Atla Annual 2021 Online

Gameful design reimagines teaching within and outside the classroom, online or in person. "Re-vision, re-tool, re-spawn" continues the conversation from Atla Annual 2020, where gamification was presented as an invitation to rethink instruction, especially in today’s tech-saturated, pandemic-sequestered situation now that virtual is a crucial mode. Gamification is the application of game-design principles to non-game contexts; gameful design incorporates basic game architecture, story, and aesthetic as central to course design, infusing education with curiosity, imagination, and play. We want to share two new examples of gamification — curricular and co-curricular — demonstrating how gameful design yields whole-person, transformational learning. First, we describe our co-taught Bible and Classical Literature course, where the hero-students journey into the dark, accomplish heroic tasks, earn badges, and engage in desire-driven, side-quest learning. Second, we describe “Human Salvo: An Experiment with the Antidote to Zombification,” a virtual, Covid-inspired alternative to weekly in-person chapel offerings. Chapel-as-game responded to our shared experience of Fall 2020, fraught with four anxieties: pandemic/contagion, political tribes, economy, and racial (in)justice (the primary anxieties that characterize the zombie genre as well). Examples offer assessable evidence of learning toward specified outcomes. Our aim at Atla Annual 2021 is to spark creativity among librarians-as-teachers for re-visioning, re-tooling, and (perhaps) re-spawning as game-oriented instructors.