Personal take on Educational Technology (Part II: Gamification of learning — interactive narratives on Twine and ‘escape room’)

I have first to start with the usual caveat that none of the following represents the official views of the organisation I work for — as the title suggests, it is just a personal take.

This is the second of a six-part series on my personal take on Edtech:

Challenges with Gamification

For the longest time, the prevailing perception is that games are mutually exclusive with gaming. Educators find it difficult to engineer checks for understanding. Dipsticks for learning are usually never embedded in games. Even when they are, there is limited flexibility to design learning outcomes that align with the intended lesson objectives since teachers seldom are the ones creating the games themselves.

I will try to explain how I tried to overcome the lack of flexibility in using existing games by creating ones of my own. The two main types I have tried this year are:

(1) Interactive Narratives

(2) ‘Escape Room’*

*Heavy inspired by a lesson executed by my then classmate, Syam, it involves designing a series of password-protected PDFs to simulate an escape room environment

In this article, I will focus on Interactive Narratives first and this article is broken into the following sections: