The Power of Gamification in Education | Scott Hebert | TEDxUAlberta

I'm here to talk about education I've been a teacher since 2009 I would ask you really simply if education was an investable tradable commodity would you be interested in investing in it when we think about education and we think about investment they don't go hand in hand when you want to invest in something you want something that's fluid something that's dynamic something it's gonna be changing adapting with the times and then you get education which may be the most static stagnant thing that exists that is accepted if I bought a computer from Apple if I

brought a computer from any computer company and they told me you can buy stock in my company but I'll never change the product I would immediately turn around and walk away but in education we love that and that is the the problem and I've had as a teacher since I entered the profession now people argue with me all the time they say well of course education is change and I'd say yes it's changed superficially the same exact way this girl is the exact same person she is underneath her sit underneath these copious layers of makeup

she's not changing herself at the core and that's what I'm talking about in a change in education can you change education at the core get away from grades get away from all these ridiculous standards and expectations and realize that we are dealing with a population that is there to gain knowledge from us in a space that should be free of judgment we should be able to construct them criticisms give them constructive criticism without them being fearful of taking risk now education doesn't always look this way this is me waiting for kindergarten my first day of

kindergarten I apparently waited for like I believe my mom told me 22 minutes at the end of this driveway why because waste school was supposed to be when I was a young lad in this chair here at four or five years old was exactly what I saw on Sesame Street and Barney and all these shows I watched on TV supposed to be fun dynamic engaging playing with friends I should be digging in sand boxes to learn about things not reading and writing are not writing about them worksheets and education started as a absolutely incredible place

for me now again god bless my mom when I moved from Ontario tell Berta she scrapbook my life which is awesome I always bring this in for throwback Thursdays at school at school and I like kids look but the beautiful part about this is this is every school photo I've ever had taken of me and check out what happens between grade five and six so why stop smiling it's where my education experience goes down the proverbial toilet and it does this because it's one play and fun and discovery based learning is eliminated in favor of

worksheets and straight rows and silence and order and regime last I checked very few workplaces like that as a matter of fact I don't think any speaker that was on this stage today talked about being orderly being following direction and on all these things they talked about being creative and innovative and I don't think school does that so I quoted myself because why not and I realized after a few years of quote-unquote research and I'll get to how I did that in a second I realized that the education system is a system that is totally

in an engagement crisis we blame the kids and we blame lack of resources and we blame all these things when in reality these kids are bored and what do we do when we're bored the same thing you point be doing right now if you're bored of me you are looking at your phone you are counting the amount of lights on the ceiling you are determining if your shoelaces are tied perfectly you are doing everything to entertain yourself when you are bored in a situation and that is what I think school is for kids now like

any good educator I ask myself what would Bill Murray do and Bill Murray of course would tell me to make a difference why do I use Bill Murray when Bill Murray was stuck in Groundhog Day arguably his best film he turned around and he said okay I finally realized what the issue is I'm a jerk to everybody and I need to fix being a jerk in order to advance out of this problem and he does and everyone's happy and he learns a life lesson that's exactly what needs to happen in education we have to realize

that education to kids is ground all day every single day so I said yes Bill Murray I will I will make a difference so here's my research you have to understand something as an educator I can tell you that the single biggest untapped resource in education are the students we will ask every single person what they need except them and they'll tell you so I sat down with them and I said all right what do you guys dislike about school because I was fortunate enough to start my career in kindergarten to grade for phys ed

where you saw kids loving school they were so fired up about school they'd come off the bus they tell me about everything that they did that day even though I had no clue what they were talking about but they were excited then I had a career change and I ended up in a grade eight science class massively different totally different set of hormones were dealing with in grade eight and all of a sudden I had kids who couldn't care about anything I was talking about and the kids that care didn't care for the right reason

they cared because they're often scared about their parents being just disappointed about the grades so I said well do I really want to do this for the next 20-some years of my career add to the cycle I think is broken so I talked to the kids and I got three common trends first thing I got is kids told me flat out school is boring it is repetitive it is the same thing every class I go to except instead of science I get math instead of math I get social and they go forward and forward and

forward with this continuously now I learned to check my ego at the door as a teacher pretty quickly and what I actually heard when I wasn't angry and I wasn't like oh what do you mean my class was boring I they said give me a reason to care about this stuff because at 13 why the heck do I have to know what a mitochondria is I don't even know how to spell mitochondria and I even I don't even know how I got to this classroom all I know is that if I look at my phone

and I go to kids then my tongue will pop out like a dog and that's way more important to me than vents then biology so I was like okay that's totally logical I've been 13 I wasn't too interested in that content so I come across in Brittany Brown came up a lot today like just read her stuff she is so phenomenal and she says you know what if we want to reignite passion we have to humanize work and you could literally just cross out work in this code and pop in school you have to make

kids believe that they are doing something for a reason for a purpose second common thing I got is kids feel like they have no choice in anything all the time and I don't disagree with that at all I hear it and I've lived it this is the project you have to do with these stipulations and this rubric is how its marked and that's all you get and all of a sudden the kid who's like got this wicked idea gets buried and it falls to the copy-paste I used to drive me nuts as a teacher the

first year I taught this every project was the same why cuz they googled the project and whatever the first hit was was what the project was even if they had no idea what it was they literally were like I don't even know what this is but here it is that's what you wanted and it fits every criteria the rubric so sucker you got to give me a hundred percent and I'm like to all men that's again good logic so I said what are they actually saying they're saying trust me because I have a brain in

between these ears and I can do something and that's backed entirely Daniel H pink who is a TED talk ER and a business leader talks about how control leads the compliance however autonomy leads to engagement so I said okay I got these ideas now now they're starting to drive around on my head and the third one and this is my favorite because I'm all about passion and that's what this stage is for why can't I do things in the way that I want to do them which exactly from a teacher's perspective says can you just

let me be creative for a second can you let me take this rubric that I don't like and shred it and just I'll you want me to build this I'll build it but I want to use my stipulations and my parameters and I want to inject music cause I'm passionate about music no problem and that again is totally backed and this is being forecasted as a huge problem in education at the World Economic Forum in February and I'm gonna say this name hopefully good me news Shafiq who is the head of the London School of

Economics as well as John MA I think it's John mauve not mistaken who is the richest man in Asia founder of Alibaba is warning the world that the projection by 2030 is an elimination of 800 million jobs due to autumn ization because he said and I love this quote as a teacher if a robot can do it better than a person someone's gonna pick a robot over a human and what a school do school says here's everything I just told you got it write it on a paper good you're smart but in reality the kids

often have no concept what they're writing because I didn't go deeper so I said all right what am I gonna do about this autonomy engagement engagement crisis no control no choice all these problems and I said well let's go back to our absolute founding roots I'm a physique meter as my degree so plate is so fundamental to me and it's so important to me so I looked around and I said okay did some googling and I came across this concept in 2015 very in its infancy and education called gamification and what is it it literally

means take the principles of game design and plunk them in an area where there's no game like school matter of fact school is probably the most anti game thing you can have we are however totally victimized by gamification on a daily basis how many of you by Tim Hortons coffee right now specifically because roll up the rim I do my coffee consumption goes up a hundred times because I just want to roll up and get another subpar coffee but there's nothing more I can do about that how many of us have a credit card where

you go around and on that credit card you had a choice between a regular one or a points one and then you get a points credit card and you're like I'm totally screwing the system all these purchases are getting me points then you're like sweet I got 72,000 points what am I gonna get a toaster awesome this is a seventy two thousand dollar toaster so now we have problems and issues with this so I said okay I'm gonna do it but now the problem I got when I talked about gamification in its early infancy was

people said gamers big slobby people live in their basement and I'm like oh seriously we still talk about this no this guy is actually hyper dedicated to what he does and if I could get kids this dedicated about science I'm totally doing my job the second thing is that games are just absolutely littered littered with creativity-wise minecraft so popular in terms of the actual gaming community it is simply because it is a sandbox game if you want don't want to no one has to tell you anything they're literally just like here's some blocks and put

them on other blocks and holy cow why are you playing this for 14 hours but they will why because someone will come to this castle and go oh my god dude that's amazing and you're like it is amazing I am awesome and I'm gonna go ahead and build more things and they just get absolutely stuck in the fact that they are doing something a hundred percent at their choice and let's just not forget this there's nothing wrong with play and fun so many times I meet parents who are like well when you were playing I

mean how can you be learning and I'm like so you're calling play the antithesis of fun and they're like if that means what I said then yes and I'm like okay so you're telling me then that when when we play we learn nothing it is a hundred percent a waste of time and energy no point proven animals play to teach themselves things like you know hunting skills and survival skills and all that we play for entertainment but there's also these quick things that we gain with like reaction speeds and all these kinds of different things

that actually can come through games so I said okay I'm going to do it so in 2015 I Unleashed something called the fight for scientist arrow which is nothing more than the fight for science land but it sounds way cooler in Latin so I went about it and I stripped my classroom bare and I said I am gonna find out what's actually valuable to you do you need desks do you need chairs to learn or is that something that teachers think you need so they build their furniture in my room that teaches stem learning something

that I couldn't get through they do practical application of all of their knowledge continuously we build things to help people to save people we battle monsters in trivia contests we go through through say us helping younger children you come across in this game by delivering lessons to them that they memorize to then go help their own communities and yacht and the whole concept is wrapped around eliminating rote memorization because rote memorization is useless this device that we all carry in our pocket will do anything and everything I need it to do at the moment I

needed so why would I say hey while you write this test you don't get to use that but when you start your career you get to use that it's completely hypocritical so I decided to just use it all the time so I thought I was a genius I was like man this is awesome Gosling's gonna tweet me hey Scott you know let's get some coffee you're doing fantastic work but in reality I got a lot of backlash the reason I got a lot of backlash it's because I realized three things when you want to innovate

you want to create and you want to change we are a fearful of change especially in education here's why if my parents learned in desks and their parents learned in desks and rows and quiet regime well I'm screwing up the future if they are not in desks because look at all the cool stuff we've done our society with desks and I go whoa wait a second if you read a lot of the research or a lot of the quotes about people they were anti desk and a lot of them didn't even finish high school and

use their own creative processes to develop the things that are so famous today the second thing I realized we don't like failure however at every teaching conference and convention I go they bring up some researcher who says we need to fail and then we're like okay sure what's the best practice I don't know but that's something we should definitely be doing and I say okay so we're cool with like Pinterest fails these are viral right here's the thing we tried it but when it comes to a classroom I saw how resistive teachers were about failing

in front of their kids and I'm like but wait a second you want them to fail but you don't ever so I will purposely teach lessons and experiments that screw up and then have kids pick apart why it went wrong and pretend like I had no clue unless they watch this and now they're in on it but I will do these things to show them that I want them to take risks now this again is probably the quote I live by I was fortunate enough last year to go from convention to Global News to the

front page of the Edmonton Journal to making the front page of Reddit with this approach to where I started getting really awesome keyboard warrior comments about how was ruining the future pandering to kids good releasing another generation of snowflakes whatever that even means and I real and this was hard for me I was like man I'm really trying so hard to do good for kids I just wanted to care about school I don't care about grades and all that I mean let's let's be honest here let's go back to the incredible talk by Shelby grades

in grade 8 are about as useless as bringing a bikini armor to a sword fight they mean nothing the only time grades matters when they go to university and that's like you know sometimes you do at the tail end of grade 10 11 and 12 my grade a kid wears as a badge that tells him or her if they are good at said subject and my job is to make sure that number can be as high as possible so that they believe that they are good at that subject and they might invite future passions and

innovations and creativity instead subject but if my goal is I don't care about you you're just a number on a paper and I'm just going to push you through the system boom boom boom then I'm not doing my job kids need to know that in the arena of Education I am not on the outside clapping for them they need to know that I'm in the arena fighting alongside them picking them up when they fall down brushing them off and saying it is okay because that is what is going to create the future innovators that we

so badly need with all the crazy problems that the current situations we are in global warming problems with food and water and all these different kinds of things we need crazy wild innovative thinking not someone who can say the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell I'm gonna write that down and I'm gonna pretend that I'm good at biology that's what school is so back to this quote I got lamb basted by people and I took really really took it to heart till I realize I don't need to be a jackass whisperer I do not

need to tell people who think it's stupid why it's not I need those kids in my classroom to believe in what we and believe in themselves and each other and we're gonna be fine so really it's up to you in whatever facet of work that you have whether it is business whether it is you know engineering since that's a whole bunch of things we had about today about engineering we've come a lot about innovation and it is your job to take that risk I love the news talking about stepping off that carpet take that risk

and see what comes out of it and listen to the people you work with and work for because they will tell you now I love this quote I want you to think in your mind when this was said if we teach today as we talk tomorrow ours we taught yesterday we robbed students of tomorrow this was set in 1917 that is a hundred and one years old this year that this quote was said 101 years ago we identified the education system needed to change 101 years later Here I am talking about it and I better

not be here 101 years from now which would be cool talking about it again thank you [Applause]