the benefits I’m seeing where students are paying more attention to their attendance, making sure their work is turned in on time, and taking the initiative to help out their classmates, all for the slight dopamine rush of collecting points and reaching a higher level, makes me feel like it’s time well invested.
Long Games
In my course, these take the form of group games that typically run for an entire class period right before a quiz. These provide a fun, interactive way of conducting group retrieval practice.
The Gauntlet
The first big game I call The Gauntlet where teams of four compete to see who can complete a series of four challenges (puzzles based on the course material) within a given time limit. It’s important they’re in small groups so they have to verbalize their thinking and no one can get lost or freeload. The puzzles are fairly simple like word scrambles and crosswords, and I let them have access to their notes since the point of the exercise isn’t to make the game hard but to encourage collaborative retrieval practice. Besides, the time restriction and making it a competition makes it enough of a challenge. This worked better in a face-to-face setting, of course, but I managed to hack together an approximation of this experience using shared Google Slides and Zoom breakout rooms.
Type Tournament
The other long game I use is the Type Tournament I mentioned in the beginning of my presentation. In the Before Times, these were party games I adapted from popular formats like Pictionary, Taboo, and the $100K Pyramid, but with Type-related clues.
What I really enjoyed about watching the students play these games was how the limitations of the games forced them to access their memory of the course materials in novel ways. So I remember one student trying to get her teammates to remember the name of the 1st designed typeface. So she ended up connecting the pirate Blackbeard with a wine press to get them to say “Blackletter”. I never made that connection before, but it worked for them and I bet they’ll never forget it now.
In a remote setting I lost the group collaboration part of the tournament, unfortunately. So instead I’m using gaming platforms like Factile and Kahoot to create customized games for my class, but keep the fun factor up.
While long games require a considerable amount of time to prepare and pretty much demands an entire class period to run them, I believe these are some of the most beneficial game-based activities I’ve seen. Not only are students interacting with each other, and engaging with the material in novel ways, they’re also making the classroom a place where emotionally rich experiences can be had.
Storylines
This last gaming tactic I use, admittedly, seems a bit far-fetched. Sure we all appreciate the power of stories to hold our attention, but what would be the educational benefits of trying to layer some storytelling into a semester-long course? I was surprised to find that several theories on Learner motivation point to Fantasy, or the creation of a fictional reality within which the lesson would exist, as a powerful pedagogical tool. I found studies indicating that story-based lessons can help with problem-solving and making the material more memorable. But the benefit that most interested me was how an immersive story could open up my students’ creativity. Especially in a fully remote format where they’re stuck at home, usually isolated. I wanted to give my kids a chance of breaking out of that even if just in their minds. So they’re not just a sophomore, alone, in their dorm room, tediously searching for examples of different kinds of fonts for a project. They’re a part of a team of investigators, recreating a ransom note to catch a kidnapper.
My foray into this kind of content gamification involved students taking on 1 of 2 roles. As a class they chose whether they wanted to play as the newest recruits for Type Squad, where they solved cases to catch Type criminals. Or as adventurers in Clash of Guilds, competing in epic quests, so their guild could reign supreme in the kingdom of Typographia. The storyline they picked would then determine the manner in which the rest of the class unfolded. This past semester the class chose to play Clash of Guilds so everything in the class was presented & branded so that it looked and sounded like it belonged in that world. In-class exercises were mini-quests, the projects were called ‘quests’ and the project briefs were written to sound like they fit within that world. For example, in an assignment where they need to design a poster about their favorite artist, the storyline version of that frames it as nominating them to become the new patron saint. The Ransom Note project I mentioned before, in this storyline that project is framed as creating a royal motto for their guild.
You might not want to go as far into fantasyland as I did. I know some teachers would prefer to use more real-world scenarios. And that’s perfectly fine. This just takes the principle one step further; allowing students to assume a new identity, in a new setting, as they tackle challenges within the confines of the class. But, obviously this requires more preparation time than any of the other tactics, which is why I left it for last.
So those were the 5 game mechanics I chose for my class. One last note about them is that they can work on their own or in combination with each other. You don’t have to be as crazy as I am and try and do all 5, it just depends on how much time you have available and which you think would be the most useful to your students.
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