Looking for new ways to engage students? Tired of battling the same problems with the same results? Design thinking and game elements provide new avenues for international educators to solve problems of overwhelming processes and help students achieve their goals.

1. Samantha Martin
Chief Information Officer & Co-Founder
samantha@projecttravel.com
Gaming Design &
Design Thinking
New Ways to Engage Students
May 1, 2015

2. projecttravel.com
the plan
My Story
Gamification
3 Game Elements
Design Thinking
3 Design Thinking Tools
Clarifying Questions
Your Turn
Resources

3. projecttravel.com
Samantha Martin
Chief Information Officer & Co-Founder, Project Travel
And before…
Study Abroad Advisor, SUNY New Paltz
Youth Exchange Officer, Rotary International
N. Ireland Country Coordinator, Educational Cultural Exchanges
Program Coordinator, Int’l Ed. Programs @ Jacksonville U.

5. projecttravel.com
What is ‘gamification’?
Using game elements and game design in non-game
contexts to engage people and solve problems.
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The Why & How of ‘Gamification’
Solve a problem in a new way. Increase motivation or
participation. Improve the experience of a ‘chore’. Change
behavior. Customer loyalty.
e.g. Fitocracy (get fit), Coursera (finish a course), FoldIt
(crowdsourced cancer research), U. of Hawaii Kukuui Cup
Challenge (save energy in student residence hall), VW Fun
Theory (speed less, walk more, recycling, etc.)
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7. projecttravel.com
Games motivate us to participate more fully in whatever
we're doing…Organizations will need to become effective
players in an emerging engagement economy.
Jane McGonigal in ‘Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How
They Can Change the World’“

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Game Design
In Education
Duolingo (Language learning)
Quest to Learn (K-12 classroom learning)
Project Travel - Via (international education processes)

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3 Game Design
Elements
Onboarding
Engagement & Progression Loops
Rewards

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Onboarding
“Impossible to Fail”
• Guides
• Highlighting
• Feedback
• Limited Options
• Limited Obstacles (‘monsters’)
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Engagement & Progression Loops
Our brains love challenge & feedback.
Motivation
Action
Feedback
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Rewards
Intrinsic rewards have longer-term pay-offs. Extrinsic rewards are
best used as a surprise.
Intrinsic
• Unlocking access
• Unlocking content or information
• Badges (symbol of accomplishment, possibly comes with social
recognition)
Extrinsic
• Tangible
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Final Thought
Game Design
Game design engages students
and helps them progress towards
global opportunities when they
are not directly in an advising
session or event.

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What is design thinking?
A way to approach problem solving like designers,
through a process of empathy, defining the problem,
ideating, prototyping, and testing assumptions.
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19. Design Thinking Process

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Design
Thinking
Tools
Ethnographic interviews
Visualization
Journey Mapping
Brainstorming
Rapid Prototyping
Assumption testing
Learning Launches

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Make failure fast & cheap.
Ed Hess, JD
Darden School of Business, University of Virginia
Fail fast to succeed sooner.
Jeanne Liedtka,
Darden School of Business, University of Virginia
“
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22. Project Description
What is the problem or opportunity?
Describe the project in a few sentences— your “elevator pitch”
Intent Scope
What is within the scope of the project and what is outside it?
What efforts sit adjacent to this particular project?
Exploration Questions
What key questions will you need to answer through your research?
These may include student needs to understand better, technical possibilities, and new engagement models
Target Audience
Who are you designing for?
Be as specific as possible. Whom do you need to understand? Why are they important?
Research Plan
How will you explore your opportunity space?
You will need a plan, including a timetable & milestones for primary & secondary research.
Expected Outcomes What outcomes would you like to see?
Success Metrics How will you measure success?
Project Planning
What resources do you need? Why? At what stages? What is creating urgency? What is the relevant
timeframe for fulfilling the brief?
Design Brief

23. Key Assumption Who How Timeframe Cost
A Learning Launch

24. Napkin Pitch (Name your concept)
Need Approach
Benefit Competition

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Final Thought:
Design Thinking
Design thinking gives international
educators new tools to understand &
empathize with students and solve
internal & external problems.

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Your turn
1. Which problems do you think we have defined
too narrowly? Why?
2. Create a journey map for your study abroad
students or yourself as an advisor or program
manager. Which parts of that experience hold
the most challenges? Why?
3. Think about the game designer’s model for
engagement (motivation > action> feedback).
Describe an engagement loop that your office
currently does successfully. Describe an
engagement loop that is broken.

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Resources
‘Gamification’, Online course hosted by Coursera, by Kevin Werbach. Taken in 2014.
coursera.org/course/gamification
Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the
World by Jane McGonigal. New York : Penguin Press, 2011
Achievement Unlocked: Digital Games as a Key to Learning, by Gayle Allen,
Esteban Sosnik, Kristen Swanson, and Cameron White pages.brightbytes.net/rs/
brightbytes/images/CoLabWhitepaper.pdf
Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers by Jeanne Liedtka
and Tim Ogilvie, New York : Columbia University Press, 2011
Failure is not the Other ‘F’ Word, by Samantha Martin, NAFSA Blog April 2015,
Access online at http://blog.nafsa.org/2015/04/16/failure-is-not-the-other-f-word/
#martin
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28. Samantha Martin
Chief Information Officer
Project Travel
samantha@projecttravel.com
want to continue the conversation?