Lightweight Gamification for Serious Learning with Elizabeth Patience

Luis Malbas  
All right, welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us here at the immersive learning conference hosted by the training, learning and development community. Welcome. Welcome everybody. Let's see, I see lots of people joining in the room. Do me a favor and just type in chat where you're logging in from. Just say hello to everyone else. I can see that Travis added a microphone check in there. 1212, love it. And I can see, let me see who's give a rundown. Oh, Kim is here. Hi Kim Diana, holiday. Christina, welcome back. Sarah Kimberly. Michelle Claire Renee, Jessica Kelly, so many people coming in. Look at that. Hello everybody. Ah, and we've got Alaska, Iowa City, San Diego, upstate New York, yes, all right. Well, chat is working certainly, all right. Well, thanks everybody once again for joining this particular conference. I love the whole concept of immersive learning. I'm just definitely a nerd at heart. I was just telling our speaker Elizabeth that I was at Universal Studios last week, and my wife and my son, we went on just a single day trip to Universal Studios in Hollywood, and we had the best time. And I swear it's like every experience that we had was like an immersive learning experience. Just getting on the Super Nintendo ride. They had this whole training series of things that we had to go through. And I'm like, I am somebody, some an instructional designer, obviously, built all this. And even with my son, who I don't know how it happened, but he got lucky enough to get to have a wand pairing in the Harry Potter world, where the expert, the wand expert selected him and did a whole like, you know, search for a wand for his, for his particular skill set. It was absolutely amazing. Was so immersive. I felt like I was in a movie watching the whole thing. I might post that. I have a video of it. I might post it on Slack later, so so you can see it. But that was an very immersive experience. And so, so just, I think, feel like it's very appropriate that we're doing this conference this week for me. So thanks everybody for being here. Oh, he got a, I think it was a walnut wand. And, yeah, you'll have to see it. Kim, it was absolutely amazing. All right. And with that, I would love to introduce you to our first speaker of the event, Elizabeth patience. Elizabeth is an instructional designer with over 15 years of experience transforming complex concepts into impactful, memorable learning experiences with a background spanning higher education and healthcare. She currently designs e learning for students training to provide preventative dental care in remote communities. Elizabeth is passionate about making serious content more engaging without compromising clarity, accuracy or respect for adult learners. Time. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being a part of the event and opening the Immersive Learning Conference for us and looking forward to hearing about your topic, lightweight gamification for serious learning.

Elizabeth Patience  
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So I have been in education for 15 years. I've been an Instructional Designer for three years, so I'm pretty new with this and very new to gamification. So I kind of want to know a feeling from the chat, sort of where you are on gamification, how you feel about it. Just a 123, or four.

Is, Oh, good. Curious. Curious, curious. Oh, we have a love it. Some love it, okay, if it's good gamification, that's click key, right? Yeah. So you guys are pretty I imagine you wouldn't sign up for an immersive learning conference if you didn't have some interest in it, and I'm glad to see some threes and fours in here. I'm showing I'm going to show you sort of my journey to from skeptical to anxious to curious and now to love it. So if I'm a like I said, I'm a beginner, but I've always been intrigued since I started doing this with the reasons to gamify. Can we get them more engaged? Can we make it more purposeful so they feel like they're doing something that will help them do their job? Um. Um, we want to motivate them, but not condescend, not talk down to them, talk down to them, whatever. And the other thing is, it's a really great project to add to your portfolio, just from a selfish, maybe more reason, but a professional reason is you've got creativity, you've got writing, you've got a little bit of brain science going on. You have technical skills in for me, articulate, maybe you're throwing in some beyond or illustration, and you're, you're bringing all that in into one project. And so it's a good portfolio project, a good portfolio ad. So why not get gamify? So when I started doing instructional design, first of all, you're overwhelmed with things to do. You are there's way too much you have to learn and and get up to speed on. So gamification kept moving down the list because it felt risky, right? I didn't I teach adults some of the gamification webinars I was going to were showing sort of mad scientists in Escape Rooms trying to get hints on how to solve a non mad scientist situation, and that didn't feel like my learners. I was afraid of emails, like could have been an email, so I kind of didn't feel it was right for my learners. And I think you still have to make that decision. I have two groups of learners now it's appropriate for one, it's not really appropriate. I haven't found it a way to make it appropriate for the other. My SMEs are dentists and dental instructors. They're serious people, and they take their content very seriously, as as most SMEs do, right? And I didn't feel like they were gonna buy into anything called gaming, their content. It's a lot of time I didn't feel I had the skills in articulate or Illustrator or Photoshop or anything to kind of pull it off. I'm not a gamer, so coming up with the scenarios, not my not something I thought I could handle. I'm not an illustrator. I can kind of do some tweaking of things in Illustrator, but I can't draw a whole scene out. I'm a big champion of accessibility, and I felt like a lot of the measures to to gamify kind of weren't really accessible. I couldn't figure out quite a way how to make that happen. And then I don't feel like I'm I'm creative enough to do this whole environment, to create all this whole package of things. So it went to the back burner. But what is the biggest barrier for you? What? Why are you gamify? Not, maybe not gamifying. Or how did you kind of were slow to start, maybe in doing it? So time, yeah, time is resonating, yeah, to I mean, you're coming up with scenarios, and you're coming up with triggers and variables and timers and all that, and the SMEs, yeah, they get in the way. And how do you do this? In the Tools? And then, you know how advanced you need to go. I'm doing everything I'm going to show you is articulate, a little bit of beyond maybe, but articulate and deadlines, yeah, deadlines were a huge, a huge concern as well. We we needed to deliver in a in a pretty tight timeframe as well. And how could I pull this off? Right? Okay, so time is the biggest. Well, let me just give you a little bit of my context and why I couldn't I didn't feel I could do it, and then what changed so I felt like I could do it. I teach adult learners in a healthcare setting. I've been teaching what we call calibration modules. We have 12 instructors. They work one on one with the students. Are they teaching the same thing? Are they teaching the current practice in dentistry? Are they teaching consistent with a public health setting that we're in, as opposed to what they're doing in private practice? Right? So I'm not teaching them anything. I'm reviewing content that they already know and trying to just kind of fill in any gaps, or sort of say what you're teaching is wrong, teach this instead, right? So it's not, it's it's not something that I'm teaching and that I think is is part of the barrier. Yeah, I had a I didn't feel ready for all the triggers and the variables and the JavaScript and all that stuff in and in articulate to do a game. I also didn't feel I had the time. And I see a lot of us are in that boat. I also had my, I say times two, because I was dealing with an older group of people who are working in about half of them are working in a remote village in Alaska, and the internet is super slow. And can you imagine, you have to take this required course. You have two weeks to take it, you have no time, and now a mad scientist comes up in an escape room, and it's super laggy. I couldn't imagine it, so I it just wasn't going to work. And then I was also, this is a new client for me, about two years ago, and I wanted to be credible. I wanted to be the one who who could talk about instruction with them, right? I wanted to talk to them about the best ways to teach this material. And here I am. We not a game. And I just didn't think I need I was ready for that within our relationship, right? So what changed? Well, we had the my this year. I started teaching the students. I started developing modules for the students in the program, so we're going a little bit younger, probably some game experience here. They're not as afraid of the trackpad or the mouse or are getting through those and they are. They're wanting something more. They're at the beginning of the program. This course that I developed is one of the first they'll have in a two and a half year program, right? We are teaching, and it's professionalism and ethics, which is non dentistry. So I felt I had a little bit more wiggle room with my SME. My skill set has improved. I've really learned some things about not just variables and triggers in JavaScript, but also about how to increase the performance of a course in storylines so that it doesn't keep crashing in the village and it keeps it keeps moving forward. So I've gotten faster. The students are faster, the internet's faster, and my skill set is kind of more I'm more comfortable with, with what needs to be done. And the challenge here is I've got to get to them, to mastery with information. And there's some challenges with the topic as well that lent itself to it so and bugs, man, man, the troubleshooting, that's what took, I think I spent more time troubleshooting and trying to figure out what was wrong than I did actually developing it. And maybe that's why, maybe why I spent so much time bugging it is I was doing it. But I can show you some resources that that can help and some things that have made it easier more recently. So I'm going to show you two interactions that I created for this course, and sort of how I got there. Oh, the timer hours. I'm embarrassed. I have a colleague on this phone, but I will, I will I feel vulnerable, so I will say days figuring out that freaking Tiger. Okay, so, um, so let's say of an interaction. I my first shot out of the gate. I was really trying to

make it an interaction. I wasn't comfortable talking about a game or saying the word game out loud. I was going to keep it to be just a more sophisticated, more more advanced interaction, right? And my idea was I'm going to stay under the radar. I'm going to beg for forgiveness and not ask for permission, and I'm going to put some of the learning underneath the mashed potatoes, right? I'm going to put some of the broccoli under there and sneak it into the course, and maybe they won't notice that it's different, or maybe the students won't notice that they're being kind of semi quizzed and they're being asked to recall stuff. So that was sort of my, my guiding principles at the beginning with this first game. And so at the beginning, this is the start screen. It's just an interaction. I use the same color palette. We've got the same font going on, similar layout here. We've got a title, we've got content, right? Look. Familiar. Everything looks familiar. But then I started introducing some little words here, and so you have a scoreboard kind of thingy over here. It'll look more like one in a minute, but you have words like game and points and mistakes. We're going to start tracking your mistakes, right? So this is a little bit more we're starting to kind of ease into. This is a sort of different kind of interaction. And so then we went and I started building in things that we actually consider part of gamification, right? So there's attempts. We're in healthcare, so we can't say lives. Nobody dies in our training. But we have attempts, and we have points, and we have a timer and and then there's a question. They type in the answer and score slide up here. So for the learner, now they're sitting up a little bit straighter in their seat, right? This isn't just a click and reveal there's a timer going on. There is there's points to be earned. I'm going to get what kicked out, or what's going to happen if I go through those three attempts, I'm paying attention, right? I'm now trying to do something a little bit more, right? I need to pay attention to this. I'm not sitting up for click and reveal, but I'm sitting up when you're telling me there's there's times and and points. So then they start answering the questions. We have the scoreboard starting to fill out. We start attempts are getting clocked here, and there's a little bit of an element of chance and and this is, this is maybe a skill set thing, but I didn't have them. They don't choose the questions. They don't choose I want the 10 point question or I want the three point question. It's just they type in an answer, and one of these turns over, and points are added to this. A couple of, you know, some people that works for some people that doesn't work for for me, just get more points. I'm okay if I get more points. And also, for me, wanting to get most of the board filled in, and if everybody went for the 10 points, then they'd answer five questions and beyond. And I had 16 vocabulary words I wanted to cover, so I wanted them to answer as many as possible, so that's where there's a little bit of chance that you might get a 10 point question, you might get a five point question, three point question, etc. So that's sort of the way I set it up. And what's really funny is if any of you are on Duolingo, or if you're on Fitbit or, you know, choose your own gamification app that you can do remember how many steps you got three days ago? It doesn't really matter. It matters the day of but it's kind of like writing in the sand. It just goes away. And the points kind of don't matter, but they're hooking me. I want to get that number higher, and I don't care about the numbers of clicks I have in a click to reveal so here we went to this is if you only you timed out, or you you only got 13 points after three attempts. So it's again, we're trying to reduce the anxiety. We're trying to build the confidence. That's one of the goals of the course. So, oops, instead of, you know, you lose so trying to soften the language, it's an optional course. It's an optional exercise. So you can, you got a 13 that's fine. Continue the course. You don't have to do anything. We're encouraging you to try again, but we are. We're not going to force you to this is also review content. This is not how I'm teaching the content. So again, it's optional, and that helped me kind of be better, feel a little bit better about the accessibility. There's also no click and drag going on here, none of that. So there's a there's a little bit of comfort, and it's individual. We don't have them competing against the classmates. We're just individual. We don't I will know how they did, because I want to know for my you know, tracking and understanding is this time well spent. I'm tracking how they're doing, but the instructor doesn't know. So this is a free space to practice for them. So and then the learning, where's. Learning in this, because we're not doing this just to play a game, right? So I structured the scoring as I explained. I used questions here that, instead of just saying, here's the here's the list of words, match them up. You know, they have to kind of know the words to type in there. And I also use the the the what's nice about the attempts and the timing is, yeah, the glossary is there. But do you really want to waste your time going to the glossary? Why don't you just think of what you think the word might be there? Were you you just learned a bunch of terms? It's probably one of them. Put it in right? So there's, there's this incentive to learn it instead of copy it. And then we had done a focus group with the past students on the materials that they've had before this course, and before we created this this version, and they were memorizing words and feeling like, Okay, I've memorized the words, I know the content and the story, and they were telling us about Quizlet and flashcards and the benefits of Quizlet versus flashcards, and it went down this whole rabbit hole of I just memorized the words, and we do not like that. This me. Didn't like that. I didn't like that. We really wanted to discourage memorization, and so we changed the wording, even on the this is this number 13, vulnerable is the word that's not the definition that's in the glossary or was in the course. You kind of need to understand what the word means to be able to answer a slightly different thing. So we've got recall going on instead of recognition, and we have this encouragement to sort of understand the meaning, as opposed to just regurgitate the definition. So that was possible, I think more possible because of the gaming environment. If you did get the 70 points, 70 points was our threshold. You got the Continue button. This whole module, this whole scene, is placed between the end of the content of the course and before the quiz. So hopefully you're kind of going into the quiz a little more relaxed. That was our goal. So the, you know, positive message, congratulations, yay. Which you don't really get a message like that after you've clicked through a click and reveal, right? You? So there's, if only we got a little confetti thing when we finished a click and reveal, right? So this is, this is taking us to the next little bit I was worried about my SMEs, right? I was worried my SMEs were gonna just not our content. You can't do this. This is the professionalism. Course, you can't do a game. And the response was the opposite, I gotta love it, from a cranky SME that I have who doesn't like me to do anything but content quiz, content quiz, content quiz. Love it. Love the game. What if you had more time? Could you do another one for this course? Could we have another game in this course and then this other one, who is always talking about how she just likes to click through, click through, click through. She wanted to redo it, redo the quiz, and I didn't have a I had a way to try again, but it was the questions in the same order. I didn't think of a way to randomize it so you would get different order the next time. And plus, I had structured the scoring so I was I was but this question from her was just fantastic, because it really said she went through it and she wanted to do it again. So that was a big win for for the for the game. Hey,

Luis Malbas  
Elizabeth, just one quick question. Couple slides back. Kim was asking for the type your answer here, yes, one exact answer that was correct. Or for each one, yeah, right,

Elizabeth Patience  
yeah, there's one. The this term was vulnerable. You needed to spell vulnerable. You need to put in vulnerable and you need to put vulnerable incorrectly. Spell it correctly. You don't I, I let cat you not to worry about caps, to do it. But it did. It was one specific answer we were testing on their vocabulary. Excellent. All right, yeah, um, okay, so any of that feel doable, any of these elements feel like you could try them in a course, because you don't have to do all of it. You could just add one of these. And I think you would, you would have more engagement. That's the promise of gamification. Yeah, the layout is pretty. Points are variable. Points, points are points. You just. And keep adding them up on a on a variable. So it's pretty nice. Yeah, so the layout is pretty, pretty easy, just to create that feeling that this is something different, and this feeling that that we're playing a game you could do that, Kim, I'm loving you. Really positive. So then the second example was, I was like, Okay, let's go all in. Let's do a game. We're going to do a game in this course. They bought into it. They love it. They think this is the right thing. Let's go into the game. So we had one of the chapter, one of the sections of the course, was professionalism. And the hard part about teaching professionalism to adults, and in my past life, I did a fair number of workshops on professionalism, is that everybody adults, think they know it, and adults in the training course especially think that they're together. They're with it. They're in training, right? They know how to how to do the things right? They know how to do things well. So other people are late, and other people do the wrong things, and other people are unprofessional. But I'm not so if it were just material, it's kind of skimmed through. And so what we needed to do was put them in their shoes, put them in I have to make this decision. Am I going to make the right decision with these eight scenarios? So that's that's was our professionalism challenge. And essentially what we have is we have scenarios. We have eight scenarios. They have to make a decision eight times from the beginning of the day to the end of the day. There's a little story that carries through in this little Polaroid picture over here on the side, we use game language. There are stars and flames and points. And you see, this is sort of an really, I'll say it obnoxious kind of background. And we're like, leaning really into a game environment. I chose the game font. Game like, buttons, right? We're really leaning into it. So the Polaroid is telling a story. Now this, if any of you have ever seen a beyond, you know this is beyond, but I did not animate i He wants me, like, can you animate a game? I'm like, No, not in the time allowed, so, but I was able to use V on because I don't have the illustrator skills to draw out these characters. I created a snapshot of the student with her patients, her instructor, the admin of the clinic, the hygienist, the patient's dad, another student, and so all of them are there and then, as you make decisions throughout the day, you might add people, or you might see people not as willing to help you or are not available To help you again because you're making unprofessional decisions. So you start to see people appear and disappear, fade in, fade out, as you make your decisions. So that's kind of the story that we're telling in the course. And so we made it all the scenarios are very specific to the learners. And time wise, I see Christy Tucker is here, and I went to a workshop on her, and she, she talks a lot about branching and scenarios and the value in them. So I would definitely hook up with her, because I was sold on, we need to. We need to do more of this kind of put them in the shoes. So we, we wanted to make the scenario specific to the learners. And I worked for a long time with chat GPT to come up with the scenarios so, you know, make them more challenging. Give me, you know, three options for each one, and chat GPT, like, made it possible. Um, we it was a lot of back and forth. Chat CBT did not write this course, but it was a lot of, like, prompt, you know, a lot of the prompting was just getting in this making, cutting down the time it took, and then I was able to take the scenarios and give it to my Smee, and he kind of edited them for what, what's the actual experience in our clinic, right? And so we made them specific to the learners. And he also was able to this situation isn't really what a problem we're having with our students. But could you change it this way? And it will, it will be. This is a problem we often see with our students, right? And so we were really able to be specific to to get the this started and down the path. And I did not. I would not have had the time to write all this out on my own. The other thing I wanted to talk about for a second is the points. The points actually helped me with something called, I'm calling, I'm getting a trademark on this actually branching light, which means that we go, maybe there's a technical term out there already, but I call it branching light in branching, full scenario, branching, as I think of it, you have a tree, right, and and the person makes the decision, and they start going down this branch of the tree, right? And the branch will fork off different ways, and they will kind of go down that path. I didn't have the time, even with chat GPT, I did not have the time to program all that and put that all into articulate so what? But what I with the points and the accumulation of the points, I was able to sort of mimic accumulative effect of the decisions so you can bounce back from certain bad decisions, but you can't bad back, bounce back from a series of bad decisions. Right? Things are going to get worse. And I think the Polaroid helped, helped kind of create that story and reinforce that story. But one decision did not mean different, a different question. In the next question, I would, I know i i Maybe one day so constrained branching, thank you, Christy, if you always get back on the right path Control Freak scenarios, yeah, I can't I just it was like constrained. Thank you. Um, so the the stars animate up, you know they Shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo. I don't have sound effects in my courses, but they do kind of go up there and create a celebratory effect, reinforcing the learning that came from Sarah Hodge Hodges, she released a series of her templates, and one of them has shooting stars up to a scoreboard. Definitely check that out. She just made it available free a couple of months ago. So and so I use that. And you see now we sort of have these little scoreboard up here at the top, and then we have stars down here and again over the top, lots of animation, lots of color, oversaturated, really trying to kind of get the excitement and really stress. You saw how muted the course was. Now we've kind of gone pink and purple, and so we've, we've really leaned into the game environment, okay, and we had very, this is again, where I really leaned into Chachi BT because they helped with the scoring. I didn't have every question was minus 10 plus five plus 10. There was a all different kinds of combinations of those. So

the sometimes you would the three choices would get you minus 10, minus five plus 10, you know, whatever. It always switched up. And so it made it more random. And I think randomization is, is part of this whole challenge of of gamification is making it sort of unexpected things happen, and not all decisions that you make are equally bad or equally good, right? You can make so, so change choices you can make. So, so bad choices. There's no, you know, whatever. So the nuance scoring was, was a guts, and I wouldn't have been able to think it up exactly. Is, is chat GPT, here are three options. And they decided, I call her She. She decided that, you know, this one is a minus 10, this one is a plus five, and then this me validated, you know that. And there were some questions were, we had to go a couple rounds as chat GPT because she felt two colleagues are talking about HIPAA in the break room. What do you do? And one of the choices is remind them to of HIPAA constraints. You shouldn't be talking about this in a public space. And. The other one was change the topic or walk away or whatever, and chat, GPT really leaned into walk away or change the topic and and do it and and not scold your your colleagues. And the dentist did not agree with that. You got to scold your colleagues. Chat GPT was leaning more into maintain the relationship. But it was interesting. It was interesting. Sorry, side conversation there, but we the cumulative score, and then the constrained branching really kind of worked through that. And so I had half half stars as well. This whole scoreboard, this whole set of stars. Here, it was about 20 triggers to get it to, because there's three states on each of these. I know someone's talking about articulate magic tomorrow, but, um, but I had to use JavaScript. But JavaScript really helped me, um, not have 1000 triggers because I wanted this to update on each page and Okay, change the first one if you don't want the second one. Change the second one if the score is greater than this. I didn't. I just couldn't have done that, not without all the debugging that we talked about. So JavaScript helped me with that, and chatgpt helped me with the JavaScript. So they helped me write the draw script when it didn't work, because it never does it. They helped me edit it and troubleshoot and fix it. And so now, if you have 45 there's four and a half stars there at the bottom. So that's how that worked. And then at the end, we have the this final scoreboard with the final little summary passing judgment, kind of not passing judgment, but definitely sort of saying, Hey, you made strong choices like building the confidence, or, Hey, maybe you should take some time to reflect, right? So, so encouraging. Again, this is optional. They have the chance to continue, even if they got below 30, or they could try again and and do it. So reinforcing the key messages, we give them the opportunities to improve their scores we've got, and then we're also reducing some anxiety, because this is a game. This isn't real life. They haven't embarrassed themselves in front of anybody. They haven't made wrong choices, but they're identifying that sometimes they do make the wrong choices, that maybe they don't actually know what the most professional decision always is. And maybe I should be paying more attention to this, which is really the big goal, right? So that we broke through, that I already know this kind of barrier through the game. So some of the practical sort of takeaways. So what are gamification elements? What does it mean? Sounds like most of you are pretty far along on your gamification journey, but points and scores and again, this doesn't have to be you don't have to do all of this. You can just do a couple of these and and points are a pretty easy one to do, even in Storyline levels and stages, a progress bar, badges, achievements. I know when I first got my Fitbit, the badges were the end all be all. I just wanted to earn those cute little badges. And they don't really mean anything, but they could, and there's ways, with like xAPI and with JavaScript to even have someone have information like points or scoring or badges, move from one course to the next course so that you could, you could continue this off over multiple courses, challenge and feedback. There's timers and time limits, branching scenarios you saw try again, loops. When have you ever said, oh, I want to try that, click and reveal again, right? So this is, this is really motivating, and it was interesting to me to see that they were actually doing that streaks. I have a streak going on my meditation app. I want to meditate. I want to do it every day, but there's days when it just doesn't feel like I have the time, but I don't want to break my streak, so I do it right. And so that plays into it. And I think later today, someone's talking about sort of hints and clues and easter eggs, really tapping into that game environment, the animations on visual feedback, the confetti, the shooting stars, there's letting them choose who they want to be today in an avatar. All of that, I think, really. A way to sort of change things up a little bit and let them know we're in a different environment as far as time is concerned. You know, just you don't have to do everything. You can just incorporate certain elements into your course as as your skill set develops, right? So you might figure out the timer thing, and then the points are easier. The points are easy, and you have a positive impact, you know, reaction from your your s me or your students. And so you add a timer, you invest the time to add a timer if you want to do the timer thing. David Anderson from articulate has a video out there in the world that shows you how to do the timer that I did, which is very strangely using motion paths. And you're wondering, how are they connected? And that's why I didn't fully understand how or why it worked, and I just copied it from another course that I found online. And because I didn't understand it, it took me longer to debug if you watch Dave's video, you will understand it better and probably save yourself some time and start with tools. You know, if you there are gaming things out there, if you want to invest in those, if you want to try those out, you want to try I go, go forth and conquer. I found it was really great with just storyline and a little bit of beyond and and then my colleague Nicole, she I not a gamer, so I don't know what a game looks like, but she turned me into free pick. And then I went into free pick, and her suggestion, I typed in game infographics. And now any search I do is for infographics, because when you search for even measles infographics or vaccine infographics or frostbite or extractions infographics, some graphic designer has gone out there in the world, and they have developed colors with hex codes. They have developed fonts that are appropriate. They have developed, how do you present statistics, how do you present process flows? How do you present all of that? And it's just, was really nice to just kind of see what the colors would work and how to present it. Also, I also was able to go into free pick and say, game assets, and that's where my stars came from. My buttons came from. The little dots, the gradient dots, so the gradients already set. I'm just copying and pasting. So that was very helpful in the course I used AI, I'm a I'm on the AI. Let me do something more advanced. I wouldn't have been able to do this in the time allowed with the skills allowed without, without AI. I worry about the environment. But it's, it's, it really helped me

push myself to the next level and make it look okay in the time allowed. It helped the story of the scenarios, writing the instructions so they're motivating and they're game like I am really in chat. GPT, I haven't had time to kind of explore the others. I know everyone has their favorite. Everyone has has a a different idea of where they get their images. I've seen a cat make Danda mien, and just been really impressed with the images that you can get out of AI, you can't get them out of chat. GPT, you can get hilarious pictures out of chatgpt, but not really good ones that you can use in a course, but you can get ideas for images, right? I have this concept about AI, what should I do? What should my icon look like? Right? You can, you can put that in there, and you get ideas, and it gets you started. It helped with the point structure and the mechanics of executing those point structures, and then triggers variables, JavaScript, all of that. It helped me debug. It helped me troubleshoot. It. It was it was great for that. So really made the gaming possible, which made my skill set better, which made me more competitive, right? I don't think I'm not in the camp that AI is going to take my job, but I'm able to build a stronger portfolio using AI. So I would also look at, if you're interested in gamification. And what? What apps help you using that use it gamification. So is it? Duolingo is helping you learn a language, meditation, apps, streaks, Fitbit, there's hundreds of them that all use this gamification idea, and so start looking at what's working and why does it work, right? Is, is what I've been doing a lot this year, is sort of, why am I hooked on this? Okay, can I add that to my class? I think we're all like Luis said at the beginning, like we're going to Universal Studios with our kid, and we're still thinking about the learning, right? So I do a lot on LinkedIn. I live. I don't live on LinkedIn, but I spend a good 10 minutes, 15 minutes every morning, looking through it and following people who are sending idea, posting ideas, graphics, cool things are doing in courses, cool things are doing on websites, cool things are doing in PowerPoint, so that I am keeping that kind of creative. It was easier to create the game because I had resources and because I had visuals and ideas for that, and then these conferences, learning guilds, e learning heroes, sometimes hit or miss, but for gamification, it was helpful too many M's to get me buy in. That was the big issue for me. And I would just say what works for me is building credibility. I do not talk to my Smee about esthetics, if I can avoid it. He's a photographer, and so we use a lot of his pictures in our course. So we do talk a little bit about the pictures, but I try not to. He doesn't have any he, he, I don't talk to him say, which font should I use or which color should I use? I make those decisions, and then he tells me he likes them or doesn't like them when they're already in the course. But he doesn't, because he doesn't care. He just lets me do that. But I also shoot down anyone him or anyone on this team who says, oh, Elizabeth, go make it pretty or Oh, go do your magic. No, no, I'm gonna go and make it more effective. I'm gonna go make it more memorable. I'm gonna make it more sticky. I'm gonna go make it this is why we're doing this. And can I show you the research that says this works, right? I that helps me when I want to try something new and I have the the research to back me up. It helps me have that conversation, if I'm just the font lady, that's harder to have that conversation about how to make the instruction better and assess the best strategy. So sometimes it's going to be begged for forgiveness. Sometimes it's going to be, you know, go big or go home, start small, like you got to kind of decide. And for me, again, it's different based on who my SME is. And then, you know, you got to consider how much support you have from your SME and from your team, and from the resources you have and the time that you have, what's the best way to go forward and then, but you have to, and I really should have put this first. It's all about the learner. How are they going to respond to gaming elements? My dental instructors would not respond. Well, I it's going to take a lot to convince me that they would respond well to that, but they they want in and out of the courses and get what they need. And they would. They are responsible enough and educated enough and invested enough to read the material. So don't treat them as if they won't right. Whereas my students are high school graduates for the most part. And so how do we motivate them to read the whole chapter? How do we motivate them to read the remember the words that they need to remember, right? This plays more of a role in that, and then also your content. So we develop courses on first aid. I just finished a course on dental instructor extractions. I think a game could get pretty gory given the the content in that course. I don't know that it fits with that, but maybe. But maybe, but professionalism, it absolutely fit with that so and yeah, so y'all were already convinced, it seems so I'll skip that question. But some of the resources, like I said, I follow a lot of. Random people on LinkedIn, a lot of instructional designers, but also graphic designers, because they help with the visual like and keep me thinking about the visual. I'm more of an instruction instructional designer than a designer, so I I need help on on ideas and how to re manipulate things so they look good. I follow some coders, Chris Hutchins from discovery learning, discovery learning. He's fantastic. He's out of England, and he does some great videos on his YouTube channel about how to incorporate JavaScript into courses. I look at experts and experimenters. Natalia V she's out of, I want to say Croatia. She has done a whole series. She just finished it this week on learning JavaScript and how frustrating it was, why she was doing it, which where she wound up with it. So that kind of dialog, if you're on the fence about things like JavaScript, seeing that dialog is good. Karl Kapp and Christy Tucker, I would even say for gamification experts, PowerPoint designers, they're doing some slick stuff if you have a chance. Thursday for me, I'm on the West Coast, so it's Thursday mornings. Bright carbon does a free 30 minute workshop on PowerPoint, and you're not seeing it here because I uploaded these and I see that all my fonts changed and all my morph went away, and all that sad, sad, sad stuff that I spent time on is all gone in the version you're saying. But it is it, you know, it is useful. And then Adobe tips and tricks, tips and tricks. They have one for Illustrator and one for Photoshop, and they're really helpful. Chat, GPT, e learning heroes. And then free pick and again, that infographics thing is, is a beautiful thing. So free pick is pretty inexpensive, and they have a lot of good like icons and graphics and visuals like the buttons that I used. Yeah, break carbon is the best So, and you can definitely connect, connect with me on LinkedIn. I don't post very much, but I do follow a lot of people that have helped me look better, so that's my presentation.

Luis Malbas  
Thank you so much, Elizabeth, that was great. I just love your journey. It was I think that that's something that a ton of people can really learn from so, I mean, before you started playing around with gamification, did you realize, I mean, did you know that you might have to get into like, variables and the triggers and the JavaScript and all that? I mean, had you known that, would you have, like, been like, oh, never mind. I'm not going to do this, or

Elizabeth Patience  
I didn't feel I assumed it was part of the the thing to do us a gamification to to make things move, or to get things to go. I thought that was going to be a big part of it, and I was spending so much time troubleshooting and not quite figuring out how to make them work. Right now I have a phantom trigger that's filling up in my courses. So it's really, it's really like a risk, right? That you go down this path and then the triggers, I think they break. Maybe they don't break, maybe I forgot to fix something, but I think they actually change. And now I do have a trigger that is randomly showing up that I've never added to the course, and it's showing up in three different

Luis Malbas  
courses. Do you feel like you had an aptitude for the I mean, you didn't realize you had an aptitude for this before? Or was it something that I

Elizabeth Patience  
like? I like programming. I like the if this, then that. I like that, that mentality. I'm more of a technical coder. Oh yes, Marie, Marie, somebody just posted Marie. That's why I forgot to mention Marie. She's French. She's a great game resource. Follow her on LinkedIn. She posts probably every week. Yeah, Marie, I forgot to mention Marie, yes. That is I like that. I lean into that more than I lean into the visual part of it. I like that part.

Luis Malbas  
How much do you think you've relied on chat GPT to help you,

Elizabeth Patience  
not as so my, my S, me thinks that I just say chat GPT do a game, and then chat GPT vomits a game, and then I can just give it to him. He thinks it's kind of like I dream of Genie. I just blink my eyes and it happens, um, I'm actually having a weeks long conversation with chat TPT for this game, for these games, it was, it was weeks of talking to them and writing scenarios and writing scores and coming back and saying that didn't work. That didn't work, that variable doesn't exist, or that, that trigger doesn't exist in Storyline. And so it's, it's, it's definitely a partnership. Yeah, interesting.

Luis Malbas  
Wow, that's amazing. That's such great information. I think this was, like perfect for opening up this event. Thank you. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, and thanks everybody for for being here. Next session is going to start at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern. This next one is with Alicia zimnock Talking more about, like, things like, what was it? It was, I think it was, yeah, intentional questioning, journaling prompts, guided reflection. It's a little different, but I really was taken by the session description. So I hope you'll join us. Then again, that's 10am Pacific Time, 1pm Eastern. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and close out the session. Elizabeth, thank you so much, and I hope to see you again, maybe for accessibility event, if you might be able to share some more, it'd be wonderful to have you. Yeah, thank you. All right, all right, thanks everyone. We'll see you the next one you.