For the past three years, the Office of Academic Innovation has hosted the Gameful Learning Summer Institute, an event focused on gameful pedagogies. This year, more than 50 people from various backgrounds attended the three-day event at the Ross School of Business.
Evan Straub, learning experience designer at Academic Innovation, organized this year’s event. With gameful learning, she sees an opportunity to apply the determination players feel when playing a challenging game in educational settings. “I define gameful learning as a collection of pedagogies [that] takes the underlying principles [of what] makes games compelling and applies it to learning,” Straub said.
Phill Cameron, instructional learning intermediate for the Language Resource Center and a three-time attendee, said gameful learning allows instructors and students to productively fail, which is a unique feature of gameful learning pedagogy. “Gameful learning is a system of learning that empowers the participants to try new things and to recover from failure, and to intentionally fail in some ways,” Cameron said.
