Digital Narrative 1

Digital Narrative

When I conceived of HuskyHunt, 3 years ago, it was for the sole purpose of creating an interesting tool to deliver information security content to students. It quickly developed into a passion. Ironically it wasn’t until a meeting with Michael Young when I was considering the Education Technology program that it really dawned on me that I had entered into the world of teaching. It was at that meeting however that I began considering how, if I was accepted into the program, I would use the tool to satisfy the practicum and it was the talk about engagement and badging during the first week of the summer by Ian O’byrne that the seeds of my ideas surrounding HuskyHunt grew into the beginnings of a rough concept.

The challenge of the game was that there was no room for changes once the game began, so all of the engagement metrics that I wanted to measure had to be thoroughly considered and programmed prior to the start of the game. However, that did mean that I had done significant work on the project by the middle of September, which was helpful. Even with that planning we found that there were certain data that we missed collecting due the system configuration oversights. We didn’t enable the level of logging at the web server, for example, that would have allowed me to correlate badge assignment compared to user activity from on campus and off campus.

I am confident that the study, especially if viewed as a research pilot, provides sufficient information to justify additional research on the theory that digital badges do provide additional motivation to produce increased engagement. The information from student interviews certainly indicated that some students, especially those that were ‘gamers’ liked receiving badges. The feedback also indicated that badge value could be increased by doing simple things like displaying them near the scores, providing clearer information regarding badge acquisition and potentially making a ‘master badge’ for players that collect all game badges. I believe that a better designed study run in multiple locations with entire game populations configured with or without badges would produce results indicating engagement improvements and improved transfer for players with badges.

I have to admit that the practicum was the aspect of the course I was most concerned about when I decided to undertake the masters. My early lack of clarity regarding my idea, the concern surrounding game re-design and code implementation and the possibility that some unforeseen technical problem could derail the whole project were all things that had me worried early on. Once it was clear that we had a game that was running as expected I relaxed and let the game run. Surprisingly, I found actually doing the paper much more difficult than I thought. I am comfortable discussion every detail of game implementation and have spoken at four conferences about the subject, but suddenly I found that I had 20 times more data than I had for any other run of the game and I had to try and make some sense of it all. It wasn’t about implementation any more, it was about proving the value of HuskyHunt. I found that I wanted answers to my questions, not just the question surrounding engagement and transfer, I wanted the data to tell me how to make the game better overall. I enjoyed working through the data and writing the final paper but feel I could have used another few weeks to go through it, get organizational feedback and improve it. I feel that there is an information goldmine in HuskyHunt, somewhat with what I have now but more with a well-designed study in the future.

I would advise future students to be sure they take the time, early on, to identify exactly what data they expect to need to answer their question(s). The project likely cannot be successful if

Digital Narrative 2

questions are asked of data after the data is collected, it is critical that the questions are defined prior to data collection and if the data answers additional questions that’s a bonus.