Survive your kids’ canceled school year with these 3 game thinking principles
We’re asking a lot from kids right now. Do the dishes, pick up laundry, clean your room, work on school assignments, stay away from friends... and please, spend some time off screens.
It’s no picnic for parents either. We’ve had to adapt, adding roles like “teacher” (and “warden”?) overnight, on top of our already-busy schedules.
Looking for new ways to get your kids to listen (or even just to turn a page in a real book)? We have some game thinking principles that might help you out.
At BLDG-25, we use behavioral science to understand what motivates people. We combine this knowledge with the immersive elements of game thinking to create solutions that motivate, engage, and inspire.
Game thinking principles allow us to take activities that people want or need to do (like learn a new skill, complete a required task, or donate to charity) and redesign those activities to be more effective and rewarding.
“Successful games all have something in common: the intrinsic joy of skill-building. It feels good to engage our brains, improve our skills, and make progress along a path toward mastery.”
- Game designer Amy Jo Kim
These are simplified versions of game thinking principles, and we think they could work amazingly well with your kids—and make your job as a parenting job a lot easier.
Here are a few strategies to try at home, with tips on how to get started:
1. The Right Feedback at the Right Time
In game thinking, feedback is how a player understands their status—like their progress in their game, their rank, and their achievements.
Think about the last game you played. How did you know how well you were doing?How did you know whether you were getting better at the game or whether the game was close to ending?
When we apply the feedback principle from game thinking as part of experience design, we leverage it as one of many types of motivational scaffolds to support and engage users (often referred to as feedback, rewards, and flow states; see Gaming science: the “Gamification” of scientific thinking). But all you need to know to apply this principle is that feedback helps players understand their progress.
In the workplace, we might see this as “goal tracking”. Maybe your company has a program that tracks weekly sales calls, or a tool that visualizes the status of enrollments or customers’ satisfaction scores. Or in healthcare, think of your fitness tracker—the feedback is the rings that show how close we are to our step goals, the counter that shows the number of calories we have left for the day, or the achievements that mark how much weight we’ve lost.
These all work by helping us see how far we've come, giving us feelings of accomplishment. They also tell us what we have left to do, which research shows drives us to keep working (see 7 Apps to Help You Do Your Chores).
For kids, perhaps even more than adults—feedback can be a huge motivator. Here are some simple ways to set up feedback for your kids:
Be as specific as possible with goal setting. Think about what’s important; what do you need your kids to accomplish? For example, with reading—do you care more about how much time your kids spend reading or how many pages they finish? Or is the goal that they can describe what they read? Tie feedback to the specific goal.
Consider how your kids receive feedback. Are the tasks written down somewhere, in a way that kids can easily understand? Do they have a clock nearby so they can see how much time is left? When they’re finished with a task or challenge, where do they record their progress?
Establish a reward. A best practice of feedback is to try and provide feedback as close to the action as possible. When your child has met their reading goal, can they ring a bell? Check the item off of a to-do list or shared whiteboard? Collect a token, which they can redeem later for screen time, treats, or other rewards? (Keep it simple, though, or the “rewarding” becomes another chore to do!)
Example - how feedback is used in reading games for kids:
In Pirate Island: Reading for Details Game, kids use reading skills to navigate a pirate treasure search. “As students move along the game board, they read short passages and answer questions about details they find there. If they get the answers right, they can move forward along the path.”
In Tower Book Challenge, kids track their reading by creating a physical “tower” out of their finished books pile. “Students are given a reading list with numerous genres and categories of books they must read to meet the challenge. For each book students read, they create a book cut-out from the printable files, fill in their book information, and begin forming their… Tower of Books!”
With Reading Challenge Bookmarks, kids cross off challenges (ex. “Read under a tree”) as they’re completed. “They can color in each completed task on a bookmark as they go or use the full-sheet checklist.”
SUMMARY: If you’re asking your kids to do something, think about how they’re able to track their progress (both as they complete the tasks and as they look back on their week). Think carefully about the goal of the task, and try to tie the feedback and reward to that goal. Consider giving rewards to acknowledge their achievements, and get creative—stinky scratch-and-sniff stickers or getting to stay up 15 minutes later can be just as rewarding as screen time or treats.
2. Create Multiple Pathways
Another principle of game thinking is multiple pathways—the idea that players may take different journeys in a game, depending on their interests or strategies. Think again about that last game you played. How did your strategy differ from the other players?
In the workplace, this manifests as managers setting specific goals, but being flexible on how employees achieve those goals. For example, companies are creating training pathways for employees to earn certificates (which let employees decide which courses or projects to work on first as they progress toward training goals). In fact, multiple pathways and personalized learning are considered one of 2020’s top training trends (see Look for These Training Trends in 2020).
“We're being very intentional about having multiple tracks to career growth and development—paths to go deep into subject matter expertise, as well as career paths. This is a way to attract and retain employees in the current job market, which favors the job candidate.”
- Kara Hamilton, chief people and culture officer at Smartsheet, in a recent article by the Society for Human Resource Management
For kids, multiple pathways could look like some level of independence—a choice. Research shows that simply allowing children to pick their players’ name and icon in an education game makes them more willing to play (see Cordova & Lepper's 1996 article, "Intrinsic motivation and the process of learning: Beneficial effects of contextualization, personalization, and choice" in the Journal of Educational Psychology). Choice can be a great motivator for kids!
But how can you be specific about what kids should be doing while being flexible about the pathway and encouraging choice?
List out the tasks you ask your kids to do each day. Do the kids have any choices in how they complete those tasks? Consider both the order of the tasks and the schedule. Do you need to tell your kids exactly when they should complete these tasks, or do they have some flexibility on when they start, which tasks they do first, or how many tasks they complete at a time? If you just want your kid to complete school assignments before the day ends, you may be able to offer some flexibility on when/where. Some kids may prefer to get all their tasks done at once, so they have the rest of the day for free play. Other kids may need more breaks to complete all tasks—but maybe they can pick the order of the tasks.
Find ways to be flexible on HOW things get done. Are there creative ways kids can complete the tasks that make them more interesting or fun? For example, take the task of writing in a school journal. If the goal is for your child to practice his or her handwriting—can there be multiple ways to do this, rather than just one assigned activity of writing in a journal? Your child could choose between writing out the week’s grocery list, making birthday cards to family and friends, or writing a story about Minecraft. You can take pictures of these items or tape them into the journal to show progress, if you need to. But taking time to think about the overall objective (in this case, not filling the journal pages, but practicing handwriting) then coming up with multiple options for HOW the task gets done, is one way to provide multiple pathways.
Example - how multiple pathways are used in games for chores:
In Cleaning Jenga, the power of choice is combined with the thrill of Jenga. “Write a chore or cleaning activity on the side of each log in a Jenga stack. “There’ll be more at risk than just the tower’s stability—your kids might be told to ‘mop the floor’ or ‘fold laundry,’ depending on which log they choose.” (Similarly, in Chore Darts, you create a dartboard and let kids shoot at the target. Then assign different chores to the different targets. “Your child will definitely aim for the target and it’ll be fun watching them get better each time. Each person throws a dart, whatever the dart lands on they do that chore. If the chore is already picked go to the next number.”)
In Chore Wars, a free online role-playing game (RPG), your kids earn “experience points” (XP) and level up their character as they complete chores. “You get to control how many points each chore earns,” and kids choose which chores to complete.
Create a Chore Basket, filled with chore cards. A complementary strategy to a chore chart, the chore basket is for “extra” chores that don’t need to be done every day but can be done by kids. The chore name is written on one side of the card, and a reward for doing that chore is written on the other.
SUMMARY: Giving kids some choice and control will go a long way! It may take some brainstorming to think up multiple pathways that will be best for your kids, but start by asking—is there flexibility in when things get done, or in how things get done? While kids might do well with some structure, allowing for flexibility and different approaches can go a long way. Creating a sense of “choice” or options helps to motivate kids.
3. Use Competition to Make it Engaging
Competition is key to game design. That last game you played: do you remember if you won or lost? It’s likely you remember, because the competition part of a game is a huge aspect of why we play. And competition has long been considered an effective motivator.
“Competition can be a form of extrinsic motivation, such as the weekend getaway prize, doing something because of the promise of an external reward; or it can be a form of intrinsic motivation, an achievement of a personal goal. Whether internal or external, competition can increase motivation, improve productivity and performance, and provide accountability and validation.”
- This is how competition affects your brain, motivation, and productivity, FastCompany.
In the workplace, competition is everywhere. It’s in the sales board that highlights earners and the org chart that spotlights leaders. It’s even in some of the ways we do tasks—how quickly we respond to emails compared to others, or what time we begin and end our day.
In our personal lives, even the smallest things can be tracked and compared—the number of friends we have on social media, how many knitting projects we finished last year, or how fast we ran our last 5K.
But too much competition can be too much of a good thing. Author George Leonard wrote, “Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick.” In all spaces, there’s a balance between healthy competition that’s motivating and exhausting competition that’s ruthless, egotistical, or even futile.
With kids, it’s important to apply competition thoughtfully and cautiously. Here are some strategies for applying competition in a way that’s fun and engaging but also healthy and encouraging.
First, remind yourself of the goals for the task. Do you want your child to practice math more often or to get better at a certain math skill? (It’s a small difference, but identifying whether the goal is quantity or quality can help you set up the right competition.) If you’re hoping your kids continue practicing math daily so they keep their math skills fresh, you may want to consider a competition that tracks quantity—ex. the number of minutes practicing math per day. If you’re looking to improve quality, then you’d instead consider a competition that tracks quality—ex. integrating a math app that grades their work and tracks their scores.
Make sure to consider who the competition is against. For example, is it fair to pit siblings against siblings? If you’re setting up a competition to see who empties the dishwasher faster, maybe a sibling competition could be fun! (Only do this if you have very resilient dishes.) But if you’re setting up a competition about reading comprehension levels, it might be hurtful or even ineffective to pit siblings’ scores against one another. Instead, can your child compete against other students at his or her grade level? A great example of this is school reading competitions. Schools often compete against other schools, or class by class, to see who’s spending the most time reading, or who’s reading the most books. Consider setting up a competition like this in your neighborhood, or with a virtual group of your kids’ friends. (Rewards are a great motivator!) Then the competition isn’t about reading more, or better, than your sibling, but helping your “house” to win in a bigger competition.
Use the clock! The simplest “race against the clock for chores” type games can be very effective. Consider challenging your kids to try chores one-handed, or to finish a chore before the end of the song. A little bit of competition against the clock can go a long way toward getting tasks done. Track your kids’ progress daily so they can see how they’re getting better
Sensing frustration? Add a restart button. If you’re trying to create competition so that a task is more engaging, you want to make sure your kids don’t get discouraged if they’re losing. (Think about the last time you saw a game go badly. Was there a disgruntled or frustrated player to blame, maybe someone who felt like the game wasn’t fair?) A great way to prevent frustration is to make it easy for kids to start over. Cheer them on so they’re not discouraged. Let them have as many tries as they’d like. The chance to start over with a clean slate is a great motivator, and can help prevent meltdowns.
Example - how competition is used in math games:
In Math Tic-Tac-Toe, players compete while practicing math skills. “Prepare by dividing a sheet into squares—three vertical by three horizontal. Don’t leave them blank. Instead, fill the boxes with questions that test different abilities. The first one to link three Xs or Os—by correctly answering questions—wins.”
In Prodigy, a free RPG math video game, kids compete in math duels. “To win, they must answer sets of questions. As a teacher or parent, you can customize these questions to supplement class material.”
On the website Math Contest 2.0, challenges are posted daily and weekly. Players submit their answers online. “Correct answers submitted for any current problem will be eligible to earn points and have your name displayed on the site.” Small groups can make custom leaderboards to track each others’ progress.
SUMMARY: Competition is everywhere, and it’s an easy-to-implement game design principle for making tasks more engaging. But too much competition, or competition between siblings, can lead to frustration and meltdowns. Take time to consider the goals of the tasks, and how you might set up the competition (between players, households, neighborhoods, or between players and a clock, or players and an average score). Consider adding easy ways for your kids to restart or retry, that way the competition isn’t too intense.
Feedback, Pathways, and Competition—3 Strategies from Game Design
Of course, the challenge of applying true game thinking principles to our work at BLDG-25 requires incredible brainstorming, prototyping, and testing. But the simplified principles we shared today—ideas for basic feedback, pathways, and competitions—can be useful in our personal lives.
Get started using these simplified game thinking principles, and see if certain strategies work better for your home.
And let us know how it goes! Does a sticker tracker help to motivate your child to clean up his cereal bowl every day? Does your daughter spend time off screens if she has multiple non-screen activity paths to choose from? Does your family garden more if you’re competing to raise more tomatoes than your neighbor? Let us know your game-thinking wins.
Ready? Set. Go!
Article co-written by Dr. Sarah Glova and Dr. Julie Miller.