Human Restoration Project

Gamification is a long-standing practice across lesson planning and educational technology, but it doesn’t always work out the way we expect. At the end of the day, if the nature of the task is not interesting, then what we’re creating is more about compliance than engagement. In this session, we will host a conversation on what it means to gamify content, learning, and pedagogy: recognizing potential success while advising for potential pitfalls.This episode is a panel discussion we had with game designer & author, Adrian Hon, on the pros and pitfalls of “gamification” as part of our EduFuturism Learning Series. You can find all of the previous events including Innovative AI Tools for the Classroom…and their Dilemmas and Learning From Video Game Tutorials, as well as register for upcoming events in the series @ humanrestorationproject.org/learning. You can also find this video and others on our YouTube channel by searching for Human Restoration Project. GuestsAdrian Hon is an award-winning video game designer and is the CEO and founder of Six to Start, co-creator of the world’s most successful smartphone fitness game, Zombies, Run! He previously was the director of play, creating alternative reality games, at Mind Candy.ResourcesWatch on YouTubeYou've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us AllAdrian Hon on TwitterConference to Restore Humanity! 2023

This conversation is nearly a year in the making, from the first messages with my guest back in 2022 - which also happened to be the last of my 9 years teaching AP European History. That year there were over 4.7 million AP Exams taken by 2.6 million students from 23,000 secondary schools. At about $100 per exam…well, you don’t need to get a 5 on the AP Calc exam to finish that equation. And…here we are again, another high-stakes time of the academic year for yet millions more high schoolers seeking college credit from the College Board. From AP to SAT, the College Board is a billion dollar educational gatekeeper that plays an outsized role in American education in policy and practice, K12 and beyond. In fact, as my guest today outlines in her book, many states have passed laws requiring the College Board play exactly that role: mandating that schools offer a minimum number of AP courses (that require AP trained teachers), offering cash incentives for student test scores, & dictating to universities what scores they will be required to accept for which credits.Even more recent partisan challenges to curriculum, like the rejection of AP African-American History by the Florida Dept of Education, should also cause us to reflect on the homogenizing and controlling influence of what has become a de facto national curriculum, AND the metrics we use to evaluate success, AND the ways we assess & award credit, AND the philosophies & pedagogies we use in classrooms with students. Somewhere in the recent past, figure & ground inverted, and we not only lost track of what was important - the best intentions of what courses like these could represent - but along the way we ceded a lot of power to a single company and a single brand - Advanced Placement - to determine our educational goals, values, & practices from the top down.GuestsAnnie Abrams holds a doctorate in American literature from NYU and is currently on childcare leave from her job as a public high school English teacher. She writes in the introduction to her brand new book Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students..ResourcesShortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students from Johns Hopkins University PressAnnie Abrams Twitter

“I learned so much about viewing the world, especially mass media, through a critical eye this year. I learned about what traps we fall into while viewing media and how we can prevent that. I also learned about good vs. questionable journalism tactics and how this can affect how accurate a news source is.”My guest today, Sam Shain, is a musician, artist, writer, former journalist and current English teacher in Maine. That opening quote was just one student review of Sam’s journalism class from his book Education Revolution: Media Literacy for Political Awareness, available from Zer0 Books. Teaching in the United States has never been more fraught, as teachers across the country are implicitly or explicitly forced to avoid certain topics, texts, and questions that have been labeled divisive, controversial, or - worse yet - political. Of course, these topics also tend to be the most immediate & important, and are accompanied by intense mis- & disinformation - the reality of climate change, systemic racism, COVID-19, and the outcomes of our electoral system, to take some examples from just the last couple of years - all of this seems particularly heightened with the new ability of AI to generate audio, video, and images to spread politically motivated narratives easier than ever before via social media, and a receptive population willing not only to accept them but to participate in spreading mis- & disinformation. As the student testimonial I read earlier testifies to, the gap has never been wider between our vital need to teach critical media literacy and our ability. To do. Just that. GuestsSam Shain is a former journalist and English teacher. He believes education is the way out of our country's current predicament and teachers and students can lead the revolution in turning this country around. Sam wrote for the Capital Weekly for several years and occasionally contributes to the Kennebec Journal.In addition to teaching and writing, Sam sings and plays guitar in the band the Scolded Dogs, who play frequently throughout Maine and have released several original albums. Sam lives in Hallowell, Maine.Resources"Not Rehired for Teaching Politics": One Teacher's StoryEducation Revolution from Zer0 Books