This is part two of a one long blog on how great video game design can inform great curriculum design. Check out the first blog on Dark Souls here. This one focuses on Super Meat Boy, a game that’s a lot easier to explain than Dark Souls. Imagine Mario. It’s a platformer with super simple controls. Run, jump, move left and right. Try to get to the girl at the end of the level without dying. If you make it, you move on to the next level. If you die, you immediately start back at the beginning of the level you’re on. That’s it, but it demands very exacting skill to complete it at 100%. It’s known for its difficulty and, because of it, has the same deep sense of reward and classroom parallels previously listed in the Dark Souls analysis. What Super Meat Boy does better than Dark Souls, though, is make the failure fun. It makes learning challenging without making it frustrating.
Edmund McMillen created Super Meat Boy, and in the interviewed linked / discussed in the previous blog, he says the following on how he went about making a really difficult game that wasn’t frustrating to play:
Edmund McMillen: “In order for things to be rewarding, they need to be challenging. That said, I try to make sure things aren’t frustrating. I think that’s the big thing people lost when it went from the class NES era when games were really hard but really frustrating too. Jump to the consoles of today and everybody wants to make games f$#$#% easy and so everyone can beat em’. There was just something lost in there, and I think people look back on old games and say “that is the flawed way of doing things, nobody wants to play hard games anymore, they want to pay their $60 and see the end of the movie.” That’s essentially what it is and I don’t think games were made to be that way. Like….you don’t play chess because you’re going to win every time. It’s important to feel accomplished, and you can’t feel that if you’re not realistically challenged. So, you know, my games are hard. But not in a bad way. In the best way possible.”
Interviewer: So how do you design the difficulty and ramp it up as the game goes?
Edmund McMillen: “I don’t know, I don’t know If I can put that into words. As far as removing frustration, it’s about trying to think about things as logically as possible and trying to get rid of all the old video game tropes. Like, question things. Like, in the new Mario, why do coins even exist when lives are pointless? Like, what? You’re going to continue and then continue again (you get infinite lives)? Why does the one up mushroom matter anymore with endless lives? They mattered in the first game, because when you died you went back to the beginning…. but not anymore. Yet they still remain. And that was just the basic foundation of my thought process when making the game.Like, what worked then that doesn’t now and how can I apply that to the game. And then just going down the line and applying it to the game to avoid frustration. So, like, how is frustration created in Meat Boy? Well, frustration is created by having a penalty. Well what’s the penalty in Meat Boy if you don’t have a life system? Well, the penalty is how much time it takes to start playing again if you fail. So, if you take that down to nothing, what do we have penalty wise? Well, then it becomes how long it takes to get from start to finish. What if we take the start to finish and make it really small? Well, the penalty becomes the visual. Like, how long do I see that I think it will take me to get to the end of the level that would discourage me if I die. Okay, let’s make sure the goal is always on the screen. And….you know...it’s little stuff, but you’re chipping away at it until it becomes close to perfect.
Take both bolded lines above and apply them to a classroom. First of all, how can we “chip away” at that frustration to make classroom experiences more enjoyable? Secondly, what are the old curriculum tropes that turn kids off learning or that make learning frustrating?
Chipping Away at Frustration
I love the whole last bolded quote. We talk a lot about backwards planning in education to create aligned curriculum, but it’s just as advantageous when thinking about frustration in the classroom. Simply asking, “How is frustration created in this lesson?” or “How is frustration created in my classroom?”, then working back from that question, can go a long way in improving engagement. Sometimes frustration points are obvious, sometimes they’re not. I’ve started to just ask student. I use Google Form surveys to ask kids, point blank, “what about this class frustrates you?” I’ve included one of the responses I’ve gotten from that question at right, which completely changed my classroom management system. Instead of using a team based system and “strikes” for misbehavior, I shifted to an individualized system using Class Dojo that kids really grew to appreciate. It was a change that removed a source of frustration from my room, and it helped create a culture that kids could buy in to.
Thinking broader, if I had to guess, frustration in classrooms probably most often comes from:
1. Kids lacking interest or not seeing the value in the content
2. Kids don’t like all the “work”
3. Students don’t feel “heard”
4. Kids are bored
5. Kids don’t like all the rules
Addressing each of these sources of frustration is beyond the scope of a single blog post, especially considering that the “fix” for each will look different by teacher and content. That said, speaking from experience, there’s tremendous value in asking “what are the sources of frustration in my classroom” and working backwards to minimize them as much as possible. More on that below.
The Old Tropes that Still Remain
Beyond this process, though, what are the” coins” and “one-up mushrooms” of education that hang around out of tradition rather than value? A lot comes to mind, but the most important are grades. I know that’s a big place to start, but when I think about them, they’re a classroom mechanic that no longer need to exist in a digital world. They existed, historically, because they were the best way to get a measure of what a kid did or didn’t understand. They allow for easy ranking and comparison. That said, in our newly digital world, they’re outdated.
First off, kids don’t like em’ for a myriad of reasons. Grades too often feel like punishment. They’re interpreted as a measurement of intelligence rather than as a snapshot of understanding. They stress kids out and feel arbitrary or subjective rather than objective and factual. Often, kids are punished for them. I’ve had parents take away phones, videos games, or Netflix for C’s. Many student athletes have to sit out of games because of them. That’s all fine, it’s tough love, but it still frustrates the kid. That frustration does motivate them to get their grades up, but they’re only doing it to get their phone back or play on Friday night or logon to the Xbox again, not because they care about the learning. A kick in the butt is fine for motivation, but not if it comes at the cost of kids caring about learning.
Secondly, many teachers don’t like em’. I hate that kids ask “what can I do to get my grade up” rather than “what can I do to understand this stuff better?”. I hate that kids take grades as a measurement of how “smart” they are. I also get frustrated when a kid works somewhat hard on something, earns an 80%, gets a B…...and then just moves on. They don’t understand 20% of the content of that assignment, and that 20% may be VITAL to understanding future content! Yet they are free to move on all the same. That’s broken.
Grades are an old trope in education that we don’t need anymore. They were once needed, as it was the only realistic way to provide measurement of learning in a non-digital world. But in the digital era, where countless formative assessment applications allow us to challenge student’s understanding repeatedly, without too many costs in terms of time for students or time for teachers in grading, it makes no sense that we haven’t adopted more standards based grading systems whereby kids move one when they understand something rather than when they’ve met the bare minimum requirement (ie. you got a 70%,so you passed, even though they don’t get 30% of the content).
Intrinsic in this is giving kids the ability to repeat assignments or tasks if they fail the first time, including tests. We’ve all taught the kid that the content didn’t come easy to, but he/she still worked hard enough to have a high grade in the class. I’ve found that it’s these kids that are frustrated the most by not being able to retake failed tests or quizzes. They worked so hard and still got a 78%….and we’re only going to give them that one shot? I don’t think that’s right, especially if understanding is the goal. I let kids retake any assignment, including summative tests, in my class. For formative assessments, they just resubmit their first attempt by fixing all the problems they got wrong. They can earn back up to a 100% for doing so. I don’t see the point in penalizing them for getting it wrong the first time. The only real source of frustration, then, is in the time it takes to redo the assignment. You can get that down quite a bit if you assign work digitally, but I understand those resources may not always be available. For summative assessments, my kids are able to retake tests at least once. In order to do so, they must complete a basic study guide to prove that they’ve studied. I also tweak questions on the second attempt. Again, the only real source of frustration here is in the time it takes to complete the study guide and the test retake, which kids will do if they’re motivated by their learning. Right now, redo’s are an option given our grading system, but a mastery based system would make re-dos mandatory and, I think, would force kids to care more about their understanding of content.
As I write this, I can’t help but think about a self paced classroom whereby curriculum is implemented individually (likely using a computer) and kids move at their own pace through it. This type of structure would allow for the varied time it takes students to understand content in a mastery based system. This is something that I want to pursue in my class moving forward and something that, I think, will be the norm in schools once we allow technology to be fully integrated into classrooms.
Aside from grades, the next biggest source of frustration for students is a simple one: They’d rather be doing something else. Either they’re not interested in the content OR, more often, they’d rather be hanging out with their friends or playing sports or doing something that they actually like to do, not learn about….idk….the Electoral College or whatever. This is the most difficult “frustration” to chip away at, but it can be done. First of all, I’ve tried as much as possible to make learning social. Kids just want to hang out with their friends, so what if we just made class a place where they hang with friends while learning things? Project based learning has proved to best with this, specifically a group debate project we do each year. I’m wrote about why the social nature of that project is so valuable previously, but to short circuit that blog, it works because kids talking to each other is the centerpiece of the project. Another tool effective in making the classroom more social is Flipgrid, an online video posting site that is awesome at making formative assessment social and engaging. The same goes for Socrative.com. When kids answer in-class short answer questions on socrative, their answers immediately pop up on the board at the front of the room for everyone to see. That makes kids feel powerful, but it also makes an otherwise boring task (answer a freaking short answer question) engaging because it’s social. Other kids see their work, comment on it, judge it, laugh at it, admire it. You know, social stuff. Kids like social stuff, especially middle and high schoolers.
We could go on for days on school practices that frustrate kids, but one more that deserves mention is the “I’m frustrated because I don’t like this stuff”. To me, this one is the hardest, because it calls into question the very idea of a standardized curriculum. I don’t think we’re anywhere near the point where students are able to walk into a school building and study a completely customized curriculum based soley on the interests of the student. That not realistic and has too many flaws to even list here. So, putting aside that option, the next one is to think about how to turn kids on to stuff that they think the don’t like. Obviously every teacher does their best to present information in interesting ways, ask intriguing and weird questions, do fun projects, etc. Sometimes that’s not enough though. Really, I think the only way to address this is to let kids pick what classes they want to complete ...but again, that would require a self paced, digital curriculum that just doesn’t really exist yet. Not only that, you’d still have to require certain classes for graduation if you were going to maintain the integrity of a curriculum. So in some ways, this frustration from students is unavoidable, but it’s also a life lesson. Sometimes you have to do things you might not want to do. That’s part of life.
Making Failure Fun
One last thing that Super Meat Boy does that warrants application to a classroom is gamify failure in a way that makes the player ENJOY said failure. It does so in a simple, clever way. When you beat a level in Super Meat Boy, your screen is immediately taken over by a “highlight reel” of all of all the times you died before completing the level. You get to sit back and enjoy all the struggle you went through to accomplish what you did. The great part about it is you begin to look forward to it when you get stuck on a tough level. The more I died in a given level on Meat Boy, the more I started to laugh and think “this highlight reel of death is going to be epic”. Think about that. “The more I died, the more I started to laugh”? That defies video game logic. Death is supposed to be a source of frustration, but Meat Boy turns it into a perverse sort of pride. Can we do that in a classroom?
Maybe. The only way I’ve done it in the past is by showing kids their first attempt on something and comparing it to their second or third. That said, because it takes so much time in between attempts in a classroom, it’s not as rewarding as it is with Meat Boy. Kid’s aren’t as able to laugh it off because the penalty, in terms of time, is too high.. What we need to do, as teachers, is find ways to minimize the amount of time it takes for a student to correct their mistakes. If only I were some whizbang computer programmer, I have ideas for software that could do this. But I’m not, and chances are you’re not either, so the best method I’ve come up with is Socrative.com short answer questions. I send out a short answer question to the kids on their computer, they answer. As they send me their responses, they pop up on the board at the front. When all kids have responded, we talk about good answers and bad answers (responses are anonymous so nobody is too embarrassed). I take one or two particularly bad answers from the round and copy paste them over (because they’re deleted after each new question). I then ask the same question again. Almost always, the reponses improve. You can repeat that process as much as you’d like (careful not to do it too many times and frustrate kids), but the kids find a real pride in comparing the best answers from round 2 and 3 to the worst answers from round 1.
In sum, I think there is tremendous value in asking the question “Where does frustration come from in my class?” and/or “What am I doing out of tradition that no longer makes sense”? Asking those questions made Super Meat Boy, which is an incredible game. I also think it can make an incredible classroom.