

Professor with background in game design abandons grades for experience points - mcantelon
http://technoccult.net/archives/2010/03/19/professor-abandons-grades-for-experience-points/

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naner
This is dumb. You're going to end up with students who are great at farmville
and terrible at anything remotely difficult.

In other words, he is rewarding task completion and ignoring self-motivation,
discipline, creativity, etc.

I've seen this same theme repeated many times. "Foods engineered to be
addictively tasty" or "Reality TV engineered to hook viewers", etc. You are
manipulating people to obtain a specific result (sell more food cheaply, get
more viewers, get higher grades), but not necessarily the one that would be
most beneficial to the individual (healthy food, rewarding storytelling,
mature adults capable of tackling complex problems).

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psyklic
It all depends on how it is implemented. After all, you could take regular
grades and assign points to each grade -- and the two systems would be
equivalent.

The big question for me though is exactly as you point out. Engineering
projects, for example, are really only valuable if they work. And it's hard to
measure the progress in-between non-working and working if you don't observe
the team carefully, except of course by "time spent."

No matter which system is used for grading, it won't be perfect -- it will
cater toward some students and not toward others. Since most students are only
exposed to one dominant way, I am all for experiments such as this.

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naner
> It all depends on how it is implemented. After all, you could take regular
> grades and assign points to each grade -- and the two systems would be
> equivalent.

This is absolutely true. That is why people always claim you only get out what
you put into schooling. You have to do more than just make the grade. This
article makes it sound like he really wants to ramp things up, though. And I
believe he's approaching it the wrong way.

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glhaynes
Instead of "F", your failing report says "You have died."

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psyklic
"You have died of dysentery. Play again?"

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scott_s
This is no different than how many (most?) courses are structured. Many
teachers assign points to various projects, homeworks, test and quizzes. The
overall grade in the course then depends on total points accumulation (in
relation to other students if there is a curve).

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barrkel
Only if you look at things at a high enough level of abstraction - at which
point all sorts of different things start seeming similar.

I would expect course scoring structured along game design lines to look
significantly different to current course scoring structures, which are
usually based around projects and tests at pretty widely spaced intervals. But
games don't work that way: you get positive feedback almost immediately after
successfully doing something. The feedback is in smaller but more frequent
packets.

Lee Sheldon frames it as XP. But XP doesn't work like test grading. Every time
you do less than perfectly on a test, you have permanently lost the potential
to make that up. If a project is worth 20%, and you score 15/20, the best you
can do out of the whole course is 95%. But with XP, you could do something
extra to make up the gap - the equivalent of XP grinding. Perhaps an extra
project, an extra presentation, etc.

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johnwatson11218
One other thing I would like to see from games is the ability to go very fast.
I wish I could find a statistics course that has the feel of working through a
long campaign in a video game. I really feel like certain subjects could have
that repetition concept blended with the idea of getting somewhere. For
languages there are flashcards but with computers we could make that so much
more general. For me the main thing is the speed and the idea that I have an
extra 15 minutes here and I want to sit down and be so immersed in my subject
of study that I actually learn something.

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henning
"LFM Sheldon final PST with GPA, transcript checks at library PST"

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zitterbewegung
I am graded on a points system already. I earn points and they are scaled due
to how well I do on a given quiz, test or project. These points are then
translated to a letter grade and curved. So there really isn't much of a
difference.

