[game_edu] curious

[Ian Schreiber]

I hate taking attendance. It's one more administrative task (as if I don't have enough grades to keep track of) and sends the message that showing up is somehow related to their skill at designing games (or whatever it is that I'm teaching). Generally if students miss class, they're going to miss material that will ultimately lower their grade on exams or projects anyway (unless they really apply themselves outside of class to catch up, or unless they already possess the skills I'm trying to teach, in which case it'd be a waste of their time to show up to class anyway and I wouldn't want to penalize them just because my own teaching skills are not sufficient to make class time worth their while). If attendance is low that can actually be a useful metric for me - it lets me know when I'm not providing sufficient interest/value to overcome students' class-aversion that they've learned over the last 16 years of "education"...


Strangely, I wouldn't be as concerned about someone missing an early class and being saddled with lost points forever - the same would be true if they lost points on the first homework, or failed to turn it in or something. With a progressive penalty, at least it doesn't REALLY start to hurt until you've missed a few, and by that point maybe the student should think of dropping anyway. (For schools I've been at that had a required attendance policy, usually students could miss something in the neighborhood of 3 to 5 classes per term, any more than that and they'd either be auto-failed or auto-dropped. So Fibonnaci numbers are in line with that, at least.)

Another method for high attendance that I remember Brenda talking about at a conference one year: when teaching her applied game design class, about half way through the course (after covering design of core mechanics) there was an abrupt switch to designing from narrative. She did this by essentially turning the class into a tabletop RPG, starting with the narrative that was happening to the students' characters, and making up rules on an as-needed basis. Perfect attendance from that point on - no one wanted their PC to be at the mercy of the professor in their absence ;-)

- Ian



________________________________
 From: Maria Droujkova <droujkova at gmail.com>
To: IGDA Game Education Listserv <game_edu at igda.org> 
Sent: Thursday, May 3, 2012 11:49 AM
Subject: Re: [game_edu] curious
 

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Steve Rabin <Stevera at noa.nintendo.com> wrote:



> Here is something that I developed in the last year that I just have to share because it works so amazingly (perhaps more related to psychology than gamification):

>

>96%-98% class attendance guaranteed!

>It's the Fibonacci Attendence Policy of Doom (TM).

>If a student is absent 1 time, they get a 2% deduction to their final class grade.

>If a student is absent a 2nd time, they get an additional 3% deduction (total 5% at this point)

>


I have two big concerns about this. Maybe it feels better than it looks in an email? I would like to hear more.

First, it's overall punitive, so it can undermine the trust between the students and the professor. 

Second, if someone messes up in the beginning of the class, they may as well give up, because they can't catch up at all. The points are lost forever.

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
919-388-1721

Make math your own, to make your own math 
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