Exploration of Knowledge

This article was written by Bo, Octalysis Prime member: Bo Paivinen Ullersted is a Danish teacher in physics and math at high school level. He has been working with gamifying education since 2015 and runs a primarily Danish language blog and Facebook group about this. This article first appeared on Bo’s website.

An approach to gamifying the classroom

An approach to gamifying classroom book-and-paper teaching, which worked well when tested in practice.

Note: My references here are to the Octalysis Framework for gamification.

Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou

Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.

Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.

His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.

TEDxLausanne · Gamification to Improve Our World17 min

Conclusion

With this short presentation, I hope you have an understanding of the idea behind using the exploration of knowledge in teaching. And if you wish to try it out in practice, you should continue reading through the notes below, to get all the details right.

Practical/teaching notes:

• The students self-test their answers from a list of answers
• Every group is 2-4 students
• Every group has their own map
• If your subject doesn’t use experiments, find a different type of non-standard exercise the students can unlock
• Try the system out with a good class the first time — students that will work efficiently in groups without too much supervision.
• The experiments are short and simple.
• At some points I summed up for the class what they had learned, due to a student’s request.

Gamification notes:

• Exploring the map and earning keys are, of course, Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment
• Celebration: When the students gain a key, give them a key stamp (a piece of paper to glue on the map). Also ring a bell or play a sound effect on an app.
• The questions of the quizzes are not visible before the group has earned access. Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity.
• Not tested: The experiments should also be unknown until access is earned.
• The final deadline ends in a large quiz, testing knowledge in all the required areas.

Notes for making the map:

• When designing the map, start by dividing the material into a few subject areas (5 in this map). Then find out which areas are dependent on knowledge from previous areas, and set up the key/gate system from this dependence.
• The students should have the same amount of time available as you would use to go through the subjects in a standard teaching.
• I recommend using the map for a project of 3-6 lessons (tested with 4).
• The map can be produced in a number of different ways. Use Word, Publisher, Photoshop or similar software. Or print the map and glue pieces of paper with gates and text onto the map, photocopy the result.
• Use a fancy map-like background
• The reason there are no page numbers on the map is because the students used a digital book. If you use normal books, page numbers would be useful.
• A single area in this map is completely optional — the key is only used to gain access to an optional quiz.
• In this map the points needed to access quizzes and experiments are different from the points needed for keys. But they could be the same.

I hope this will be useful to you.

Bo Paivinen Ullersted is a Danish teacher in physics and math at high school level. He has been working with gamifying education since 2015 and runs a primarily Danish language blog and Facebook group about this.

You can read Bo’s website here.

Related Reading

• The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
• Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback
• Top 10 Education Gamification Examples
• What is Gamification?
• Learning with Games
• Books by Yu-kai Chou

WOULD YOU LIKE YU-KAI CHOU TO WORK WITH YOUR ORGANIZATION?