Welcome to our tech talk today. We have Andrew Phelps and Elizabeth Lawley here
from Rochester Institute of Technology. I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to
introduce them to you. Those of you who don't know them already, they've been longtime partners of Microsoft doing all kinds of incredible stuff. Most recently helping us
with a project in what we’re calling gameful research. And this is -- some of you might
be familiar with gamification and pointification and gameful things and all things Jane
McGonigal. And I'll let them talk more about it than us, but I just want to point out that
Microsoft has been engaged in this area for a very, very, very long time. We've had the
games for the Lorraine Institute for three years now, and our productivity games that are
used by our employee population to make, you know, the everyday activities we do more
fun, have been going on for many years now. There are people like Ross Smith who is
going to be at the gamification summit talking on this next week who are just absolutely
legendary and visionary individuals. And I'm very, very pleased to introduce you to two
very legendary and visionary individuals that I have the pleasure to work with. So, yea,
I'll just give it to you guys. Cheers.
[applause]
>> Liz Lawley: Okay. I'm not standing behind the podium, because I will disappear.
>> Andy Phelps: Sure. Sounds good.
>> Liz Lawley: All right. So we haven't given this talk before. You guys are our guinea
pigs on this and you get to afterwards tell us all the things that we should change about it.
But, I don't know, do you want to start or do you want me to start?
>> Andy Phelps: You can start.
>> Liz Lawley: Okay. So, go back. So Just Press Play. This is the project we're
working on. The idea behind this came out of a colleague of ours, who's working on this
project as well, who was talking with some students who basically said we ought to get
achievements for some of the cool stuff that we do around here. You know the creative
things that we do, the funny things that we do, and, you know, she said yeah, we really
should. And she talked to our department chair who said, yeah, we should do something
like that. And then he talked to Donald, and Donald said here's some start up funds to try
it.
So we went from, wouldn't it be cool, too oh, yeah, we're going to build it I guess. And
what we've been thinking about over the past couple of months is how do you do this in a
way that doesn't break the educational environment? Because there's a lot of risk when
you start saying we'll give you points for things. We'll give you rewards for things. If
you read any of the recent research on motivation and rewards and things like that, you
can actually do a lot of harm by offering extrinsic rewards for things that have intrinsic
motivating value. And we want to be really careful on all that.
So we've called the project Just Press Play. This green button is going to be a recurring
motif as we go through this that you'll start to see. I know Jane was out here, I don't
know, what about two weeks ago? Talking about her book and a lot of what she talks
about here in Reality Being Broken is what we're starting to think about in terms of our
much smaller piece of reality, right. We're not trying to fix all of reality, but we are
trying to make the educational experience a little less broken. We're trying to address
some of the problems that we know that our students have. And so that's what we're
starting from. And when I say our piece is broken, in many ways our piece is really
good.
You know, we have a very, very strong program. We've got a new school of interactive
games and media. We've got 750 students in it. We are admitting about 250 a year, right
now 180 to 190 of which are in the game design and development program, sixty of
whom are in the interactive media program. And we have great placement but like
everybody we struggle with retention issues. You know, it's still hard to attract the
widest range, the most diverse range of students. And one of the things we're looking at
recently is that, a recent study shows that college freshmen rate their emotional health
extremely poorly. Right, they are under enormous amounts of stress.
My mother, who teaches in the same university I do, was telling me that she's got a
student who is an Afghan war veteran. And he told her that college has been more
stressful for him than being at war, in part because of the open endedness of it. And this
is a big piece of it, right? Somebody’s not, you know, when you're used to being told
what to do and suddenly it switches to, you have to use your own judgment. You have to
use critical thinking. That can be emotionally psychologically very stressful. So these
are some things that we've been thinking about.
>> Andy Phelps: Yeah. So just to sort of chime in, first I love this picture. Because the,
I'm not getting it, and I'm not going to get it desperation is so ultimately clear, right, on
this person's face. And I can do this project with stats like this. All right, a couple of
years ago I gave up my life to become an educational administrator. Which everyone
will tell you is the death knell of your entire career and you will never think another
original thought ever. And along the way you get access to the treasure trove of all of the
data of the university, right? There's literally nothing that you can pick up the phone and
take a look at. And you start to see the rich environment that surrounds a modern
technological campus and the ways that people touch it and the ways that we understand
all of the ways that people touch it.
But we don't really do anything with it, at all, other than track it, and after the fact, go
hmm, a lot of people failed there. We should fix that at some point, right? I mean these
are really great retention numbers. I can go to educational conferences and talk about
these numbers and people are hugely excited by what we are doing right, that we’re not
losing half of the incoming class. I still consider this to be a really big problem. That
that many people are disconnected from first-year curricula, because on paper they are all
capable of doing it. One of the neat things about having a highly successful program is
there’s this weird compression effect where you get tons and tons of really on paper very
bright people that were in the top of their class in their high school and all that kind of
stuff. But a lot of them don't make it. So what's going on there?
>> Liz Lawley: That was taken at Imagine Cup, by the way, taken about four o'clock in
the morning as one of the teams was deep in thought to accomplish something--Ian?
>>: Can I ask you something now or do you like want to->> Liz Lawley: You know me, you can ask now.
>>: All right. I'm just curious do you guys have a grasp on what the number that is just
basically people that--you know there's going to be this number of students that drop into
a program and decide that it's not for them. Like, they're not leaving because they’re
failing there, but they just want to change. So is there going to be like always two or
three percent that you know, like you know what I'm saying, like what's the number, or is
this excluding that too?
>> Andy Phelps: This is more--you know there are some percentage of that 11% that,
you know, have transitioned to other programs and some of which by choice. You know,
you come in and you think this is what you wanted but it turns out that you really wanted
to be an art major, or whatever it is. Okay, great. But these are people that are being
forced to transition in the freshman year, before you really have necessarily a very good
sense of that. I mean there are some students that do that, but I think in actuality for
somebody to know that in the first ten weeks is somewhat rare. So this speaks more to
coming in and all of a sudden not being able to hit the metric.
>> Liz Lawley: So one of the goals here is to start to think--there are two what we're
calling holistic goals. One is we want to start thinking more about the student as not just
a body in the class, not just a GPA but the richer set of things that they participate in and
engage in. Right now we really don't have a good view of the student. We have a view
of their transcript but the transcript it is not necessarily a full representation of the things
that somebody accomplishes and learns over the period of their undergraduate education.
But similarly, we want them to have a more holistic view of what becoming a
professional in their field really means. Which is not just I took this class and I took this
class, but it's developing a set of interrelated skills. And we have these amazing students,
but they don't always know how amazing they are. They don't always know how
amazing each other are. And they don't always have a good way to really express that.
So whoop.
>> Andy Phelps: And, you know, one of the things that goes on with that, we spent some
time looking-- you know, so, obviously the game design thing is a big driver and a big
motivator for people coming into our program. They’re familiar with this kind of media
and they come in and they say I really want to do this. But what they--they're coming in
being essentially, you know, very deep consumers of media. But that has very little to do
actually with being a developer of media. And there was this really comical but well
done piece out of Escapist Magazine a little while ago about, so you want to be a game
designer. What does that mean? And, you know, they sort of go through all of the things
that are involved in being a game designer, but one of the salient points at the very end of
that was that the best designers are those that can draw from a very rich and well-rounded
life. And that is antithetical to the viewpoint of a lot of incoming students, because they
have been drilled in the fact that their view of education is that they will have their head
opened up, knowledge poured into it of how to perform a specific task or tasks, right?
And then they go on their merry way and actually do what they have been taught to do,
right? And we know that in any design field that doesn't quite work out that way.
>> Liz Lawley: We also know that they do a really bad job, especially to begin with, of
realizing how important it is for them to connect with the other people in the program.
That they complain bitterly about every group project they’re ever given, because group
projects are hard and, you know, you need to coordinate with people, and other people
don't always do what they're supposed to do, and we tell them over and over again this is
going to be very much what you have to deal with for the rest of your life. Nobody goes
out and builds software for builds websites or builds games by themselves, really. This is
done as collaborative work and helping them learn how to collaborate more effectively is
a big part of what we're trying to do in all of this. But what we've started to do really is to
think about the narrative of the undergraduate student experience, right.
There is an underlining story of what happens when you get to school, the mileposts
along the way, the kinds of things that happen. We don't actually have a sign hanging
from the lab right now that says speed bumps next 96 months, but that's the concept that
we’re trying to get to here, is that this is not a smooth path. This is a rocky road along the
way. And there’s some key things that we've identified, key, what we’re calling choke
points, along the way. There's obviously the point where the student arrives on campus
and is dealing with the unfamiliarity of the new experience. How do I meet people?
How do I know what I'm supposed to do? There's also a really important point at the end
of the freshman year, because freshman year curriculum is very much about we will tell
you what you're supposed to do. You're taking introductory programming. You're taking
very basic survey classes. You're being given very clear assignments. But by the time
you get to sophomore year things start to become more open ended. You have to make
more--you have to take more agency in the process.
We'll say I want--I'll tell my sophomores I want you to build a website about a place that
you've lived. And they'll say what you mean? You mean like the house, or do you mean
like the city or… And I'll say yes, you know. Pick something about where you've lived.
But this is scary for them. This is stressful, this idea of open ended stuff where
someone's not telling you exactly what to do and exactly how to do it. And then even
more importantly for people in creative fields, between approximately their junior and
senior year we go from saying we want you to make stuff, to we want you to understand
the difference between okay stuff and good stuff, or bad stuff and okay stuff. How do
you develop a critical eye? You know, not just making stuff but really understanding
how to critique your own work and how to critique other people's work. That's often
missing in professional, you know, technical programs. You see more of this in art
programs where there are built-in critique functions. But in terms of making sure that
you're putting your stuff out there for other people to see, learning how to get feedback
on it, this is really important.
But trying to put all of this into classes doesn't always work. Classes are a very
structured, very top-down; somebody is judging you, not very playful environment, right?
GPAs are scary, grades are scary, you know, all that evaluative stuff. So what we've
been thinking about is how do we add what, you know, what Jane talks about as a game
lair on top of the reality of their educational experience? How do we get them to engage
in some of the kinds of activities that we know will help them with these choke points
along the way? But to do it in a way that they don't have to. One of the key things about
something being a game is it's voluntary. You opt in. If your professor says you have to
do this, it's not a game anymore. You know, it's your responsibility to accomplish it. So
we're thinking about how do we, how do we do this in a way that infuses it with the sense
of playfulness and gaming?
And one of the ways we're doing this is, you know, I said we’re thinking about the
underlying narrative. In many ways you can think about that underlying narrative of the
undergraduate experience as being the hero's journey. The hero sets out on the journey
with the vague sense of what they're trying to accomplish. And no real sense of what the
monsters and dangerous things that they will meet along the way are. And often, not a
sense of how these challenges are going to help prepare them for the longer term success
at the end. So, you know, if we think about our students as on this journey, you know,
how do we get them to understand and engage with the small monsters along the way, so
that they can defeat the really big monsters at the very end? And, you know, if we think
about it as in levels of the game, all of these little challenges should really prepare you for
the big ones. How can we build in little challenges so that when you get to that point
when you have to take on more personal responsibility, or you have to develop better
critical skills, how do you know how to do that? How have you prepared people through
things that they enjoy doing?
>> Andy Phelps: Yeah, and you know, when I was thinking about this analogy, you
know, a couple of different points came up about hero’s journeys in general, and
comparing them to the undergraduate narrative. Which is, one is, you know, usually
when we study that narrative we think of it as being transformative, which as educators is
exactly what we want, right? Okay. People start out with, you know, get gold from
dragon, right? And then break that into sub pieces and so on and so forth. But you don't
know what the sub pieces are in order to get gold from the dragon. You sort of head that
direction with a vague plan and a couple of dwarves. And so there's, there's this notion
that you have to fill in the pieces along the way, right? There's also this notion of mentor
ship or guides, right? Or that the knowledge in the--there's knowledge enough in the
world if you are capable of finding it, to help you and to enable you to succeed in that
goal, okay, which is what we all sort of want out of our campus environments and so on
and so forth.
But then I got to thinking this also really leads into something that I've seen time and time
again with individual students and particularly the students that you start to see once you
become a chair. Because you see every problem case once you become a chair. Which is
the quest link, the length of that quest vastly exceeds the localized fear of attention at any
point in time, right? So you set off west and say get gold from dragon. But then you're
slogging through, you know, Murkwood, and you're not even thinking about the dragon,
right? You’re just thinking get to other side of forest, right? And at a certain point you
start to make decisions that are based solely on the localized fear and not your overall.
Or you don't understand the relationship that one of these things had along the way
relative to the overall goal.
And that got us sort of thinking about well how do we track progress on a relative to
overall goal? And we started--Weez actually brought up the notion of going on a long
car trip, right? So there are some individuals that when you go on a long car trip they
will count the mileposts, right? It's a very concrete measure. You are now one-mile
closer. You're now another mile closer. There is no argument, right? Except when you
believe the Department of Transportation has placed them incorrectly. So, but then other
folks will count telephone poles. Do you know how many telephone poles are between
you and Florida? But it's still a marker of progress, right? My family played the game
where we would count hawks, and if you can see it circling from the road, one hawk.
Which is one more than you have, right? And that was a way to entertain but it was also
a way to mark progress and so on and so forth, and so there's different measures of
progress that mean different things.
So sometimes want to measure things along, you know, this very abstract notion of
completionism, right? X out of Y, right, those types of metrics. I've completed three
courses of my 15 or whatever it is in the curriculum. But sometimes we want to measure
things based more on an access of localized importance and meaning. And the way we
track college curriculum in the large, is set up entirely on abstract measures of
completionism. But not necessarily on localized meaning. If you ask any faculty, right,
they have a lot to say about the localized meaning and importance of any particular
course and how it relates to the curriculum and all that kind of stuff. But when you look
at where that's codified, is this course more important than that course and so on and so
forth. Not so much in the record of things. And not so much in a new person's
understanding of what might or might not be important.
>> Liz Lawley: So that's the why we're doing it, right? This is the underlying narrative,
some of the underlying motivations, you know. Next is sort of how we're going to do
this. And one of the things that we really want to do is make this game as embedded and
pervasive in our students’ environments as we possibly can. And this means not just the
online environment or the computer environment, but also the physical environment. So
we chose an icon a logo for this that invites interaction. I showed the design document
for this to my 14-year-old a couple of weeks ago and it was a Word document and at the
top it had that green button logo on it, and he immediately clicked on the logo. And he
said nothing happened. And I thought that's awesome, because already it's inviting
engagement, right? And I immediately, I then went to our website developer and said we
need to fix the website so that when you click the button something happens, because I'm
not getting burned on that one again by my own kid. But we want this button to show up
in lots of interesting unexpected places, right? We want it on the walls. We want it in
the labs. We want it on websites that they encounter as they are walking around. And
one of the things we’re starting to think about too is actually having ways to activate the
physical space. So one of the scenarios we've talked about is that freshmen in their
orientation will get a bracelet with no explanation whatsoever, just a little tag with the
URL on. This is an RFID enabled bracelet and when they walk past certain places on
campus, something will happen. This is a magical bracelet. This activates the spaces
around you. So, you know, these are some of the things that we want to try to have
happen. You walk into the lab and suddenly the Just Press Play button on the wall glows
and it flashes a code. And you got to figure out what to do with the code. You know, we
want to pull them in; we don't want to push them into this game. We don't want to
require this game. We’re not going to include it in classes. We’re not going to say this is
something you have to do. We want them to fall into it and be delighted. You know, to
be engaged, to find it playful.
We want it to be accessible to them everywhere. So it will show up in browsers. It will
be available on phones. We will have mobile games that tie into this; we will have-we've already got buy in and from our university to embed content in a variety of existing
websites. So you go to the library website and you log into one of the research databases
and there's a button. And if you click the button maybe you get, you know, a quest to
find a particular set of research things that gives you a special scholar achievement along
the way. So as much as we can, we want to have there be delightful surprises that that
glowing green button, no matter where you see it says if you press me something fun will
happen. You know this is Ellis and the drink me along the way.
So we’re also starting to think about, you know, what the nature of these achievements
might be, the way that we can frame them. This slide is actually kind of out of order,
because this is part of how we’re going to pull them into this. We’re planning a whole
campaign over the summer that will involve mysterious postcards that show up in
students’ real-world mailboxes, posts that show up on their Facebook wall, you know,
from the game or from somebody who's playing the game that they didn't know actually
existed. Some videos that we plan on doing to engage people in the process, so we want
them to show up on campus particularly our existing students already excited about this.
You know, and then the freshman, we want to try to embed this as much as possible in
ways that they will, that they will run into. And we've been thinking too about pulling
them in is one thing, keeping them in is another. You know, so what kinds of ways can
we make sure that they know there's interesting stuff out there? What are their friends
doing? What are the, what are the achievements that a lot of people are coming up with
right now? You know these are, we have not actually created any of these yet, but, yes,
some of them are quite delightful. You know, and some of them will be very much about
exploring the local environment. You know, about going out and trying local restaurants,
about checking out recreational reading material. Some of them will be about creative
work that they do. But a lot of it, you know, we want to build on what we know about
reputation systems, what we know about social networks, what we know about people's
interest in comparing themselves to others and knowing what other people are doing. As
I mentioned before, some of this will actually get embedded into the site so it might be
that you go to the RIT library site and something pops up to say there's an achievement
here. You know, if you go to this thing, you know, in the physical library you know, you
could get some points for having that happen. Did you want to add something there?
>> Andy Phelps: Yes, just when you're looking through a lot of these sample
achievements and a lot of the ways that we’re talking about, sort of gamifying portions of
the campus environment, these are all the very same things that you hear from most any
academic affairs unit. Here's what we know about students that succeed in the collegiate
environment. We know that they become engaged in their localized community. We
know that they become aware of the campus. We know that they, you know, are able to
draw upon the resources of the campus. You know all these things, we know an awful lot
educationally about what are good indicators of success and what behaviors will result in
typically sort of more success around those gates.
But this is a way to actually, you know, speak to the motivation of those issues, right?
And one of the things that we found is, you know, we had the big friend wheel, a few
slides ago, right? Almost every campus right now is engaged in a process of saying how
do we simplify the campus environment from the student perspective, right? I see it over
and over and over again. People are saying how do we make, you know, a one-stop shop
for academic advising? How do we, you know, reduce the number of entry points for
somebody into this system so that they have easier times making decisions and so on and
so forth? And yet they're so totally capable of managing complexity, right, by the time
they arrive to us. They can manage a friends network of a gazillion people, right, on
multiple networks, you know, and all the rest. But somehow they can't find the library?
Like, I just don't think that's true; it's what was the motivation? Did they understand that
finding the library was going to be a resource that was critical in their path to success?
>> Liz Lawley: A lot of what we’re thinking about too is what we can draw from what
we know about existing achievement systems. So, you know, you can compare your
achievements in Xbox Live to what other people you know are doing. Apparently Kevin
doesn't play Dance Central at this point, so I'm going to have to figure out what's going
on with that. But you know, many systems will allow you to this. If you play World of
Warcraft you can compare achievements of what you did versus any passing player in the
game. We want them to be able to compare themselves to other players. We also want
our faculty playing this as well. Because and one of the great advantages of piloting this
in a game design and development program is if you're going to find any faculty willing
to participate in something like this it's going to be us, right? We like to play games.
This is why we teach in a game design and development program. But, one interesting
thing that happens with this is it’s not just about competition. It's not just do I have more
points than somebody else, while that can be part of it. It's also whom I like? What kind
of a player are you? What does your profile look like as a player?
I mean if I look at the achievements in World of Warcraft of another player, I know
immediately, are they somebody that likes player versus player combat? Or are they
somebody that likes to explore the world? Because the nature of what their achievements
look like are actually very different.
And so we've been thinking about how do you represent this, right? How do you divide
up the kinds of achievements, and how do you start to represent visually what the profile
of a given user is? And this is just playing right now. None of this is the actual system,
but we've thought about how to you, how do you take these different kinds of
achievements that we’re imagining and create a profile that you can compare? And you
can do some interesting things once you’ve got that ability. You can say, you know
what; Professor Phelps is really cool; I want to be like him. You know, what does his
achievement profile look like? What kinds of things does he do that makes him into the
kind of person that he is? Or, you know, you can go the other way. And say, who do I
look like? What does my profile look the most like? Who are the people that maybe I
can look to for help and encouragement?
And from a collaboration standpoint it allows you to find people with different strengths
than your own. You know, you need a designer for your group project? And you're
really, really good at some of the technical stuff? How can you find somebody whose
profile is complementary to your own? So this becomes a kind of interesting
credentialing system, but one that's very different from grades. The fact that you got an
A in web design, doesn't necessarily tell me if what you are really good at is coding or
design or coordination on a group project. So can we start to show people what their
community looks like, and who the people are that they might want to be like, that they
are like, that they can collaborate with? And you've added some notes here and so I'm
not sure what…
>> Andy Phelps: Yeah, I just wanted to make a point about, you know, one of the
interesting facets of that is, who can you learn from? It becomes an interesting question
and that space. Particularly in a space where achievements are public, right? You’re
basically saying, oh, that person earned this achievement that I am now working on. I
can go to that person and they will have knowledge about what it took to do this. By
virtue of already having earned it which, you know, most campus environments, right,
you go to the TAs, you go to the graders, you go to the faculty members, you know, so on
and so forth. And you go to your fellow students in your class, when you're trying to
work together collaboratively on a project. But one of the things that we were looking at
even early on when, way back when I was looking at the Muppet system was, how do
you engender a community where the freshman of their own volition can reasonably
approach the seniors about learning introductory programming?
Clearly every senior learned it, right? But they don't think to use them as a resource and
vice versa. So how do you bring those groups together in a way where there's a little bit
more cohesion and connection, right? Could there be achievements for mentorship
within the student body, that sort of thing?
>> Liz Lawley: So when I came into this project, it was a little bit on its way and they
were super excited about it and super optimistic about it and this was all going to roll out
in the fall and I took one look at it and I said, this is going to be really hard. You know, I
got to be the “yes but” person when I came in, and I said, you know, yes it's really
wonderful and it's really exciting and it's potentially transformative, but. And, you know,
there were a couple of big pieces of this that I started to think about and worry about.
One of them is motivation. You know, I said a little bit at the beginning about how one
of the challenges with motivation--this is just taken out of--I'm not sure if--my creative
person picked this image and I'm not sure why. This is something about intrinsic
motivation but because it's in French, it's less meaningful to me than if it were in a
language that I was actually was fluent in. At any rate, the concept here is that
motivation is a big issue when you start talking about trying to add game mechanics into
real-world activities. We know that rewarding people for activities does not always make
it better. In fact, it often makes it worse. You know, the Dusty and Ryan work on selfmotivation. Daniel Pink has a great book out right now called Drive the talks a lot about
intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. And there's a huge risk if we do this wrong that we
in fact make our students less creative, less motivated to do the kinds of things that we
want them to do.
So, you know, I said we need to really take a step back and say how are we going to
make sure that we don't fall into this, you know, a motivate--what pink calls motivation
2.0. You know, the carrot and stick kind of thing that if you're good you get points and if
you’re bad, you get demerits and as a result you never want to do anything unless you get
the points. That's not where we want to go with this. We want to make them more
motivated, not less. So this is a big piece that we're thinking about and trying to really
allow students to feel some sense of autonomy and creativity in this. One of the things
we plan to do is to engage students as much as possible, not just in the early design of
this, but in the ongoing creation of content.
A couple of years ago Justin Hall did a game called Passively Multiplayer Online
Gaming which was a browser plug-in that allowed you to sort of leave landmines and
treats on web pages for your friends to get points every time you went to a new website.
To, you know--but more importantly and interesting and the thing that I got excited about
when I saw it, is you could build quests. And a quest was a series of web pages that you
had to go to in series. So you went to the first one, and then a little thing popped up and
said, here's the next site you need to go to. And at the end of it, not only would you get
points for having completed this quest through the web, but the person who created the
quest would get points because somebody had gone through and finished it. And it got
me thinking how powerful that would be for my students.
With my--in some of my classes what I ask my students to do is not just review the
articles that I assigned to them but go out and find something relevant and interesting and
give me a review of that. Well, what if they could turn that into a quest? And if they
found better stuff, other people would follow it through. So if we can get them involved
in being creative as a part of this, that the reward is not just for completing what
somebody else told you to do, but for actually contributing and managing the content,
that's going to be valuable as well.
Here's the “yes but” that was the really scary one for me. Some of you may be familiar
with this game on Picture the Impossible is a game that I worked with our local
newspaper to run back in the fall of 2009. And it was, you know, Zella actually was one
of the people who helped to develop content for that game. This was an alternate reality
game that we ran over a two-month period in the fall. And we had 2000 registered
players in the Rochester area, many of whom actually represented families or couples, so
we don't know exactly how many players there were, but it was well in excess of 2000.
And, you know I did a talk at GDC last year where I talked about building an ARG on a
shoestring budget. And yes, you can do this on a shoestring budget, but it kills you. It is,
it is just incredibly hard. And we did it because we were passionate about it, and we
loved it and we wanted it to work. We wanted to prove that it could work. And it was
spectacularly successful. It accomplished almost all the goals that we set out. You know
people became more vested in their community. They explored the area; they learned
about local history and culture. It was great. But at the end of it, I said to Andy I will
never do that for free again, ever.
I looked at this and I thought 750 undergraduate students, that's really close to, you know,
the scale of actively involved players and we've been here before and this is hard. Scale
is hard. You know, running this with 20 or 30 students is fun. Running it with 750 you
get big community management issues. You get big issues of having to, you now, keep
an eye on things, keep the pulse of it, all of that. So we're talking about scale that's hard
and we need to make sure that we do this right. Because if we do it wrong we’ll do more
harm than good in terms of education.
>> Andy Phelps: Yeah, and with that--for everyone in the room that actually ships
product, you know that one of the single most damaging things you can do is ship
product that isn't of quality, right? It will destroy your user base in a way that is almost
tacitly sort of back in your face the next time you try to do anything. Because you lose
credibility, right? And so one of the, one of the key factors in this is whatever we do we
have to do it at a quality level and at a scale level and at a support level and at a
management level that we can pull it off. Because the worst thing we could possibly do
is try something and get, you know, 50% of it to go right. Because our students are going
to have that expectation, I mean where the faculty, right? And if they're involved with it,
you know, it's their school and their program so this is, in the precursor to this that I did
over the summer at Faculty Summit, I had the slide that said big danger everywhere. And
that still informs a lot of our thinking about this. This is very hard to do for a lot of these
reasons.
>> Liz Lawley: And then we're not trying to do this all by ourselves. We’re talking with
people that we know and we trust, and we’re talking with them in the two other areas that
for us are sort of the “yes but” pieces of this. And one of these is the issue of assessment.
When I came in and looked at this project, I said, you know, this is a great list of
achievements. What are you hoping will happen at the end of this? What will be
different? And nobody could answer that question. And I said that's a really important
question here. We need to think about what's the difference for our students? What, how
was the experience different? How are the outcomes different? You know of, how is
being a student in our program different because of this? And that requires, you know,
doing real assessment. And we're really good at code; we’re less good assessment. It
turns out people in programs of education are really good at assessment of educational
environments. So we've been talking with Constance Steinkiller, who runs The Game's
Learning and Society Conference every year in Madison and has the GLS group at the Ed
school at the University of Wisconsin. They are really excited and enthusiastic about this
and the piece of it that they're really interested in is in fact that assessment.
Which is how do you know it's working? What do you need to ask your students? What
do we need to do in terms of talking to this year's freshman class to know how next year's
freshman class is different? What are the right questions to ask and what are the right
ways to ask those questions? So assessment is a big piece of this. Another piece of this
as it turned out; there are some legal issues, right? We’re asking students to submit
creative work that will get evaluated and judged. We’re also dealing with a lot of privacy
issues. You know, I'm hoping that for some of you when I said RFID bracelet, you got a
little worried, right? You know the, yes our students will feel the same way. And it's not
just that; it's things like, you know, that they checked out a book from the library. That's
scary stuff.
Now the reality is, of course we know they've checked out a book from the university
library. The university knows everything that you do with your ID card. But it's one
thing for you to know sort of theoretically that the university has all this data, and it's
another for you to see that reflected back at you like, hey, good job going to the gym
today, right? That's kind of scary. So there are issues of how we present that. There are
also significant issues from a legal standpoint of how do we deal with student records
policies? How do we deal with intellectual property issues, having to do with this? If
somebody uploads their creative work, you know, can we show that to people when we
talk about the game? You know who has ownership of that? You know, how can we
share it?
And so we've been talking with Dan Hunter who runs the State of Play Conference out of
New York Law School, who also runs the Institute for Internet Information Policy and
Law and he's very interested in this. And it turns out he's interested in this not just from
the standpoint of helping us to clarify what the legal questions are and what the policies
are which is critically important to us. He wants to transform legal education. And, you
know he wants to play with the idea of how would you implement this in a professional
school environment? Legal and business education are both under a lot of fire right now
in terms of whether what they're doing is working and whether it's working well. And
we've got some people at Wharton who have also expressed, I haven't told you this yet,
yeah, Wharton is also interested. [laughter] so we’ve definitely got, you know, people
who can help us with these problems, but the problems are real and there are things that
we’re going to have to, have to address as we move forward on this.
And so part of what we’re thinking about too, is yeah, if we're successful in doing this at
RIT we’ll have a lot of wonderful things to tell people. But there's also some potential
for people to say, you know look, you’re a game program; of course your students and
your faculty played the game. You know, because their preprogrammed to do so. But
you know, it wouldn't work, you know, in another kind of school; it wouldn't work in
another kind of environment; it wouldn't work with K through 12 students. It wouldn't
work with graduate students, it's too frivolous. It's, you know, there are a variety of kinds
of criticisms that could come in. So one of the things that we really want to see happen
with this as we move forward is we start to think about not just how do we make it work
with our students and our students’ journey and the specific milepost and challenges, but
also how do you take what we learn from this and apply it in a wide variety of
educational environments? And the earlier we do that, I think the better, because if we
get too much into the, how do we solve the problems at RIT, okay, that's not a replicable
thing. You know, we need people involved with this that are thinking about a variety of
environments where this can be implemented and where it can be thought about. So,
what do you want to add?
>> Andy Phelps: I mean the only thing that I would add is, you know, we've been talking
about this project for, what, almost a year, just in terms of, first our internal discussions
and then our, you know, sort of dinner conversations and working forward with our
colleagues and friends and all of this kind of stuff. And every single educator that we've
come in contact with has said if you can really do it, if we can really learn how to do this,
that would be so incredible. At the same time, you know a lot of folks that we've said,
we're going to try this, everyone assumes that it's already been tried. And it really hasn't
in the modern-day gamification sense. But it seems like it should have been, right? And
we do it in little dribs and drabs all over the place but never together, never collectively,
never at the scale where we’re talking about, let's go out, let’s really do it, let's learn some
lessons and let's take those lessons and export them to the broader community in a way
that we think can really raise the discourse of what this could be.
So we bit together little site where we're tracking our development and our design
thoughts and all of this and it's out there. You can comment on the site. You can read
what we're writing, what we’re thinking, what we're reading. We'd love for all of you to
be involved in what we are thinking and moving it forward so hopefully they'll be lots of
other people in short order blasting away at this and helping us move our thinking
forward on this. But that's where we are and come this fall we hope to be playing a game
with a whole bunch of our students.
>> Liz Lawley: So, and this site is publicly available and we’re working on getting the
internal URL caught up. But if you go to thinkplay.irt.edu it will redirect you to where
the site is. One of the things that's on here is a version of our overall vision document for
this, which frames the idea and talks about some of these concepts of the hero's journey
and how we see this actually playing out. And also addresses some of the, you know, the
motivation issues and some of the concerns about things like the dangers of gamification.
You know, gamification has become one of these buzzwords that, you know makes me
feel a little ill to even utter it because it does seem to trivialize, right? It’s like we’ll just
toss in some achievements and some points and some badges and poof. it'll be a game?
You know, and criticism of gamification has not been that, you know, incorporating
game mechanics into things is a bad idea. The criticism has been that incorporating the
mechanics without really thinking about the design of the game itself is a bad idea, and
that what we're trying to bring to this is really thinking of what is that underlying
narrative? What is that experience? What are the things we’re trying to accomplish with
this overall? But, so, that's all in the vision document. But one of the things that we’re
really going to try to do with this as much as possible is really track our thinking about it.
So that diagram that I showed you earlier comes out of this Philip Glass composition site
where you can, you can look for tracks of his, based on joy, sorrow, intensity and density,
right? These really interesting metrics for how you evaluate, and we want to think about
what are the characteristics that we want to use as the definition of what our groups of
activities and achievements come into?
One of the things that's really nice is that so many of the people involved in the project
are, have been participating in this, adding stuff, you know. Our graduate students who
are working on the technical stuff are also thinking about the game design, and so we
would, you know, invite you to take a look at this to comment on things as we go along,
to, you know, be a part of the dialogue in what we're doing here, because we're really
excited about this. We think that this has the potential to be genuinely transformative,
you know, from an educational standpoint. And we want to do it right. And the more
people they give us input and give us feedback and give us thoughts into this, you know,
the better we’re going to be able to do it. So that's our story.
>> Andy Phelps: Yeah, that's it.
>> Liz Lawley: All right?
[applause]
>> Liz Lawley: And we have plenty of time for questions. Jonathan?
>>: So I have a comment and a question. I think this is great; it's very exciting. And to
cycle back to your beginning, I think one possible measure of success would be if you
had a 20% attrition rate in your first semester and then zero after that, because it is of
course possible that people would get the idea. You'd be able to identify the people who
aren't going to survive in that program. But that ties to the second question which is your
concluding remark about how this might generalize. And the thought that I had there was
going back to when I was, well I’m ten years out of the 18-year-old education game.
And so 18-year-olds are probably evolved quite a bit. [laughter] I taught at UC Irvine
and the issue that pops to mind is that this would, if I look at the students that I had there
would be a huge breakdown as to how they would respond to this based on gender and
cultural background. And so, that is, I could see which students would really respond
well and which ones would not. Now it wouldn't matter in your program, but in my
program, you know, in information computer science it would've mattered. Because
there were, because there were big differences based on like their cultural background in
particular and maybe gender also. So I wonder if you’d thought about that.
>> Liz Lawley: Yeah, and in that sense I think from an emotional and cognitive
development, 18-year-olds haven't changed enormously in ten years, but in terms of an
engagement with games and the extent to which games are part of their day to day life,
you know, we see the numbers now and they're saying--what are the numbers right now?
They're saying 97% of 18-year-olds right now play some kind of computer or video game
on a regular basis. That it's become so much a part of their day-to-day lives. And you
look at things like Facebook games and casual games and if all of this looked like Xbox
games then, yeah, then there'd be a lot of problems. But some of you may know about
the thing that I worked on when I was here with Lily's group a while back, which was a
game called Social Genius, which was a casual game that allowed you to see six faces
from a group that you worked in, or a conference you were going to, and try to identify
who the people were. And you could move up, you know, as you got further and further
afield from your home base, you got more points for identifying people. Something like
that is an obvious addition into a game like this. Not all of the activities need to look like
traditional gaming stuff. You know, and some of them can absolutely appeal on the sort
of casual mobile play with your Facebook friends emphasizing the social rather than just
the individual achievements. So but, that's exactly the concern that I think a lot of people
are going to have. Which is, yes, it will work with these students, but will it work with
others? And part of the goal in this is going to be, say, we may think it will, but we
should check, you know? We should try it in places other than our department, because
otherwise it's just our guess, you know. Not anything provable. Lily?
>>: I just think it's awesome that you guys are doing this. I mean we have all these ideas
about games and kids that we'd be interested in doing, and of course we don't have kids,
that we have [inaudible] [laughter]. They're not going to want to play. But I think it
would be really fun to partner with the guys and find maybe other things that we can
maybe follow-up on that after. That would be great. And then I was going to kind of riff
on the Social Genius when Jane McGonigal was here giving a talk. And one of the things
that she said was at Zappos, the company, they decided that they should play a little
game. And basically they did Social Genius, which is, you just say who the person is;
you see their picture. And they play it for five minutes in the morning, a particular five
minutes every day, so the game doesn't become the whole experience. And she said that
it's just had a profound impact on the Zappos’ culture. Because people will go in and
they'll be like, who are you, because they want to be able to go in and name the person,
you know. But it just created this friendly environment, and I think especially for
freshman, one of the challenges is just feeling like you're not alone. You know, and kind
of overcoming that [inaudible] feeling, so
>> Liz Lawley: When we ran Social Genius for the symposium that one year. I
remember people coming in, and we ran again for the social computing symposium and
put everything out and people could play it before they came to the event. And we had
people say, I saw this person in the airport and I knew they were going to the symposium
because I'd seen their picture on the, you know. And people were playing it for different
reasons and in different ways. Some of them were like, I am not going to let Eric have
more points than me in this game. So they would go back just to keep an eye on Eric's
points so that they had more points than Eric. Other people were playing it just because it
was, you know, an interesting engaging little pastime. But almost everybody who played
it said when I got to the symposium I recognized and could connect with people that I
otherwise wouldn't have known, because I recognized their faces. And I, which is why
I've been thinking about adapting this, you know, particularly as a mobile game. We’re
hoping to hire one of our students to develop a mobile version of it so that people can
play it over the summer and start earning points.
>>: Ultimately too, a lot of these games if you do these at work for interns here, I think if
the games work in schools, they will over time work and lots of other environments. It's
just that if they don't work in schools they probably aren't going to work in a lot of other
environments. Starting at Microsoft is kind of dry, unless you have interns. So, anyway
great work.
>> Liz Lawley: Yeah, Ian?
>>: Yeah, just to go on your point, I remember running into Tony Hsieh, which is the
CEO of Zappos and he said that the employees can’t log onto their computer unless they
answer that question as to whose face that is. And you're like, oh, I saw that guy last
week, but now you can't log into your computer. That's a cool idea. Yeah, I wish we did
that here. But, my question was, you guys talked about motivations a lot. And what I'm
really interested in is the incentives that can motivate people. And one of the coolest
books, one of my favorite books was Freakonomics. And I remember it was this great
little story about behind motivations and incentives about a babysitting service in India.
And the fact that everybody was coming late to pick up their kids. They wanted to stop
it.
>>: For Israel.
>>: For Israel yeah. So they started charging people like ten bucks if they were late an
hour. And everybody just said, oh great, so now I can just pay ten bucks and get an extra
hour for free. And basically the point was that when they switched it to like a hundred
dollars an hour, then everybody picked up their kids right away. And so it talked about
basically how incentives only work when there's enough of it to make it worth
somebody's while. So just curious are we…
>> Liz Lawley: But the other thing on that is that people picked up their kids more often
when there was no reward, I mean when there was no fee, because there was a social
obligation.
>>: Yep.
>> Liz Lawley: Right? And that that's the one that we want to foster. That sense of
responsibility to each other, to the community. That, how do you make things better? I
noticed, you know, actually when I was driving to your house last night, they had this
sign up, this speed limit sign that I do not remember from the last time that I was here,
that said, please respect our neighborhood, drive 25 miles an hour. And I actually…
>>: I've never seen that sign.
>> Liz Lawley: I slowed down, because it was, it was a different, I mean if it was just
you must do this; I’m like I don’t see anybody is really going to stop me, right?
>>: They said there were like construction signs they say like, my daddy works here,
please slow down. And then it has like a sad face and it makes…
>> Liz Lawley: Yeah, and those for some reason just don't work as well for me. You
know, I don't know, maybe I'm broken. But the respect my neighborhood, to me was
really interesting. And it's the, that's the kind of thing that we want to tie into, right? Is
that, it’s not that we're giving you points, so much, it's that you are engaging in this, that
you're getting to show off your work. One of the things that we’re looking at too is
allowing people to do sort of up votes of creative work and so, yeah; you can get an
achievement for submitting something. But you get something different if the
community says, oh, that's cool. You know if any of you have seen SF Zero, which is a
website about sort of community engagement and gameful activities. Some of the same
kinds of things that you could up vote things and engage people, and make it about the
social connections rather than just about the points. And this is where the criticism of
gamification is coming from to, in the games world, which is, it’s not just about the
points. The points alone are not meaningful. You know, I didn't spend hours, you know,
visiting every single region in World of Warcraft because I was going to get a 200 point
achievement. I did it because I would get a title that the rest of the world would see,
right? That I would be able to show off, you know, that I was Galatea the Explorer, and
that's a very different kind of motivation. It's not a numeric motivation and it's, and it
wasn't just that I did it for me; I wanted that label to put over my head so that the rest of
the world would see that I had accomplished this thing. And so tying into those kinds of
motivations, the ones that strengthen the bonds within the community is going to be
really important.
>>: Yeah, I agree with you. My point is just going to be that I see the, I see the future
issue of this being the same kind of thing that any kind of any game mechanics,
applications, they are just trying to solve. It's just, you know, something like Foursquare
introduces Meier Shifts which is like having a title, or something that people can aspire
to, more than just points or badges. But even that I don't feel like has really has, I mean
Foursquare is definitely not something that has gone to the masses yet. It's not--my
mom’s not using Foursquare for example. It's still a very techie-based thing. And I feel
like even Xbox Live with achievements, I have a ton of friends that use Xbox Live and
they don't even think about the achievements that much and it's still not relevant enough.
And I’m just curious about, you know, what's that motivating thing? What's that
incentive that's really going to get people to start paying attention to this, if they're not,
for example, in a games department, or so much into playing a game, but you still want
them to be a part of this, right? So I'm just kind of curious, how do you go to like that
next step?
>> Liz Lawley: That's part of our next several months of game design and testing and
iteration. So right now we have got a great concept. We've got a lot of talent. We've got
a lot of enthusiasm. We have three months ahead of us in terms of starting to lay out that
underlying game design and motivation framework while we’re also building the
technology infrastructure. And then the summer is for play testing because it's not all
going to work. And the biggest part of this, you know, we didn't build in a lot of play
testing time with Picture the Impossible. The fact that it was as successful as it was is
kind of astonishing. And, but this time we’re not making that mistake, and because, in
fact, this is higher stakes. And we do need to think about all of that. We are, in fact,
working with Foursquare. You know, they are interested in providing us with API access
and also with sharing with us some of what they've learned about what motivates people,
you know, what engages them. And then down the road the other thing that's going to be
really interesting for us is a lot of the cross analysis of data that we can do. Once we
have the data about what students do what stuff, we also have the data about what
students get what grades. And the data about what students, you know, engage in various
kinds of RIT required activities, you know, like doing your degree audit and stuff like
that. We can start to look at things, you know, that say do students who do these kinds of
achievements, are they more likely to also be successful in these other ways? And so
there's some really fun stuff you can do when you're doing this within the context of you
know, a given structure. But we need to know, what do they want to do? What
motivates them? What will engage them? And we need them to tell us that too. You
know, the more we can involve the students in the development of content, the better that
will be.
>>: Have you found that, like Bartles Player Types, is it used it all?
>> Liz Lawley: How is Bartles Player Types ever not useful, right? You know, but Nick
Yee has actually done a much richer, more nuanced interesting discussion of player types
and underlying motivations, which is another thing that we're looking at and if you e-mail
me I will send you the link to that. It's a really, really nicely done thing which doesn't
reject Bartle, but says it's too simplistic, which in fact it is. Because nobody fits into just
one of those player categories, you know. And what Nick has done is rather than saying
there's a player type, is to say there are these areas of motivation and then subareas of
motivation within them, and that's a big part of the framework that we want to use in
looking at individual activities and achievements, is how does it fit into that and are we
making sure that we hit a range of those. Because it's very easy to design the stuff that
you want to play, right. And if you fall into one of these areas, you know, it can be hard
to recognize that that's not really going to be all that interesting to somebody else, and
this will. And so that's part of what we're working with is, yes Bartle, but also what
Nicky has done.
>>: One of the things that you guys might want to do, we built this tool that, at work,
that sort of pulls it onto Outlook [inaudible] people's pictures and what they were doing.
But one of the interesting things that we did, which you guys might want to do, when we
rolled it out, we actually had surveyed people before they used it, so you get a baseline.
And I think that that’s sometimes something that we forget to do just because we build it
and then we give it and we start to doing analysis. But we found that one of the most
interesting like differences was before people used Salsa, they thought they would use it
to look up information on their managerial hierarchy. And they thought that looking at
friends would be super low priority, and after a month of usage that really evened out.
And I would suspect similar things might happen. You might initially assume that people
who were good might be good students, but you might find that this appeals to a different
set of students, or people that--and just being able to kind of go back and measure that,
would be interesting just to make sure you do that before.
>> Liz Lawley: And that’s some of what we've actually been talking with Constance
about, you know, which of these things should we be measuring before hand? What
should we be asking, how should we ask it, because that's the part that is harder for us to
conceptualize. You know is what are the right questions for us to ask? So.
>>: I'm sorry. I just want to respond to a couple of things and then I have a question for
you as well. Just so you know, a few things I heard Jonathan, you know, talking about
different groups and how they respond to it. And it is important and obviously you’ll
find these things. And I just, it's kind of funny to me now. I was just talking to these
guys earlier about how, when talking about educational solutions, Roth sometimes put it
to these amazingly high standards. Where it served like, if you're going to come up with
a good solution it should apply to everybody, it should work for every situation.
And it strikes me as kind of ironic considering that the educational system in reality is
broken. Education is just like dust, I mean it's just it's something like about 7000 kids per
day drop out of high school in this country. I mean it's absolutely astounding once you
start seeing the numbers. And if we can start making even small differences or
improvements, I think that [inaudible] justification. And that being said it's, trying to get
to the root of what makes these things fun and differential [inaudible]. Lily, you know,
as far as working with you guys, we'd love to. We've been actively doing outreach with
different groups. There's Dev Give has some interesting projects going on there's the
Achievements web services. This is a framework has been actively looked at and I think
there's a lot of things we can collaborate. We're talking to Engineering Excellence.
They're very interested in using these kinds of systems. [inaudible] kind of people in
these kinds of systems. I think it's totally fertile ground. We were talking, I mean, these
guys are willing to do the sorts of high risk kinds of activities that we maybe can’t do
when it's peoples’ salaries on the line, of course it just grades for you guys.
[laughter]
>> Andy Phelps: Ahh, no.
>> Liz Lawley: [inaudible] don't really care much about [inaudible].
>>: The picture we see is that inside we can leverage these things and we were talking
about in the [inaudible] Foundation, maybe open sourcing a project, bringing in engineers
so we can apply all of our corporate know-how to build hardened systems and allowing
these guys to experiment on it, and we think that's really fruitful so, but we’ll be talking
on Monday so.
>> Andy Phelps: Yeah, I think there's also in what we've already looked at with this
project and just the current curriculum and our students in general, there's a real danger in
designing around last year's paradigm. Because, I do this thing with the freshmen every
single year where we talk about their motivations and coming into--I made a commitment
today would teach all the freshmen seminars in the entire program,
>> Liz Lawley: Which is a lot of students.
>> Andy Phelps: Because I wanted to understand my incoming students. I don't think
I'm going to be able to do that when we scale up to 1000 students in a couple of years but.
I teach them in little sections of, no more than 15, so that I can meet every single one of
them. And, I know I'm just saying. But, so I do this thing with them every year where I
ask them, you know, what are your motivations for getting into the program? And why
do you want to do this? And all this seems like a crazy way to want to make a living and
so on and so forth. And invariably we get down to sort of what games did you play
growing up, and what impact do you think they had on how you think about games and
media and all these other kinds of quality discussions, that you have with media students.
Last year something interesting happened. Last year was the first year where I had a
majority of students self identify that they spent their, the bulk of their media experience
entirely on a mobile platform, from the Game Boy Advance on up. I had about 20% of
the freshmen who never owned a game console. And they’re in earning a game design
and development degree. That's very, very different from even the way we were thinking
when we designed this program. The way the industry was thinking when they said we
want to hire people that have relevant media experience that looks like X. You know, it's
a huge shift in the worldview of somebody, in the way that they think about that type of
content. And it's going to change again. In very short order. And so we have to be
cognizant and design to, you know, the 18-year-olds of next year and five years and ten
years from now. And what that's going to try to look like. And I think that that's one of
the, one of the reasons for the dust, is that we keep designing for the students of many,
many moons ago. So.
>>: Will I think that what we can do is design services that can supply, you know,
multiplicity platforms and a really [inaudible] and let these things surface to where they
want to. And not just like profile system of badges, for those who say don't want to use
[inaudible] they can still benefit from it. Because even if you don't have your
achievements surface there are systems that you can use it for backend intelligence and
analytics to provide sort of customized experiences and, I want to ask you guys a
question though. I'm curious what you guys think about the creepy tree house. I mean
there's a danger here because we're trying to sort of make a game, we’re trying to slowly
guide people to do good things. There’s sort of this moral and ethical undertone to it and,
you know, I mean how do we stay away from building this kind of creepy tree house
which is…
>> Liz Lawley: Does everybody know what a creepy tree house is?
>>: The creepy tree house is when adults build like an experience for kids that's
supposed to be really cool and really fun, and it's like gingerbread house in the woods and
the kids are like, oh, that's creepy, and they stay away from it. Like they instinctively
know that…
>> Liz Lawley: A grown-up made this.
[laughter]
>>: So I know one thing with kids, maybe less so in college, but like in middle school
especially, kids are really attracted to subversive elements. And they're looking for
autonomy, and I’m wondering if you guys have considered the element of subversion and
how that can fit into the larger game design?
>> Liz Lawley: Yes. We have definitely considered it and this is a big part of why we
want to build a system that encourages and, you know, eventually depends upon student
creation of content. We don't think we should be the ones designing the achievements.
We think they should be, but you have to, at least have an initial architecture, right? You
need to say this is what a tree house looks like. You know, now you build the tree house.
You know, and if you will let us, we'd like to play in it to. Because part of it is also that
it's not where we’re judging them; it's that we want to play. You know, yeah they should
create achievements for us, absolutely. I mean they do it all the time, right? They test us
constantly. You know, they are so surprised when they see us in a bar, right? I mean it's
like whoa, well you may not have been but, you should see the faces of some of my
students when they, you know, and it depends on the bar, right?
[laughter]
>> Liz Lawley: So but we want, we want them, you know, to eventually take
responsibility for this. It should be theirs, that this should be their tree house. That they
build, that they look at, that they learn from, you know, that we can learn from too, but
not that we own.
>>: They make trails for the ones that come after them.
>> Liz Lawley: But in fact, you know, you haven't seen our personas and scenarios
document yet. But it has a big piece about alumni, sort of going back and crafting
content for the students, you know. Or students looking at what alumni have done. I
mean, yeah, see, see? Zella already wants to build quests.
>>: Zella: I can fail them all.
>> Andy Phelps: I mean our curriculum, the proper curriculum not this, is very, very
projects based, right? So I'm invariably always accused of, well you picked the project,
so you lead the, you know, what they're going to learn and all that sort of stuff. To a
thousand percent, the best learning experiences I have ever had in my classes are not
when I say, we’re going to build an X. It's when the students say we want to build a Y
and we need your help to do it, right? Those are the best learning experiences, and this is
going to succeed on that paradigm. It's going to have to.
>> Liz Lawley: Yeah, I told Donald a story about what happened when we finished the
design document for this, the one that's up on the website. I sent it out to our faculty so
that they would know, you know, what was going on with the project. And one person
printed some copies out and had left them in a classroom. And a week later I was
walking down the hall and I walked past the lab with a whiteboard this big, and it was
full of notes and diagrams and this is actually not comments, the IMM lab. And you
don't generally see that board end to end covered with stuff. And I was in there, and they
were like four students in there, with one professor, and I was curious so I opened the
door. And as soon as I opened the door, the students turned and looked at me, and said
we want in. And I, you want into what? And I had no idea they had found the vision
document. And they had cornered a professor, and they had said we want to build
content for this game and they were sketching out what the freshman first week
experience should be like in the game, completely unprompted.
And this to me was so exciting, you know. That without anybody asking them they said
we want to help build this. We want to build; we want to make the tree house. We don't
just want to climb up in it. So I suspect that we’re going to get a lot of that as we start to
go out because people are going to look at this, you know. I have yet to tell anybody
about this project and have them say that sounds stupid, you know? I mean there’s
skepticism about whether it will work, but mostly there's, that's really cool, can we play
too? Which is why we’ve got a law school involved and why we’ve got Wisconsin
involved, because as soon as you tell people, they’re like can we be a part of this? So we
think that we’ll be able to deal with it very much by inclusion, rather than by saying
here's this nice prefabricated tree house, you know, for you to play an. Don't pay any
attention to the cameras, really; it's all fine. So.
>>: I've got a few Word project documents so I'm just going to leave them around your
apartment and so when you go home just
[laughter]
>> Andy Phelps: Good luck Lee.
>>: Speaking of cameras littered around, one of the things, I guess, I really liked was the
badge that you had and it was achievement-based badge.
>> Liz Lawley: Uh-huh.
>>: I think, maybe it's just older folks having been working for 20 years that, you know,
Meier’s breaks and some of these things that aren't achievement-based but they’re more
experiential based, and who you are, and you start off with that base line and you know
how you evolve etc. it's kind of like, you know, creating your character tree. You know,
do I want pointy ears, or do I want to be the average human? Do I want to be this really-and I think that some of that kind of colors it is well. And so, one of those things that I
guess I think about when I get into this is some of those players, you know, those
students are quite happy to be over in this zone. And they just, they want to know other
people who are like them, you know, like that whole badge design really appealed to me
because I look for the people that are like me. And I look for the people that are different
from me that challenge me and push me out of my space. So that was really nice.
>> Liz Lawley: Thank you. Yeah that's something that we’re really excited about the
potential for how that can help people from a mentoring standpoint, from a finding
people like me standpoint, and from a collaborating with people with different skills. I
mean, there's lots that we can do with it. We've got to get the metrics of it right, you
know. We've got to define those areas properly, but the potential if we get that right is
huge.
>>: No pressure, right?
>>: People used to love putting I am an ENTP on their cube, right? I am green, I am red,
I am, whatever, yellow. And it's different with every, but I mean that whole thing
appeals to a certain percentage of the population. And others feel that it's creepy.
>> Liz Lawley: And a lot of this, we’re going to have to make it really easy for people to
decide how much they want to disclose. You know, it should not all be automatically
public. You know, and you should be able to choose, can my friends see this? Can
anybody see this? Do I want to put it on my Facebook page, you know? I mean what
level of sharing this do you want? Chances are that I'm going to make a different choice
than Andy does in terms of how much of it I put out there, and we know this even just
looking at ourselves, how different our sharing, you know, strategies are. So that's a big
piece of what we need to work into this as we move forward is, what do you share, you
know, or how do you share it, how easy is it for you to control that access to things?
>>: [inaudible] I saw Simon, who’s a developer on it, are you trying to create a platform
that other schools can use, or are you trying to kind of just roll it out of IRT first and then
show people the way? Like they're going to be APIs or…
>> Liz Lawley: No, we want, this is a platform that could be done in a couple of ways.
So if we do end up with the resources to be able to roll this out to multiple places, our
plan is to begin by hosting multiple instantiations of it locally. So that if we're dealing
with, you know, New York Law School, they don't have to set up a server, install the
software, figure out how to manage it, figure out how to do the APIs, basically, we just
set up the New York Law School instantiation and it's Justin Swartz who's the new game
design grad student who's working on it, is doing, has a significant software engineering
background. And he's building a very flexible extensible architecture so that this is not
tied at all to RIT for RIT systems. It simply has the gateways to be able to bring the data
in.
>>: Thank you everyone, and thank you Andy and Liz for coming out here and sharing
this with us. I encourage everybody who is interested, we are looking for collaborators.
We are very interested in testing this on our own people and, you know, looking for
people who can help us, give us ideas of technology we have that we can help them to
leverage to make this experience as big and as exciting as they possibly can. Hopefully a
lot more people than just us will be knowing about this very, very soon so. Thanks.
>> Andy Phelps: Our pleasure.
>> Liz Lawley: All right. Thank you.
[applause]