Our next speaker has the most refreshingly
brief bio I’ve had of the day. Clayton Brown is an assistant professor
of history at the Uintah Basin campus. Let’s welcome Clayton.>>[APPLAUSE]
>>Okay, this on? Okay, there is more to it than that but
yeah. So I’m an Assistant Professor of
History and Asian Studies in Vernal. I’m interested in wedding gaming and
education, educational games. And it all started with my 11 year old
daughter who is way into gaming and she always has her iPad with her. And I notice, of course, sometimes she’s
playing sort of those mindless games. But I notice she also really
likes playing education games. She plays a lot of math games,
and it’s not because we make her, it’s not an assignment or
anything, she just loves to do it. She likes to see,
she likes to beat her old scores. She likes to see that she’s making
progress, that she’s learning something. And I started thinking, this would be a great thing to be
able to bring into my own classroom. Especially for my lower division courses,
where I have a lot of students who are taking history at college for
the first time. And they think these courses are boring. So I’d like to inject
something that’s fun, right? That has a point, that has something
educational, educational value. So that’s how I got the idea. And then the ETLG Grant program, I got
a series of grants through the ETLG Grant program, that allowed me to
develop this idea and realize it. And so what I’m going to be sharing
today is two versions of the same game. Some of you may have been in
my presentation last year. I’m going to go over briefly,
just sort of do a demo. The first game that I developed
a couple years ago, which was for my modern world history course. Which is a lower division sort of
introductory level history course. I have been using it for, this is five or
six semesters that I have been using it. So I will show you how the game works. The second phase of this was to take
that same game, that same idea and make it more flexible. So that potentially, the same game
could be used in any kind of classroom, not just the modern
world history classroom. So in theory, the way the more recent
version of the game is going to work is that teachers will be able to author
their own content in the game. That is,
they can put in their own content, and I’ll show you how that
works in just a minute. So let me get out of this screen and
into Chrome. Okay, so Atomic Jolt is the company
here in Logan that helped me. They actually did the coding and
the programming side of it. I’m a professor of Asian studies and
history, so I don’t do that stuff. But I oversaw the development
of the game and have been deploying it in my classroom,
as I said, for the last couple of years. So I’ll come back to this. This is the Atomic Jolt web
page that features the game. It has a few screenshots. But I’m gonna take you through
the game itself, just do a demo, and also sort of talk through how
the students have responded to this. And you’ll be able to see this
as we look at the metrics that we’ve developed for the game. So this is in my modern
world history course. The game is one of the last
things they do in the course, if you’re familiar with Canvas. I’ll scroll through, these are the modules
for the semester, all of the weeks, I do it by week. So the last module before they take
the final exam, the week 13 guide. And they have a series of sort
of the usual assignments, watch some videos, a documentary. And then they’ll play the Masters of
History game right before they take the final exam, the week before. Now the game is open for an entire week which gives them a week
to play it as many times as they want. They can beat their own scores but
they can also compete against their peers. So this is an asynchronous competition. As they play the game it’s timed, so the key thing is to lower their time,
to beat their peers. And I’ve set this up in Canvas, so
if I open this up, it opens up in Canvas. It’s a free Canvas app, it’s already available for
those who teach modern world history. So when you open it up,
this is the page that students see first. This is the leaderboard, the top 10 times. So the lowest time gets the highest score. You can see the number of errors here. Now every time they make an error in the
game, it adds five seconds to their score, so they wanna minimize the errors. So well, let me just open this up and
you can see what the content is. This is the actual game, once they start,
you have a description in this window. And actually on my Mac you don’t
have to scroll, it just comes up. But there’s a short description and then you’re confronted with ten
individuals, right, a picture and a name. And the students are supposed to select
the one that’s being described here. So while in prison he
wrote the book Mein Kampf, that’s probably one of the easier ones,
right? So you scan down here,
of course, for Hitler, right? If you click on that,
it gives you a little green check mark, lets you know that that’s correct. Now you have 24 of the 25 cards remaining. The time is running out here,
so far no errors. So they have 25 individuals that
I’ve chosen that they have to correctly identify. And in order to finish the game, they
have to correctly identify all 25, right? If they misidentify somebody, so say they
start readings inspired by Sun Yat Sen. And they think that it’s Mao Tse Tung,
let’s say they’re confused, they think it’s Sheng Kai Shek,
that’s reasonable, right? So that’s wrong, it gets an x,
it adds one error and five seconds to their score, right? And we still have 24 cards
to complete of the 25. So they have to complete, they have to correctly identify all 25 of
these individuals before the game is over. If we skip to, I’ll just reload this page. If we skip to when they complete all 25, when they’ve correctly
identified all 25 individuals. For each that they miss,
it’s reshuffled back into the deck. All right, so
they have to complete all 25. When they’re done, then they’ll have a pop
up screen that tells them their overall time, how many errors they made. And the total score would be 4 minutes and
58 seconds, just for an example. So that’s what they say when they finish,
great job you’re ranked overall. You’re on the leaderboard or
perhaps not on the leaderboard. But they can immediately start back
over and play the game again, right? They can play it as many
times as they want and in the process they’re preparing for
the final exam. Now of course modern world history
doesn’t boil down to 25 individuals. And I’m not suggesting that it does,
but some of those individuals, maybe ten of them will
appear on the final exam. It is for me, very important, that they’re able to identify
these people by face, right? If they can see a photo and
know this is Chairman Mao or whoever else, that they know the names of these people,
that they know the description. And this helps to familiarize them with
the people that we’ve been covering all semester, right? By this point at the end of the semester,
they should know these people anyway, but it’s a good way to review before
they take the final exam. So that’s how the game is played. In addition to this sort of basic, this
leaderboard here that the students see, I also have an administrator’s view so
I can look at the metrics of the game. And I can see for each student to play,
actually all the students. We have their time, their best time,
it only records their best time. Number of errors that they made, and their number of attempts which
is really insightful, right? Cuz we have the top scores,
obviously they played more times. The people at the bottom played once,
right? That was good enough,
and then they’re done. They still get credit, though. For completing the game. The way I’ve set it up is in canvas,
when they complete the game, that automatically gives them credit
back in the canvas grade work. They get 10 points for
completing this assignment. All they have to do is just finish this. A lot of the students just
decided to do it once, but you see some of them did it two,
six, three, five. And then of course, those who play it more
end up doing better on this assignment. But also on the final exam. Now the way i’ve set it up is for
those who end up on the leader board, the top 10 scores get extra credit. They get it’s a little bit,
three points extra credit. But it’s enough that it’s an incentive for
some. Some of whom i’m sure would just play
this whatever, just for the fun of it. But one student who did it 36 times 23. So quite a few times. And that correlates really closely
with their performance on the game. So the top times tend to be
the people who play it the most. These are the people who get extra credit. But again everybody who plays the game and
completes it will get at least the basic credit, the 10 points for
completing the game. That’s how this works. I’m trying to think if there’s anything
else I want to show before I move on. Any questions at this point
about how the game works. I’m gonna talk about how
the next phase of this game, how teachers can offer their own content. But at this point is there any
questions with how this works or yeah.>>[INAUDIBLE]
>>It took them months. It was the programmers. And then I was coming up to Logan to work
with them in their offices to give them feedback and
sort of work through the kinks. And then the first semester
that I deployed it, there were some bugs that
we had to work out also. Still have a, maybe a few kinks. But it works pretty well now,
two years on. It took them probably
slowly six to develop it.>>And you said you put the gap in for [INAUDIBLE]
>>Yeah, and that’s what I’m going to
talk about in a minute. The second phase of this is that
we’ve created a template so that you can go in and
put your own content into this same game. Because as it is now,
I have 25 of the most important. In my opinion,
most important historical figure. Not every person who teaches
modern world history would agree. That maybe some of the people I’ve
chosen they wouldn’t want in or they have other people that
they’d rather have in there. But from the beginning when I developed
this, I thought if we could make this more versatile, if we could make this so
that anybody can use this same game and just put in their own content,
whether they’re in chemistry or physics or math or whatever.This could be
useful to other educators and it wouldn’t just be useful in
a modern world history course. Or my modern world history course. Any other questions. Before I leave the Masters of History,
yeah.>>[INAUDIBLE]
>>It was paid for by the ETLG grants. It was, for the first phase, they gave us a deal with the understanding
that we would take it to the second phase. The first phase was 5,000. And then the second phase was 10, because it was much more
complicated at the second phase. I think it was still a good deal, just because what we got out of it
is educational and it’s freeware. So it’s something that
anyone could download. Right now the Masters of
History is available on Canvas. I’ve published a little bit about this
tool so some educators are using it. But now that we’re developing
the knowledge masters game. The more versatile game then it’s going
to be useful to more then just myself. Let me go to, unless there are any other
questions on the Masters of History, yeah.>>Does it have to be [INAUDIBLE].>>That’s a good question. We haven’t done video. It’s possible. At this stage we don’t have
the capacity to do video. But down the road that’s definitely
something that will be possible, yeah. At this stage it’s not. Let me move to the prototype for
What I’m calling Knowledge Masters. The way this works is if I go back
to the Masters of History game, and I’ll go to the start page. I’ve chosen 25 historical individuals. This is essentially a deck of cards. And we have 25 cards within that deck. I’ve created one deck that
I use every semester in my modern world history course. The idea with the Knowledge Masters Game,
is that instructors could download the software, and
then they can put in their own content. And I’ll show how that will be done. You can create your own cards but you can
also organize them in to your own decks. And you can mix and match. In this case, when you open up Knowledge
Masters, this is again within Canvas, when you open this up. Then I have a couple of example decks. But let’s say you can either create
a new deck and start from scratch. If we go in to that, here’s a new deck. You would enter the title. Let’s say I wanna make an alternative
to my Modern World Leaders. Here’s World Leaders version 2.0,
create that deck. And here we can either enter card titles,
in this case again, names. Let’s say, Thurgood Marshall,
civil rights person. We can put him in there as an alternative. And upload images or drag and drop images here that would correspond
with the names that I’m listing. But it doesn’t have to be names. Card titles could be anything and
the images. So we could put any type
of images in here that fit. Or, you can opt out of either of these. You have the description,
you have the image, and you have the title for each card. You can eliminate one of those. You can eliminate the image or
you can eliminate the card title, or the description. But you still have to have
two elements that they match. Does that make sense. You don’t have to have an image,
but you have that option. We’re done here then. Well, let me go back for one second. So that’s creating a new
deck from scratch. But the other option you have
is to import an existing deck. Then you don’t have to redo
cards that you’ve done before. So for instance,
I have a Modern World History deck. But I also wanna do a modern East Asia
deck since I teach a course on modern East Asia. And there’s enough overlap between the two
that I can import the Modern World History deck and then just eliminate
the cards I don’t want to use. I’ll import and here on my
computer is the World Leaders 2.0. I can use that and then it imports
this into, again the interface for the teachers to edit decks of cards. This is the World Leaders 2.0 deck. I have three cards in here so far. I can also edit these cards. So for Sigmund Freud let’s say I
want to edit my description of him, so you click on this and
you can edit that text. Or you can edit the title
of the card here. Or maybe I want a different image so
I remove that image. And I can here click to either,
you can drag and drop. Or you can select an image from my
computer here that’s already chosen. Choose that and uploads it. Or I can remove that image,
excuse me, remove the card. Eliminate that card, and
then I can add other cards here. I add a new card, by putting in
the titles or dragging and dropping or uploading the photos. That’s how it will work. Again, this is the prototype. The Knowledge Masters
game is not ready yet. But the Masters of History
is fully operational. And so we’re thinking this fall that the
Knowledge Masters game will be released to the public and will be available. We were hoping it would be ready by now,
but the prototype is the farthest
along we are at present. I think that’s everything I
wanted to present on this. Any other questions on how the game works,
either the Masters of History, or the new Knowledge Masters? Yeah.>>[INAUDIBLE]
>>Right now, this is how it works. Now you don’t have to do a picture. You could just have them match
a description with the title. Or you could eliminate the title and have
them match the description with the image, so there’s some flexibility. Somebody already asked
about putting video in. Down the road that’s possible but
right now this is how the game works.>>[INAUDIBLE] very [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE]>>Sure. It’s like, sure.>>[INAUDIBLE].>>Yeah. Was there a question or just a comment?>>[INAUDIBLE]
>>Well, if you call it a game,
they like it a lot better than a quiz.>>[LAUGH] [INAUDIBLE]
>>It is, it is, the content is essentially the same, but
it incentivizes them in a different way. Taking a quiz seems like they’re slogging
through it, and they have to study. But if they’re playing the game, first of all they can do it as many times
as they want, which gives room for error. They can make a mistake it reshuffles
that card into the deck and they will be confronted
with that card again. So they do have to know every
card by the end of the game, but it’s a lot more fun for
them than taking a quiz. They get credit for it, and
there is the potential for extra credit. So the big difference is
not what they’re learning, it’s not like this is more effective
than a quiz other than I think they’re more incentivized to do a game
than they are to do a quiz or an exam. For me it’s the Masters of History game in the World History course as
a final sort of review activity. Before they take the exam,
they do this exam. They get credit it for it but
again it’s more fun in preparing for the exam, at least for
this aspect, the world leaders. There’s more on the final exam
then the world leaders, but this is more fun than just
reading through the notes. But t performs the same
function essentially yeah.>>[INAUDIBLE]. You had the idea. Did you write the program?>>I didn’t do the programming,
but I came up with the concept and then I worked with the programmers. I had to describe how I
wanted this to work and then as they were going
through this in stages. I gave them feedback on things
like the color, the layout. And of course all the content is my own. So the images are open
source on the Internet. I don’t need to have rights or
copyright to those images. But the descriptions are my own. So I had to write those based on what
my students are studying in my course.>>[INAUDIBLE].>>Did what? The programming?>>Yes.
>>No, that was Atomic Jolt. So the page that I started on here, it’s this outfit here on Logan
they do the programming. And they were paid directly
by the ETLG grant. I was basically the person who
came up with the concept and shepard it through, and
then use it now in my courses. But I didn’t do the programming side,
that was Atomic Jolt, and the funding side came from USU. Any other questions, yeah?>>I see that in my mind and
competency based. If you have to do it until you’ve got
whatever score or wherever you were at, you could see accurate students
if you did this as an intern. And those are the things
that are needed to take it 36 times to get a different score.>>Sure. [INAUDIBLE] possibly [INAUDIBLE] and make them successful. Maybe it’s [INAUDIBLE] but I like the idea of [INAUDIBLE].>>Yeah it certainly is an indicator
of student commitment or capability, however you want to put it. The ones at the bottom here, some of them, this person had 72 errors and
only played once. Another person with 20 errors. This indicates that they’re going into
this not knowing who these people are. But they completed the game
which means that by the end some persons played this for
an hour [LAUGH] or 20 minutes. But they’re gonna come out knowing
more than they did going into it. So it would be great to incorporate this
into more regular basis into my course. I’m not to that stage yet but. As a sort of final review
activity it works really well. All the students, I don’t think I’ve
had a student who doesn’t do it yet. All the students seem to do it unless
they’ve dropped the course by then but if the students are still in
the course will play this game. Even if they won’t do the readings or they
won’t, maybe they missed the quizzes or whatever, they’ll still do the game. It’s just a more fun activity I think. Other questions? Yeah.>>I love your game [INAUDIBLE] But
my question is for the demo [INAUDIBLE]
your own grades in there? The program itself has the capability
where we can decide how many [INAUDIBLE]>>Yes. Mm-hm. Yep. That’s all determined by
the teacher within Canvas. You create this,
if I go back to the prototype here. When you open this up and you have the
Knowledge Masters, when you open this up, so this will be like a side bar in Canvas. You’ll click on it,
it will open up a page like this. And if you go, so this is where you
author your decks and your cards. But within Canvas, you can also go to
Assignments, and make this an assignment. So when they complete this automatically. When they complete this game,
credit goes back in the Canvas and you determine what kind of credit. It could be points,
it could be some other score like an A or whatever you want to determine
within the parameters of Canvas. That is possible with this game. It’s just an assignment within Canvas. That’s how it operates. So, I decided, it’s worth ten points
because that fits the scheme of my course. And I’ve also designated that they get
extra credit, three points extra credit, if they end up on the leader
board at the end of the week. So it’s open for a week. They compete for a week and
then whoever is still on the leaderboard, of course you have the scramble. In the last hour or so
that the game is open to try and make it on the leaderboard or
to make it to the top. But those are the students
who get the extra credit.>>[INAUDIBLE] How do we know is it on Canvas [INAUDIBLE].>>It’s available through Canvas,
the city people would be able to help you integrate that into your course in Canvas,
that’s who I’d refer you to. Since this isn’t operational right now,
we’re just at the prototype. Maybe next year, I would do another presentation
once it’s working all the way. And then maybe people would have
a better idea that it exists and that it would be useful for their courses. So, that’s a thought.>>[INAUDIBLE].>>Yeah, that’s what people said last
year when I presented on the Masters of History. I had people in chemistry and biology saying that I’d really like to
do something like this in my course. Which is naturally why we wanted
to make this more versatile. So that any teacher could use it,
and not just at USU. Potentially, this could be used by high
school teachers, and even outside of Canvas, although that’s farther
down the road, any other questions? Comments? Derogatory remarks?>>[LAUGH]
>>No? Okay, we’ll call it good, thank you.>>[APPLAUSE]