Teachers are using games to level up the power of their lessons.

It’s a new day in the land of Scientia Terra, and a new adventure is about to begin.

“Guys, go to your guilds,” says teacher/game-master Scott Hebert to his Grade 8 science class. The students break up into teams with names like Clouds of Glory, Fire Skulls, or Chef, ready to begin.

To enter Hebert’s room is to step into adventure. Axes, potions and war hammers dot the walls. Dragons soar overhead. Miniature wizards and warriors battle on every shelf and surface. There’s a dragon’s cave, a blacksmith, an item shop, and a fortress – everything you need for an epic final fantasy.

New today are a series of envelopes, figurines and arrows on a table at the front of the room. This is a choose-your-own-adventure game, Hebert explains, and it represents the class’s quest to free the city of Optica Lux from the crushing coils of the fiendish Photocobra. Each envelope contains a story and a quest they’ll have to solve using their knowledge of optics and light, and will get them one step closer to slaying their serpentine foe.

“There’s prizes, there’s deception, there’s mini-games,” Hebert tells the students. You might do battle with monsters or even each other. Do well, and you’ll earn unique items to help you on future quests. Do badly, and, well, there’s always the Continue screen.

Soon the students are off and running, reading their initial quests and advancing their game pieces towards gold, experience points, and knowledge.

A teacher at Fort Saskatchewan’s Our Lady of the Angels Catholic School, Hebert has turned his class into a yearlong adventure game. He’s on the leading edge of a new trend of gamification in education, where teachers are using game to level-up learning.



Class-time playtime

Hebert was one of a number of speakers at the Shaw Conference Centre last Feb. 8 and 9 for the North Central Teachers’ Convention – a gathering of some 6,500 teachers from St. Albert and other regions around Edmonton. Many of the sessions there were on games and toys in the classroom.

Gamification is the idea of using game mechanics in non-game circumstances, Hebert says. Its proponents argue that the fun, competition, and reward structures of games can change people’s behaviours.

“Fun is important in humans,” Hebert says – if you’re having fun, you’re more likely to relax, pay attention, and participate. If you’re not – say, if you have to sit in a boring lecture – you tense up and act out.

Hebert says he started out teaching science the traditional way, but noticed that his students weren’t engaging with the material.

Remembering a YouTube video he saw on games in the classroom, Hebert started researching gamification. Inspired by the monsters/quests/loot gameplay of the hit computer game Diablo, he launched The Fight for Scientia Terra in 2015. In it, students play mercenaries fighting to free the land of Scientia Terra from the evil Minotaur King. To do so, they’ll have to perform science-themed tasks to liberate five cities, each of which is based on a different part of the curriculum, from the king’s five generals, of which Photocobra is one.

Hebert’s students do quests instead of assignments and earn experience points instead of grades. Instead of groups, they have guilds – complete with cool code names and heraldry – that compete with each other on the experience point scoreboards. Students that do exceptionally well on quests may win gold or other resources they can exchange for in-game bonuses or real-life privileges, such as hints on tests or control of Hebert’s Instagram account.

“Tests are boss battles,” Hebert says, where each right answer knocks a heart off the boss’s life bar – something that gives some students an incentive to study.

“Kids will cheer and yell and scream and be all gung-ho about crossing hearts off. It’s kind of funny.”

While Hebert does do some traditional teaching to introduce concepts, he says most of his class time is spent on hands-on, open-ended quests done in groups.

“I want to immerse the kids in it,” he says, so they become hooked on the storylines and games.

“They want to come here every day.”

Fellow Our Lady of the Angels teacher and presenter Vernon Brady gamified his classroom about four years ago. Instead of an adventure game, he has his kids tackle escape-room-like breakout boxes as a way to review math lessons.

“I love games,” Brady said, and these boxes were a way to get students interested in his lessons.

“I want them to come to my class because they want to be there, not because they have to be there.”

Brady says he breaks out the breakout boxes about four times a year. Each is a box secured with multiple locks. Students break into teams to solve puzzles (math-related ones in this case) linked to a storyline to find the combinations and keys needed to crack the locks, all under a nerve-wracking time-limit.

In the scenario he ran this week, for example, the story was that the school’s principal had locked all his candy in a box and now couldn’t remember how to open it. His students had to decipher the clues the principal left for himself open the box before the candy melted at the end of class. To open the locks, they had to solve fraction-based equations encoded in short stories (the solution to which served as a lock code), find hidden messages with a UV lamp, and search for physical keys hidden in the classroom.



Bonus points

The storylines give kids a reason to stay engaged with the lesson, Brady says.

“If we did not have the back-story, it would just be ‘solve a problem to get to the next problem.’”

The time limit also ups the excitement, he adds.

“When you opened that first lock, boom! The adrenaline just pumped,” he told teachers in his session at the conference, who got to try their own breakout boxes.

“It was kind of like, ‘I want another one!’”

Brady says his students get so into these games that one time when he hid a clue as a QR code in the school’s library they almost trampled a teacher in their haste to get there.

One particularly stubborn student initially refused to play, and was given a worksheet to do outside instead. But after a few minutes of hearing his classmates having fun, Brady says he saw the kid’s head slowly peeking around the corner, so he invited him back in.

“Twelve minutes later (I hear) ‘Mr. Brady! I got one!’” he says, as the kid cracked his first lock.

By putting students under a tense time limit and presenting them with obscure puzzles, Brady says he shows them how to work under pressure and encourages teamwork, perseverance, and experimentation.

Brady and Hebert have also seen evidence that these games help their students learn. Hebert says he saw his students’ marks improve by seven to 12 percentage points in the first year after he started his game, and has had graduates of that game credit it for their later interest in science. That one stubborn kid Brady encountered struggled with math, but went on to ace the part of the test that dealt with the material covered in the breakout game.

“We see an increase in engagement and an increase in achievement,” Brady says.

Games can encourage creativity. Hebert says he encourages his students to design and build new elements of the game. The fortress at the back is one example, as are the series of potion bottles one girl was creating.

Quests also encourage creative solutions. One quest in Hebert’s game asks teams to help a scientist who’s losing his memory to physically preserve his knowledge of cells, for example. While many teams built simple cell models, Hebert says one made a coffee mug with all the cell’s organelles on the bottom and the coffee representing cytoplasm, and knew enough about the subject to explain the model to him.

“It was this incredible depth of knowledge (shown) and all I said was ‘preserve,’” he said.



Education at the next level

Hebert believes games can help prepare students for the future. Thinkers such as Jack Ma, one of the world’s richest men, say memorization and repetition won’t cut it anymore in a world where robots could take over millions of jobs, he notes.

“If we teach in the same way, if we teach the way a robot can do it, then a robot will replace you,” he says.

“We have to prepare them for the world they live in, which is a collaborative world, a creative world.”

Hebert suggests starting out by integrating a few basic games into your classroom. Many lessons can be broken up into parts that work well with a choose-your-own-adventure format, he notes.

Hebert is still improving his game, and regularly taps his students for new props and ideas. He plans to keep running the game until he retires.

Will Hebert’s students fell the Minotaur King?

“So far we’re two-for-two on winning,” Hebert says, referring to past years, but they’ll have to keep their grades up to win the final battle.

The fate of Scientia Terra, and their report cards, lies in their hands.