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Gamification at AMD’s Game On! Texas 2011
Evan Smith and Sandra Day O’Connor. Photo by Jason Walker, provided by AMD
On Tuesday, an eclectic collection of educators, video game designers and marketers, politicians, nonprofit staffers and a former Supreme Court Justice gathered on the AMD campus to talk about the so-called “Gamification” of education and how the power of gaming can be harnessed by schools and businesses.
What’s “gamification?” A buzzword at South by Southwest Interactive, it was explained succinctly in a slide by Rodney Gibbs of Austin’s Ricochet Labs, the maker of the popular quiz game “Qrank”: “Gamification is a process of using game thinking and game mechanics to engage audience and solve problems.”
[Let’s not quibble about the spelling; I’ve also seen it as “Gameification.” We should make a game out of figuring out whether the “e” belongs in there.]
The day began with an upbeat, often hilarious keynote presentation featuring Texas Tribune CEO and editor-in-chief Evan Smith interviewing former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In 2009, O’Connor helped launch iCivics (originally called “Our Courts”), a gaming-oriented website meant to teach the kind of information that the nation’s disappearing middle and high school civics courses used to impart. “Half the states have stopped teaching it,” she said.
O’Connor said that there’s a general lack of understanding about the way the courts work that led to its creation, but since then iCivics has expanded to also tackle the legislative and executive branches as well.
The free site has been enthusiastically received by students and educators, she said, but it’s been a struggle to get schools to adopt it. O’Connor said she was planning to focus on Texas because of its size and influence in the education industry. She said she hopes “It will have a widespread, contagious effect” if Texas schools begin using iCivics.
A separate keynote presentation in the afternoon featured Disney Interactive executive producer Starr Long interviewed by a witty and handsome American-Statesman reporter named Omar L. Gallaga.
In the presentation, Long, who is working on a major Disney project that he’s not yet able to discuss publicly, hinted that Disney is looking to create more online-originated properties and that they will likely have strong social and online elements, like “Club Penguin,” which the company acquired in 2007.
Long, who is not based on Los Angeles with the company, was a longtime fixture in the Austin gaming community. He worked on many projects at Origin System including the long-running “Ultima Online” (which is still active) and later worked with Richard Garriott at NCSoft on the ill-fated online game “Tabula Rasa.”
Disney Interactive recently restructured some of its business and laying off employees. Long said that despite the shuffling and the shift in the industry to so-called social gaming (like “Farmville”), the company doesn’t plan to abandon console game like last year’s Austin-developed “Epic Mickey.”
Other sessions through the day focused on ways that the state of Texas can work to spur more educational game development on the state, how schools are using game design courses, how to use games to train and inform and whether the state is educating enough game development talent to feed the industry. A set of sessions explored principles, rules and mechanics of game design as a group exercise.
At the start of the day, it was announced that Austin’s Girlstart was receiving a grant from the AMD Foundation to fund game design education programs for this year’s Girlstart Summer Camps. The camps, for 4th through 10th graders, are being expanded nationwide near AMD sites in Silicon Valley, Bellevue, Ft. Collins, Orlando and Boston.
A few common threads I heard throughout the day included frustration with the state’s education bureaucracy in adopting new technologies (which could include gaming-focused online tools or new kinds of e-textbooks), worry about whether making everything gaming-centric might be detrimental to helping kids learn for learning’s sake and, not surprisingly, concern over costs in a brutal budget environment.
The day concluded on a more positive note with a video showing off a National STEM video game design challenge that was sponsored by AMD, Microsoft, the Electronic Software Association and others. It featured kids winningly talking about their game design projects. You can see it below. Warning: it will fill your heart with hope. Curmudgeons beware.
One of the finalists, Manor 5th-grader Rhys Wynn Wilkinson (pictured above right) was awarded a laptop and will be receiving a letter from the White House.
On stage, Wilkinson revealed that the previously untitled game he designed now has a name. He’s calling it “Dinosaur Sustainability.”
Edited at 5:45 p.m. to add information about Girlstart.
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