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Over the past four months since schools closed, I’ve mostly been doing two things: playing video games and freaking out about how to plan a curriculum for a pandemic. Weirdly enough, the former has actually helped me (start to) figure out the latter. Here’s a quick thread on how:
Video games are fundamentally educational. They don’t usually teach the same skills we learn in school, but they do teach skills – hand-eye coordination, reflexes, strategy, rhythm, etc.
All games essentially teach you a skill, gradually ramp up the difficulty of that skill, and then assess your understanding (often with boss fights). Then you do it again, but harder. This is called the “core gameplay loop.”
Let’s take the familiar game of PAC-MAN as an example of this. In PAC-MAN, your objective is always the same: clear the board of pellets while avoiding the ghosts.
The skill being taught here is planning ahead, as you have to plan your moves to avoid the ghosts’ predictable paths of movement and get the big pellets to eat them when avoidance is impossible.
When you clear the board in PAC-MAN, you are immediately given a new board, with more pellets and faster ghosts. This repeats infinitely until the player can’t do it anymore: it’s the core gameplay loop.
One happy side-effect of the way PAC-MAN works is that the difficulty eventually adjusts to accommodate the skill of the player, which is applicable to school as well, but I’ll get to that eventually.
All games have a core gameplay loop, whether it’s doging increasingly complex obstacles to get to the end of a stage in SUPER MARIO BROS or switching between weapons to take on increasingly dangerous monsters in DOOM. Struggle, learn, repeat.
And now for how this is useful to teachers. Our classes always inherently have somewhat of a core gameplay loop, as the tasks we present to our students are repetitive. In English class, this usually manifests as the mantra: read about it, talk about it, write about it.
But the core gameplay loop is going to be way more important this year. I usually plan these complex multi-unit semester plans, in which the themes of my texts build upon one another and everything (at least theoretically) has a sense of universal coherence. That’s harder now.
It’s harder now because some of my students will be with me in the classroom and some of my students will be online, so it’s hard to design content that works for both of them. And things are so unpredictable now that we have to be prepared to switch at a moments notice.
Stated plainly, it is extremely hard to plan curriculum for a whole semester when you don’t know what that semester will look like on the front end. So I don’t think I’m going to make that kind of plan this year, at least not now – I’m going to make a core gameplay loop instead.
We need simple lesson plans and simple assignments that can be presented in any medium, can be repeated as many times as necessary, and will naturally adjust to to meet students’ skill levels and stress levels. We always need these things, but we especially need them now.
Just to think out loud for a bit, here’s an idea I’m playing with: what if, every week, all students had to find a recent article that interested them and write a short argument about how we could use the information contained within that article to improve the world in some way.
Then in-class, I could pick a volunteer or random non-volunteer to share their article and their essay and facilitate an impromptu class discussion about the reliability of the article and the validity of the student’s argument.
This could be repeated as many times as I need. It’s not an overarching semester plan; it’s a core gameplay loop. And it teaches the stuff I always need to teach: reading, writing, discussion, research skills, etc.
Having students select their own texts and do regular writing for class feedback does that thing I mentioned earlier about difficulty level being based on skill. Everyone will (theoretically) find texts in their own skill level and get feedback based on what their specific needs.
This plan also builds community because my students are learning about each others’ interests. Community-building is of fundamental importance every year, but it will be especially hard with social distancing and virtual learning. But I think this could work in either context.
As a side note, the above plan also aligns with my teaching philosophy (informed by Friere’s PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED) that the purpose of education is to help students see the world as fundamentally changeable. This is especially important as things are changing below our feet.
This plan is very specific to my content area and the guiding principle of the core gameplay loop may not work for everyone (especially disciplines that build in a very routine way, like algebra or biology). But I found it clarifying in all this uncertainty and wanted to share.
Video games are good, actually.
~fin~
~fin~
