Gamifying a course, phase 7: Fat points

One aspect of gamifying a course includes the use of points. Let’s  consider points and assignment values……and something referred to as fat points.

The majority of my personal academic experiences have been with assignments worth 100 points and adding up to 100 points.  That is just the way it was.  A 100-point essay that took me 20 hours to craft was worth the same number of points as a 100-point quiz.   Now, weight might have been different, but points were the same. Let’s shift to classes based on 100 points, making some assignments worth 3 points, another 7 points, and so forth, totaling 100 by the end of the course. An assignment worth 3 points does not sound that important to me, and as a busy adult with a lot of commitments, I may well choose to ignore a 3 point assignment, no matter useful that assignment may have been. Also, many courses start with 100 points, and student grades drop as the course progresses…..almost counter intuitive with regards to learning and performing.

Is it possible that I am the only one who feels that way? 

Evidently not.

When attending a Teaching Professor Technology Conference several years ago,  I heard Dr. Tom Heinzen speak about fat points and grading. I have pondered this topic and how to integrate it into my courses ever since, and I have found it both useful for me and and more descriptive for my students, resulting in higher quality projects.

http://www.gbelabs.com/projects-1/2016/7/13/fat-points

Heinzen, et al., (2014) suggest that grading schemes really do matter to students. These researchers discovered that students  view fractions as an unfair grading scheme, focusing on the distribution of effort required by the grading scheme. At the same time, these same students viewed a course with 10,000 points as fair.

Huh.

Just a cursory glance at Heinzen's results to the left shows us that  students equate points with fairness.

It appears as though we have an issue with numbers, or, in this instance, points. faculty trained on a 100-point system might want to consider other ways to reward  and assess students, emphasizing the importance of a project. I am not sure that weighting assignments delivers the true importance of a task, particularly if every task is scored on a 100-point scale. Game designers have taken advantage of this to motivate game players to engage in meaningless tasks…just to earn points. The most time-consuming the task (or level of difficulty), the higher the points earned.

Why do people spend so much time playing a game, just to get a good score? According to Schell (2015), games become "structures of judgement and people want to be judged" (220).  People want to be judged favorably, however, and rewards are a way of demonstrating to the player how well they have done.

Points matter.

Points are rewards.

We like rewards, and businesses have been rewarding us for decades. Remember Cracker Jack?  Each box has a toy inside...a reward... I remember as a teenager  filling  up my car at a local gas station, making sure that I would be able to pump at least 8 gallons in the tank to receive a free glass to complete a set that I was working on. Our Ingles grocery stores offer points based on purchase dollars. These points can then be used  - in increments of 100 - to  purchase gas at a discount of 5 cents per 100 points. You can believe that we schedule our shopping and gas pump visits to coincide.  Why pay an additional 40 cents per gallon when you don't have to?

We like rewards. Points are rewards.

After reading the above mentioned research and that by Schell (2015), I no longer base my courses or assignments on 100 points.  Each assignment is worth a specific number of points based on the  complexity and estimated length of time needed to complete tasks within the project. Effort and doubt also play in assigning a point value.  I see complexity as what students to have to “figure out”  in an assignment. I know they can solve the problem and complete the task. Students may also have a feel for how they will approach the task, but they still will need to figure it out….and that will take some time and thinking.  Effort is the sheer amount of work that students need to do to complete the assignment. Doubt comes into play  with regards to student perceptions of the difficulty of an assignment as they may doubt their ability to complete the assignment.

So, the more complex the assignment, the more effort required, the more thought needed….the higher the point value. One such assignment in this gamified course is their Experiences Paper, worth  1000 points. Students complete three interviews, 3 shadowing experiences, transcribe each interview, analyze their findings  thematically, integrate peer-reviewed research, reflect upon their experiences and lessons learned, and compile this into a qualitative research paper. Surely this much effort is worth more than 100 points!

I equate a day's worth of time (8 hours) to 200 points, so a 1000 points assignment, to me, requires approximately 40 hours of work o the students' part.  this includes every single task, from identifying the interviewees, the sending emails to arrange the interviews,  writing drafts, revising drafts...and so forth.

Blog posts requiring students synthesize research to support their approach are worth 250 points as they had to identify their topic, locate peer-reviewed research, read  and evaluate the research, then craft a solid blog post demonstrating best practices of blogging.

So, how does this work in a gamified course based on experience points (XP)? Howe does this work in Canvas?

Just as various game tasks earn points, so do various course tasks.

In some instances, students earn points for messaging me the names and titles of their interviewees. I set this up as an assignment worth 50 points (allotting for their identifying three different interviewees EARLY in the assignment) in Canvas. Reading assignments are also worth 50 points, and students submit a message to me as well to earn those points.

While I do use Assignment Groups I do not assign points to the groups, only to the individual assignments. The gradebook function is set to "treat ungraded as 0," and student pathways show number of XP they have earned....and their next steps to earning more.

At the midpoint of the semester, I plan to survey students regarding points, badges, pathways and such for feedback, so more on that later...

What's next?  Oopsies in course design....

References

Heinzen, T. Salazar, A., Shipway,B., Kim, T. & Paterson, W. (2014). Fat points and game mechanics (When the points don't matter, they really do). Paper presented at the 2nd Annual CUNY Games Festival Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, NY.

Schell, J. (2015). The art of game design: A book of lenses, (2nd ed.)NY: CRC Press