The costs to gamify education

In a previous post, I laid out what it means to gamify education (short answer is: incorporate best teaching practices).  If you read that post, it should be pretty clear that those ideas are quite far from our current educational system.  Gamifying education means doing so much more than giving kids badges or points when they turn in homework. It requires a massive overhaul of the structure, values, and philosophy of our school system.

That may sound drastic, and I don’t at all mean to solve the education problem in a two-page blog post.  But I did want to highlight some common classroom practices as a case study, just to emphasize the many ways that they violate gamification principles, and what gamification-friendly solutions might look like.  I’m going to continue using the same delineation from my first post between the Rules (the formal structure of a lesson plan) and Play (the experience created by the implementation of a lesson).

Gamification and Education: the Core Principles

I always like to say the gaming industry has done in 30 years what the educational industry hasn't been able to do in 300, namely make self-sustaining learning.  The reason games are fun is that games are learning tools, and people inherently like learning (or more specifically we have an intrinsic motivation towards competence).  I like to think of the gaming industry as a hotbed of educational innovation-- games only sell if they are good at letting people learn, so the game industry has gotten extraordinarily good at creating learning.

Thus we come to gamification, a term spawned from the idea that if only we could put these game elements into other situations, we could make those situations so much more fun and engaging.  But as described above, if games are learning tools, “gamifying” an experience simply means improving the learning that occurs in an experience. In this light, education seems to paint itself a ready target for gamification efforts.  But, what exactly does it mean to gamify education?

The problem with MOOCs, you see, is that...

...I don’t like them very much. It was Thursday morning, and the Mozilla Teachtheweb MOOC was about to kick off. I was languishing in a simple decision: should I try out yet another MOOC or give up on them altogether?

This would be my third MOOC, the first two being pretty big failures. In both previous MOOCs (one on Coursera and one on Skillshare) I was part of the 80% that dropped the MOOC in the first few weeks after registering. Why couldn’t these MOOCs keep my attention? It certainly wasn’t the topic or the instructor, as both previous attempts were highly interesting topics taught by great instructors. The format was the problem, I decided.  As the noon kickoff time for Teachtheweb, approached, I listed off the reasons I didn’t like MOOCs:

What is my child learning?

As a parent you have the unique privilege of seeing your child learn over many years. If your child is very young, it is very hard to pinpoint what exactly she is learning. For instance, many times a child may not have the vocabulary to express any idea and even if she does, she may not have the cognitive ability to assess her learning and frame an opinion. It gets very hard to immediately assess what your child has learned.

The key is patience.

Here are some things to keep in mind while exploring and learning with your child (if you have a very young one!):

How to hire great people

Its been seven years since I started Iridescent and I have learned a lot about hiring! Here are the  

various stages I have gone through starting from when I had no clue.

Stage 0. No Money.
We ran programs on the power of volunteers and visionaries who saw the great things we could do if we kept trying. So the decision was easy as soon as there was funding. I hired them as team members.  
Stage 1. Growth.
As we got more funding, we needed to run more programs and we actually needed to go through the job-posting-interviewing-hiring process. I had no experience doing this and naively thought that one get-to-know-you-interview would suffice and many times I didn't even do that. I let other team members who would work directly with the hire conduct the interviews. I had other things to do. BIG MISTAKE.  

Stage 2. Pain of firing.
And this led me to experience the first growth pains - having to make the decision that a certain match was not working out. This happened very often. And I went into a frenzy of reading a bunch of books on hiring, interviewing and organization theory. The best turned out to be the "Who: The A method of hiring" by Geoff Smart. It was so good that I went through and made a condensed version for my team. It basically said, there is no easy way. Button down. Plan carefully what the job outcomes should be. Spell out the deliverables, but don't spell out the how. Put this all down in a scorecard. It also said to do 7 reference checks. I had not done reference checks till now! Another valuable lesson learned.  

Stage 3. Screening Task
I dont really remember how I started doing these. But after many false starts and fires, I wanted a more efficient method of learning more about a person. Interviews just didn't provide that deep look inside. And so I started using screening tasks and now I feel I do it pretty well! I do admit that I am really sneaky and so I dont feel bad sharing all the traps I lay. It eases my conscience :)

• create a task that is representative of the first major project the person will face once they are hired. So for instance for a development position, I asked candidates to suggest improvements for an existing proposal. 
• identify characteristics that are important to your organization. For us, it is the ability to learn, to be courageous, to question and to pay attention to detail. So very often I ask for a list of their favorite books. 
• finally, put some pieces in the task that help the candidate learn more about your organization. Hiring a person is very much like getting married. The love has to be on both sides. So the candidate should really want to work in your team. 
• I usually post the screening task as a url on the bottom of the job posting. 99% of folks email me their resume and omit to do the task. They think its a mistake or that they can get away with not submitting or (most likely) they dont notice it! So the 1% that do submit the task without being asked to automatically get on my favorite list. 
• I sometimes do something very sneaky. I purposely make mistakes or omissions to see if people are paying attention  to detail :)
• The next step is to email all interested candidates who sent me standard cover letters and resumes, the link to the screening task. 
• I never give a deadline as the speed with which they reply is indicative of their interest. Some get so intrigued by the task, that they get very absorbed and finish it right away. Others keep emailing me with many excuses as to how they will get to in on such and such date and they just wanted to update me. 
• I also like to send everyone the screening task so that more people get to know about Iridescent in the process :) Why not!   

Stage 4: Maturity
Ben Horowitz says it much better than me..
"Valuing lack of weakness rather than strength—The more experience you have, the more you realize that there is something seriously wrong with every employee in your company (including you). Literally, nobody is perfect. As a result, it is imperative that you hire for strength rather than lack of weakness. Everybody has weaknesses; they are just easier to find in some people. Hiring for lack of weakness just means that you’ll optimize for pleasantness. Rather, you must figure out the strengths you require and find someone who is world class in those areas despite their weaknesses in other, less important domains."

We now have an amazing team of 16 members in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco Bay Area, Boston and Chicago.

What are badges, and how will education use them?

Badges are soon to be, if not already, a hot topic in education.  Yet unlike many other hot topics, it’s a little unclear what badges are and why they might be useful. Badges have baggage, meaning badges are entering education with a complex history of varied uses in non-educational settings. Before we can effectively implement educational badges, we have to unpack and understand the baggage.

Iridescent's experiences with teacher and school evaluation

We like to do things at scale, cheaply, fast and for the long term. So when we started working with a lot of schools in Los Angeles, I figured it would make sense to automate the process of finding lifelong partners.

We worked with Factual (a data company) to automatically collect data on school demographics, test scores, crime and parent involvement. This data was already available on the web. We worked with an information visualization group in Milan, called Density Design to develop the user interface that would help parents and organizations like Iridescent, find the right school. You can use the tool and learn all about it here.



After this tool was developed, we realized that we needed more data on the classroom level - i.e how committed a teacher would be to our partnership and we entered the labyrinth of teacher evaluation.
I came in very naively thinking that with my love for technology and efficiency and formulae, I would be able to develop a clean system that could provide data on how good schools and each teacher was. I wanted to give a voice to the most important people in this whole equation - children and parents. Using Factual's crowdsourcing tools, our vision was to provide a wiki base of school data (that was aggregated from the web) on top of which we could collect data for each teacher that was contributed by children and parents. Children and parents would fill out surveys that would evaluate various facets of teaching. In addition they would be able to upload videos as well.
Good teachers would be highlighted and awarded "Master Teachers" badges and would be invited to lead best practices conferences. In addition, we would collect videos of great teachers executing their craft and skills.
This was our vision.
We needed partners to make this happen and we dove into the haystack. What we found was many groups working on this problem in different corners of the room, some talking and learning from each other, but mostly not willing to collaborate. Each had spent significant amount of time and money going down a particular direction and didn't want to change. Each direction varied from the other only by a dot or a dash. I didn't come across even one really disruptive approach.
We were working in the Los Angeles Unified School District and heard much open-minded talk about open data, but in reality, the doors to collaboration and sharing of data were shut or going to be shut very soon.
What I learned was this:

• the problem is undoubtedly complex. There are many different school districts with different testing systems, different standards as the baseline. On top of that you have different grades and different skill sets to be mastered at every stage. Teachers can only be compared across narrow ranges.
• the problem needs undivided attention. It doesn't need a ton of money - as most school districts think. Technology can be intelligently leveraged to go very far, fast and do great things. But it does need undivided attention and focus. And for Iridescent it just didn't make sense as our undivided focus is on making children curious, courageous and persistent.
• the problem needs a fresh perspective. Towards the end we were going to use Facebook as a platform and offer badges and $1000 prizes to teachers who would be brave enough to share their own classroom data and solicit feedback from their children and parents. Nobody is the bad person here. Everyone wants to do a good job. That was our starting assumption. Then move forward building systems that help all groups learn and excel.

Although we stopped working on this project, I am very curious to see if some innovative soul takes it on and paints the canvas brilliantly.