Games, Gamification, and Apps

​Karl Kapp's TEDx Talk

TEDx Talks inspire us. In fact, the charity takes its name from learning design guru Karl Kapp's TEDx Talk. In this video, Dr. Kapp asks, "How can learning games help us think outside the box?"

​He review various life lessons games can teach. He tells one story of playing a video game with his son, Nate, and what he learned about innovation from that experience:

Many, many years ago I was playing a video game with my son and it was a game where you took off from the aircraft carrier, flew past some enemy airplanes around ships and to an island. It was a game that really caused me a lot of problems because I couldn't take off of that stupid aircraft carrier. Every time I tried to get my airplane it was shot down again and again and again. I just could not do it.
 
I looked away for a moment, my 8 year old son was playing the game and he got half way to the island with his airplane unscathed. I said, 'Nate, how did you take off from this aircraft carrier? I cannot take off.'He said, 'Dad, I didn't take off.' I said, 'What do you mean you didn't take off?' He said, 'Here, I'll show you.' He then proceeded to taxi his airplane off the left hand side of the aircraft carrier - right onto the ocean. He drove his airplane past the ships, too low for the airplanes to get him.
 
I couldn't believe it, he had found a flaw in the game that was so outside of my realm of consciousness and the consciousness of the developers, we couldn't even fathom it. To me, if you're sitting in an airplane as a pilot, on an aircraft carrier, you really only have one choice. It's to take off. What that taught me to think about was constraints. 

Are the constraints our own or are we constrained by the environment around us?
 
So video games let us think through these constraints and let us get outside of what is conventional and think unconventional things. I call that lesson Drive on the Ocean."

​​Gamification & Apps

​Learning games and apps inspire us. Research suggests that learning designers might want to reconsider utilizing content-heavy, 20th-century designs that do not appeal to 21st-century learners. Designers who rely on 20th-century methods, where learning was very formal from books, involved memorization, and was instructor-led, risk alienating these learners by underestimating their skills or misunderstanding their preferences.

Instead, cutting-edge designers might follow Adam Bosworth's lead. He is an amazing design guru from Microsoft/Google. He ran Google Health. Bosworth crafted a game where learners form groups within their companies and get a series of challenges, which they report on. This design is a significant innovation because global virtual teams can engage in challenges like this, which are engaging to 21st-century learners. These learning challenges could then be designed to illustrate certain ideas, test new business models, or dive interest more deeply into other topics. Currently, we are researching Bosworth's ideas to enhance learning.

"