197 – From Exams to Experiences: How Gamification Could Transform Education

[00:00:07] Santiago: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:17] David: Hi Santiago. Looking forward to carrying on discussions.

[00:00:21] Santiago: Yes, we had an episode recently about gamification of education. And we could have spent probably several hours more discussing that. But we left a couple of points for other episodes, so I was hoping to look in a bit more depth the reframing of education that you suggested could be needed in order to actually gamify, to some extent, education.

You gave some very interesting examples, focused a bit on what if exams changed and we could do them, frame them differently. So I was hoping you could tell me a bit more about your vision on this.

[00:01:13] David: I can’t claim ownership of this vision. I’ve had a number of colleagues, Chris Sangwin amongst them, who are the ones who I would claim as part of the visionaries on this. But, I do have maybe some coherence on how some of these things could fit together. The way it’s been framed to me, which I think I mentioned before, is what if our exams weren’t high stakes exams, they were more like your driving test? You prepare for them and you take them when you are ready.

A driving test is a hurdle to jump over, you can take it when you are ready and you are then qualified in that sense. And there are professional exams that take a similar model. What if our school exam system was built on that model? And then I like the idea if we are really talking about gamifying it…

[00:02:09] Santiago: Hang on, there’s an intrinsic difference that jumped to mind. Driving test, not everyone takes it.

[00:02:17] David: Absolutely, not everyone takes an A Level mathematics either. So where’s the difference?

[00:02:24] Santiago: At lower levels, there’s high stake exams in GCSE where we have a number of core subjects that everyone has to take.

[00:02:31] David: Yeah. So there is a question then whether this is something, well, you only have to take ’em if you want to carry on with your education. If you are leaving schooling, you can leave schooling without passing a high stakes exam. That is possible. I do think that there is a question about what are the exams that we’re wanting and why. There’s a more important difference, what are high stakes exams used for?

They’re not just like a driving test to say, you qualify for this. They’re also used to differentiate. Are you the best? If you are the best, you might get opportunities to go somewhere for further studies, whereas somebody who has lower grades might get other opportunities, or might not get those opportunities. And so that role as a differentiator is an interesting role because there’s implicit biases within this, which have been well documented.

And so the fact that we have high stakes exams that are used as differentiators is both positive and negative, it’s integral to our current societies. What would a society look like if it didn’t have high stakes exams that were used as differentiators? If it had mastery exams, which were about sort of being ready for something, might we need something else then, which corresponds to the differentiators? How would we achieve the same sort of differentiation between students? These are interesting and difficult questions, which I have ideas on, but I don’t have the answers for.

[00:04:10] Santiago: To some extent, or at least from my experience in schools and from an academic perspective, towards the top level, those differentiators, for example, A Level or IB, or whatever exam you take, is one filter to get to university, but universities are more and more putting their own filters, getting specific entrance exams, well, not entrance exams, but further exams. I suppose for prestigious universities or highly academic universities, that sort of academic filtering is fairly valuable.

[00:04:59] David: Well, there’s a question about how valuable it is, and I think this is something which could be challenged. Because as you say, universities are in different ways using other indicators as well, this is not the only indicator. And so if you took this indicator out, would that just strengthen other indicators? Would other things emerge? I don’t know.

This is where envisaging systemic change, envisaging these large scale changes is an exercise in, well, I suppose it’s really imagination, because it is difficult to see how we could go from where we are now and whether it would be a positive change to go to somewhere systemically different.

And part of that depends on what is the purpose of these differentiations? When you have limited places at certain top institutions, the fact that you need differentiators to choose who gets the privilege of attending somewhere is one thing. But if you have other systems, then these things are different.

In Germany, for example, you don’t tend to rank universities in the same way, and so people’s decisions on which university to go to are often not as prestige related.

[00:06:23] Santiago: What do they consider?

[00:06:25] David: Often, where you want to be, where do you want to live, which is another sensible differentiator. Of course, there are differentiators in terms of who gets in where and where you’ve been accepted and where you haven’t. But generally speaking, as I understand it, with a few exceptions though, centers of excellence for certain topics in different ways, the German university system is set up that different universities offering the same subject, you should be able to go from one to the other, you should be able to move quite easily between them.

And this is something where as a student studying in that system, the prestige of one university over another is not the important point. The UK, like the US, the top universities come with a higher level of prestige, which relates to employment and all sorts of things afterwards. So this is a systemic choice about how we set up our higher education institutions and our educational systems.

And that might mean that such a change might be easier to imagine in a system where there isn’t the emphasis on the ranking, or where the importance of the ranking is less. Every system works differently. This is why thinking of these as systemic change is interesting.

But let me come back. If you also think about systems and you are thinking about further education, you don’t just have to think about higher education as university education. What about apprenticeships? What about professional training?

[00:08:01] Santiago: Which is becoming incredibly important given there is a shortage of labourers, of different type of specialism. It can be quite difficult to find good electricians, good plumbers.

[00:08:15] David: Well, so let’s take those as examples. If you want to fly a plane, there are good flight simulators.

[00:08:23] Santiago: Yeah.

[00:08:25] David: Why if you want to become an electrician, well, actually, I could imagine sort of a really realistic electrician simulator might be something which would be worthwhile existing. Now I can see why this is not cost effective at this point to build, but in the future, maybe, you know, and this is where people have had dreams about VR in different ways and virtual reality, how you could actually have an electrician simulator as a training of electricians in different ways, or a plumbing simulator.

And if you did have such things, I could easily imagine how you could actually gamify that to another level where you could be implicitly training electricians and plumbers who are playing a game where that’s part of the skills that you can build to do things in a really immersive version of Sim City, where you actually build certain things, and you actually get these systems where you get skills as you do it.

[00:09:25] Santiago: Yes. That’s the exact example that came to mind that you gave in the previous episode about Sim City, I think it was for geography or something of that form.

[00:09:34] David: Environmental sciences, yes. I’m showing my age a little bit, but you know, these are elements of thinking about gaming in ways where you could easily have immersive experiences as part of that, which are genuine skills building services. What about if within your simulator you also had the accounting? Maybe even what if in our games, we actually used the software that people used in real life?

If you had a business simulator in a business game, what if you actually use the same software that you use to do people’s accounts and you could choose to plug in different software and have those integrations where as your business simulator or your game where you are running a business in the game?

[00:10:25] Santiago: File your taxes with a particular system that is normally synced into the taxman’s database.

[00:10:34] David: Exactly. Is that exactly what you’d want to do as part of the game? Well, maybe not, but maybe it’s something which could be a natural extension to the game for the people who actually want to go deeper and want to go further. These could be options. How you could imagine games in the future engaging in education is a really interesting question.

[00:10:53] Santiago: And of course if someone wanted to work in accountancy, they might certainly choose to get those add-ons or get that sort of pathway within the immersive experience.

[00:11:09] David: Especially if that was your exam.

[00:11:12] Santiago: Exactly, yes, I can see that.

[00:11:15] David: So now you are playing your game and you are using your accounting software, and by successfully running your business within the simulation for a number of years and filing the accounts correctly and so on, you could actually get qualifications in terms of this, in certain ways.

I’m not yet saying this is achievable or sensible or what should happen. I’m saying this could happen. There’s no reason why it couldn’t.

[00:11:41] Santiago: And this is more a thought experiment than anything else, I think.

[00:11:45] David: Exactly, because with the systems change thinking, you can’t do anything more than a thought experiment.

[00:11:52] Santiago: Yes. And there are ethical aspects of systemic change in education. Who are you leaving behind if things don’t work out?

[00:12:04] David: No, let’s really dig into this for a second. In some sense, the route we’ve gone with this is a very interesting one because the technology we are using is potentially highly immersive. We’ve mentioned even virtual reality as a potential way to learn to be an electrician or a plumber. But almost by definition, that means that you’ve got an expensive technology, which is a barrier to entry because if you don’t have access to the virtual reality, you can’t have access to the high quality training.

And this is a really interesting problem, and this is why thinking about these things in terms of systemic change is so important.

[00:12:49] Santiago: But hang on a second. Schools spend fortunes in exam entries.

[00:12:54] David: Yeah.

[00:12:55] Santiago: Could it not be that those fortunes could be spent on the immersive technologies?

[00:13:01] David: Well, it could be, but again, are you going to have that the wealthy schools are able to do this really well and the sort of schools which are not so well off, don’t do it as well, and therefore their students are disadvantaged? I don’t know.

[00:13:15] Santiago: Let me dig deeper a bit, in that sense. Do we need, would we need schools in the same way as we have now if the system changed?

[00:13:27] David: Absolutely. Could the nature of schooling change? I don’t know. Do we really want people spending all their times in front of a screen engaging in a virtual reality or a simulator rather than actually doing stuff and building stuff physically?

There’s also other questions there. Is this really a better training? You know, I’m not sure it is. Apprenticeships are an incredible model, which has been extremely successful. But this is where that gamification of education, and actually thinking about these in different ways is very enriching.

[00:14:05] Santiago: Yes. And I’m thinking beyond that, you know, we mentioned the technology and the virtual realities, but there are analog versions of games. Think about escape rooms.

[00:14:19] David: Yeah.

[00:14:19] Santiago: Or things like that to become a police officer.

[00:14:23] David: My understanding is, and I don’t know this, there are elements of that sort of training that already exist. And so we are not reinventing something which is totally unheard of or new. These immersive experiences, which are part of training, this has existed for a long time. So once you take it out of the digital sphere and back into the sort of human sphere, examples of this can be traced back a long way.

And also, the cost of some of these things, what is affordable in different contexts? These are really fascinating questions. How objective are things versus being subjective? One of the really nice things about imagining this in a digital sphere is that you could make it totally objective.

[00:15:08] Santiago: How?

[00:15:09] David: What do you mean how?

[00:15:11] Santiago: I don’t understand how it could become completely objective.

[00:15:14] David: Well, according to criteria you were wanting to assess against, you know, fundamentally how well you do could be measured with a level of precision, which is impossible to do in other contexts, because so much data is coming out of all your actions and what you’re doing and the time you’re taking and how you’re doing it.

Now, I’m not saying this is a good thing because it might actually mean that you get a level of creativity which is lost. And so you might be therefore rewarding those who are not creative in their approaches. And those would be interesting questions of this.

[00:15:51] Santiago: Well, I don’t think the current system unfortunately encourages creativity as much as I would like.

[00:15:59] David: Absolutely. And could you therefore design it so that creativity was encouraged? But if you are encouraging creativity and you don’t know what to expect, how do you know how to grade it and how to actually get sensible standardised grading systems? These are wonderfully challenging questions.

[00:16:15] Santiago: But why do we want standardized systems? Why don’t we work towards building a portfolio of evidence?

[00:16:21] David: Well, absolutely, and there’s also wonderful examples of that having happened in the past. But that’s not necessarily objective either. What are we actually trying to achieve? The nature of any examination system is actually surprisingly ill-defined because they’re used for multiple purposes, and that makes them very interesting.

If you have certain purposes in mind, you could be misinterpreting an important other role that this plays in society. And this is why thinking of these as system change is enriching but also highly confusing, because of the potential of what could be if we were to totally reimagine a system.

If you were to totally reimagine a system and you were to totally reimagine schooling in a way, do you really want that this is like a job where people have to turn up at a certain time every day and leave at another time every day and just have that routine? A lot of jobs are no longer like that, you no longer have your nine to five as your standard job. So should schooling change because the job market is changing in these different ways?

[00:17:39] Santiago: Yeah.

[00:17:40] David: Let’s look at it another way. Well, part of what schooling is playing is enabling society to work in certain ways, it is actually playing a childcare role where you have a certain period of time where people can then get on and work and do their work. Even if they have flexibility, they choose to do it in the time when their children are at school because that’s what enabled society to work.

[00:18:06] Santiago: That’s exactly what I was getting into. And there are studies that suggest that that sort of timing that is currently used for schooling is not necessarily the ideal timing for cognitive development for adolescents or for children.

Scandinavian countries that have schooling for early education that is just a couple of hours a day and then more recreational activities afterwards are proving might be a bit strong, but are coming up with very positive results.

[00:18:45] David: And think about that for a second. What is that recreational activity? That is a form of play. These are games. Games are educational, or they can be educational. Sport, I’ve learned so much of what I know about teaching from coaching, when I was a sports coach. You know, the skills that you get from play and games in different ways, they can be multifaceted.

[00:19:10] Santiago: They can be indeed, and values of team sports as well, we talk a lot about values in school contexts, but I personally haven’t experienced anything that gave me more values than playing rugby.

[00:19:28] David: For me it was volleyball.

[00:19:29] Santiago: In terms of respecting your peers, in terms of respecting your adversary, rugby particularly in terms of respecting the referees, the way that that happens in rugby is just outstanding.

[00:19:44] David: So this comes back to the gamification of education.

[00:19:48] Santiago: Yes. And games can have a very wide range of definition and presentation and design.

[00:19:58] David: So just thinking, if you think about education in that broad sense, imagine all your education was gamified, all the skills you were gaining, you were learning. Well, balancing physical games with mental games, and so on. This now becomes a very different sort of outlook on what education looks like. And we might come out with a much more balanced view of education.

At the moment, physical activity within school time is a small component, but if you are thinking of everything in terms of a gamified curriculum, I wonder how much of it would be physical, how much of it you’d want to have as physical to maximise educational outcome. Because we are not doing that in our current education systems.

Our current education systems aren’t about maximising educational outcomes, and that’s fine. But it would be interesting to see, what if it looked very different, you had a much more personalised sort of setup? There’s some interesting things that could come out of this about personalised education in ways.

Now, one of the things which I think we need to be careful of, and I think this is probably a good way to finish, is that actually as a society at the moment, we tend to reward extremists, especially in terms of education. If you are an elite athlete, by definition, you are an extreme case of an athlete. And they get recognition.

Now, I’m not saying they shouldn’t be recognised, but I am saying if we think of education systems in different contexts and we want to create an education system for a society, should it be designed for the extremes? Should it be designed for the norm, whatever that means, or can we get systems which get designed to support a wider range?

[00:22:05] Santiago: I think that is taking a view of the British system, and perhaps other systems, while I believe the French system and the system that we have here in Argentina, tends to be broader the further you get along rather than narrower.

[00:22:24] David: I understand what you are saying, but that was not the point I was trying to make. So let me try and articulate what I’m hearing. In the UK and in the British system, as you advance in your education, you become narrow and narrow, and you actually narrow quite quickly to just a few subjects. Whereas in the French system, which I studied, even if you choose the scientific route or the literary route, you are still doing a wide range of subjects and topics, so you’re not becoming a specialist.

I was not referring to that specifically. I was referring to the fact that as societies we often have, and now it could still be true, that there are many societies in the world which have less of a celebrity culture or less of a culture which values excellence in the extreme in the way that I think it is valued in quite a few cultures now, where elite athletes are experts, real experts in narrow areas, whatever they may be, are highly valued in our society. Maybe overvalued, maybe not. These are interesting questions.

[00:23:32] Santiago: They are indeed.

[00:23:34] David: And maybe I’ll just finish on that by saying, you know, this is partly digital technology’s fault. Because in the past, if the fastest person you could see was the fastest person in your village or your physical environment, then lot’s of people were the fastest person in their environment.

Whereas now, there is only one person at any given point in time who is the fastest, and that’s recognised by everyone because you have the globalised competitions. Which is good, but it means that if your benchmark for valuing sport or whatever it is, is the global benchmark, which is enabled by digital technologies, then suddenly it’s a much narrower set of people who are really valued.

And these are interesting questions. The fastest is a really interesting, you know, if we’re talking about games, the fastest is a really interesting measure.

[00:24:40] Santiago: It is.

I still have more questions for you, David, and I find your views in this really stimulating, so I can promise the audience that we will have more discussions on this area soon.

[00:24:56] David: Well, I would like to just sum up what I feel is a way of thinking about all the things we’ve just discussed.

Gamification of education is something which taken to its extreme is systemic change. This changes everything about education as we know it, if we really want to sort of take the technologies, the possibilities that exist, and gamify education. But systemic change isn’t something necessarily to be desired or aimed for at a given point in time. It’s a thought experiment, which is interesting and valuable to do, but it is so unpredictable.

It isn’t advised that this is something we should be jumping towards or aiming towards. So I do want to sort of make sure that that framing is correct for what we’ve just discussed. There is nothing we’ve just discussed that I would say I’d recommend this is what we should do. All of this is simply a thought experiment in, well, how far could this get taken? What could it look like as something which is really different to the current systems and societies we live in?

[00:26:13] Santiago: However, there are small ideas, small snippets that can be applied within the current systems, that could lead to improvements in education or more engagement or more interest or all of that.

[00:26:29] David: And looking at what could be the value within the current systems and that form of change is, as you say, another discussion. That is not this discussion.

[00:26:41] Santiago: Indeed it is. And on that note, thank you very much, David.

[00:26:44] David: Thank you.