Episode 160 Katrin Becker on Learning through Playful Experiences

Katrin Becker on Learning through Playful Experiences

Episode Summary

In this episode of Experience Points, serious games expert Katrin Becker explores why “good enough” may be more powerful than perfection in gamified learning. She argues that focusing on defined criteria rather than comparison increases student agency and supports a wider range of learners; not just top performers.

Katrin highlights safety and trust as essential to joyful learning, emphasizing that mistakes must be recoverable. By allowing resubmissions and designing flexible systems, educators encourage reflection, risk-taking, and persistence. She also introduces “benign transgression,” explaining that students will test boundaries—so instructors should build thoughtful guardrails and iterate their designs without breaking trust.

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(LinkedIn): http://www.linkedin.com/in/katrinbecker

(Research Gate): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Katrin-Becker-3

(Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/katrin.becker

(YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@MinkHollowStudio

(Website): https://www.drkatrinbecker.com

Dave Eng:

Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host, Dave Eng, from Games-Based Learning by University XP.

Find out more by going to www.universityxp.com. On today's episode, we'll learn from Katrin Becker. Katrin is an award-winning expert in serious games and gamification in education.

With a PhD in educational technology, two computer science degrees, and over 40 years of teaching experience, she's taught everything from computer science to game design and games-based learning. A certified instructional designer and published author of four books, Katrin's work is globally recognized for transforming how we teach and learn. Katrin, welcome to the show!

Katrin Becker:

Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here.

Dave Eng:

Excellent. Well, we are excited to have you as well. And I want to jump into the very first question here.

And we first got connected from this past year's Games-Based Learning Virtual Conference. And one of the sessions you did was called Better vs. Good.

So my first question to you is, in your session, when better is the enemy of good, how do you define, quote-unquote, good enough in gamified learning systems? Can striving for better actually harm student engagement?

Katrin Becker:

Well, good and good enough are things I've been giving an awful lot of thought to lately. And the problem with... It's not possible to answer that question precisely, because good enough is going to depend on many, many things.

Who you are, who you're teaching, where you are, when you are, a whole bunch of different things. I think it's something that we should keep in our mind throughout whatever it is we're doing, whether we're designing or whether we're actively teaching. We need to be cognizant, is what I'm doing good enough?

And on the other side of that, when you're receiving work from your students or participants in whatever kind of teaching experience you're doing, it is important to think about what constitutes good enough. And I think what it comes to, one of the problems that we have, especially in formal education, is we seem really very preoccupied with perfection, A, 100%, getting it right, top of the list, all of those things. And they all have to do with competition, which isn't always useful.

Katrin Becker:

Whereas good enough asks a slightly different question. We're not looking for best. We're looking for something that meets a set of criteria we have determined independent of other people.

So better is by necessity comparative. And when we're looking at perfection, that also pits you against the others. It's norm-based.

And so good enough is a more difficult thing to define. But I think it is more useful in the long run. It allows people also a greater amount of agency.

I've had students who have come to me when I have provided assignments that give, you know, if you want a C, you have to do these things. If you want a B, you have to do all of those plus this. And if you want an A, you have to do all of those plus that.

And I've had students come to me saying, I'm going for the C this week. And I have some questions. So for them, the C that week is good enough.

And that should be fine.

Dave Eng:

All right. Thank you. I think that is an interesting approach because I think that because of the show, we're really focused on games and really education as well.

You brought up that really specific and I think important point about agency. And specifically, like, you know, when we're playing or doing work or pursuing our academic endeavors and everything else, having that ability to set what we want to do, I think is important, you know, like specifically for agency and trying to identify that good enough level is what we are is I think is in line with, you know, how much we're prepared to propose or how much we're prepared to invest in this particular activity or anything else.

Do you ever feel that this is a difficult concept for, I mean, you gave us the student example, but is this a difficult concept about good versus better for like other educators or administrators? Talk me through about like a time when I think you had to make this kind of conversation or this argument about good versus better.

Katrin Becker:

In a way, it kind of snuck up on me. I started playing around with providing my students more choices than I normally would. A typical formal university class has, you know, six assignments, a major project, maybe and a couple of exams.

And I decided I would play around with that. What if I gave them more different things to do? And what I ended up coming up with was I gave them many more things to do than they had to do in order to get the perfect score.

So a perfect score in this case didn't mean perfection. It stopped meaning perfection. It meant, you know, you've reached the highest step that I have defined as necessary.

And what this allows, if you give students more things to do than they have to do in order to reach that level, then they all of a sudden have choices. They can choose, and some students still do this, can choose to do a few things very well and earn that level that I have determined, reach that bar by doing a few things really, really well. Other students do many things adequately.

And the students that do many things adequately are students that we have been losing. We've been ignoring throughout a lot of formal education. And yet I thought about this and, you know, if I were a game designer and I were staffing up to do a project, I would want a few of those students who do a few things really, really well, the traditional A students.

I would want the majority of my staff to be made up of those others who will keep at things and keep trying to do things and try something different and do more until what they get is good enough. The ones I call the sloggers. And that's where good and good enough really has power.

We want people who are going to stick with it, and those are the people who will end up doing that.

Dave Eng:

Um, I think that this aspect, this, you know, you talked a bit about it before with, um, sort of like, I don't know if you would call it like a jack of all trades, but someone who's has multiple different areas that they can approach and really kind of have like the longevity and the endurance and the desire to stick with it and really, you know, hopefully learn as much as they can and do as much as they can. Goes again back to what you said before about agency and being able to choose their individual path.

And that leads me to the second question I wanted to ask you about the overall like joyful return of learning. So I want to talk about your book for a moment. Your book Gamification 101 emphasizes bringing joy back to learning.

So what do you think are the biggest blockers to joy in digital education today?

Katrin Becker:

Um, it boils down to what I'm going to call safety and trust it. Um, and, and those are topics that a lot of that are coming up a lot, um, you know, classroom spaces and, um, lots of other places where people talk about the need for safety. And when you think about it, that is what allows us to take risks.

Um, if we don't feel safe, we're not going to be taking a lot of risks and feeling safe in a classroom setting does not necessarily mean you're allowed to fail. Um, what it means is when you fail, you have ways to recover. You have ways to make it up.

And so that's where the safety comes in. It's not about lowering your standards. It's not about making sure everybody gets an A so they don't get upset.

Katrin Becker:

It's about giving people the room and the support to try things that might fail to take risks. And we, in life in general, when we think about our most important lessons, they were usually things we learned never to do again. And we don't allow that to happen in school.

Um, we often penalize them in, in such a way that, you know, that the anxiety is so great. The students, the risk for them is so high. If they blow this one thing, they're toast.

And that doesn't help learning in any way. If our goal is to help students learn, then we have to make things safe. And the joy comes along with that.

If you feel safe, if you have trust, and the trust has to go both ways. Students have to trust what, that you're going to do what you say, and that you're going to say what you do, and you need to trust your students. And so all of those things help to build a safe place.

We're not really striving, and we shouldn't really strive for constant joy. Um, but I've been, even as a student, to far too many classes where there was no joy at all. And not even sometimes.

And we know from life too, that, that, you know, breaking things up with a, a little bit of fun or something, making people laugh, everyone then relaxes. And that speaks back to the concept of safety again.

Dave Eng:

And I think that, that concept of safety, and I think is embodied in a lot of different games, because gameplay, in fact, I make an argument multiple times, is that it's part of an experiential learning loop. Being able to play, and interact, and engage. And being able to make mistakes, and being able to recover from them.

One of the things I used to say to my class when I was using tabletop games in the classroom, is I would preface it with, I would not say exactly what my learning outcome was, or what I was hoping to accomplish. But I would preface the activity with, you know, today we're going to play Pandemic, or we're going to play X, Y, and Z game. And the purpose of this is to learn something.

But the purpose is not for, you know, you, or you, or you to win, or do anything else. The purpose is the activity of playing this game, and afterwards we're going to talk about the activity. So that's how I preface those conversations about this being a space where, I don't really care about the outcome of the game.

What I care more about is how you engage with it. So do you have an example of like, how you would preface a conversation with your students about the fact that this is an environment, you can play, you can engage with it. But it's also okay to make mistakes.

How do you have that? How do you share that with your students?

Katrin Becker:

Partly, I do it by showing them. By allowing, noting mistakes, and not actually, I don't point out individual students. But I will talk about a piece of work, and perhaps where it fell down, and where it might have done better.

And then said, well, you're allowed to do it again. That's another piece of this is I put my money where my mouth is by allowing people to resubmit work. So that underlines the fact that if you got it wrong, that's okay.

You have a chance to fix it. And they will always learn from it. They will remember what they got wrong, and they probably won't do it again.

Katrin Becker:

Whereas in a standard, traditional kind of classroom, when you hand in an assignment, you don't think about it. As a student, you don't think about it again, because you're already on to the next one. Whereas this, the allowing people to resubmit, turns out, and I hadn't thought about this before I actually did it, forces them to reflect on what they did.

Because now they have a choice to make. Because in my class, they're allowed to do more things than they have to. They now have a choice to make.

They need to decide, do I want to fix this and submit it again? Or do I want to do something different? In both cases, they have reflected on the mistakes that they made in the first one.

And so they will have learned from that. And there was nothing lost for them. So the risk is low, and they can continue on and keep trying.

So I've kind of lost the train here. Ask me again what you were saying, and then I'll come back to it from both sides.

Dave Eng:

I wanted to know how you have that conversation with your learner, saying that it's okay to make mistakes.

Katrin Becker:

Part of that is I actually make mistakes in class. Sometimes they are mistakes I have made, the same mistake in this same lecture over and over and over again. It is a rehearsed performance.

And so they see me making mistakes. That's also important. And I sometimes, and I also don't always tell my students ahead of time what I hope they will get out of this.

It depends on the situation. Sometimes the big reveal at the end is more impactful than saying ahead of time, here's what I want you to learn, or here's what I hope you'll get out of it. So it depends on the situation, whether or not it is appropriate to say ahead of time, here's what I hope you'll learn, or to do something else.

Katrin Becker:

So I used to do a lecture where I would teach binary counting, binary number systems. And I would tell my students, okay, by the end of this class, you will know how to count to a thousand on your fingers. And then I go into what I'm going to talk about.

And at the very end, I show them how to count in binary on your fingers. And so this is the carrot. And a lot of this is performance.

And I think anyone who doesn't believe that a lecture or even a designed online only kind of presentation is not a performance is missing something important. It is, I once had, I did a survey and one of the comments that sticks in my mind was, and this survey was with teachers. And it was about what are the barriers to using games in the classroom.

And one of the teachers responded with, I send my kids to school to learn not to have fun. And my thoughts on that are, you're missing something here is, yes, I absolutely expect my teachers, professors, instructors to entertain me. Now, if that was all they did, I would feel cheated.

But that is absolutely part of it. And so I have to do my part in making things joyful and relaxed for them as well.

Dave Eng:

I see. Thanks, Katrin. I appreciate your insight there.

And I also want to know if your particular response speaks to the third question I want to ask you on benign transgression space. And we talked about being able to make mistakes and how that's okay generally in the educational environment that you want to foster. But my question is, in your presentation from this past conference, you talked about benign transgression in good game design.

So my question is a two part. One, what do you mean by benign transgression? And then two, how can this concept be brought into formal education without causing chaos or worse punishment?

Katrin Becker:

Okay. I anticipate, just like we do with games, when we design a game, we, or at least should, expect people to try and game whatever system we set up. They're going to try and see what rules they can break, what they can get around, what they can get away with.

And so rather than trying to prevent all of this, I assume that that is part of the game. The class, a part of the design. And so it is my job as the designer and the instructor to set up the guardrails for this and the boundaries to keep them from going too far.

And I mean, occasionally someone will, and that's when you have a quiet talk with them saying, look, you know, this is not acceptable. We can't go this far. But in other ways, an example, and the way I set up my classes, everything is front loaded.

Katrin Becker:

So all of their assignments are available at the beginning of term and I allow them to continue submitting. They can attempt whatever they want and they can continue submitting until about a day or two before I have to submit my final marks. And one of the exercises, one set of exercises I gave them involved various kinds of classroom discussions, posting articles and doing an opinion piece about it and that sort of thing.

And what I learned the first time I tried it was because I had given them this much leeway, I had a bunch of students at the very end of term, because they can see their marks all the time, right? That their grades get updated very frequently, just like scores and games. And so what I noticed was after the end of lectures, I had a bunch of students posting these op-ed pieces.

And I thought, wait a minute, I've made a mistake here. Nobody is, none of the other students, my reason for doing this exercise was to promote class discussion. And so if they're going to be posting all of this stuff at the end, there's going to be notes class discussion and my objective has failed.

Katrin Becker:

So I still, because I said I would, I gave them the marks, but in the next round of this course, I changed it so that you're not going to get any marks for submitting any of this after the last day of class because nobody cares. And so I explained and adjusted. And that is part of the back and forth is expect them to play the system, whatever system you have set up, and then be prepared to adapt it over time.

And if you happen to screw up like I did that time, you have to eat it. You cannot change the rules on them and say, oh, yeah, that was a mistake. Now I'm going to penalize you for it.

That completely destroys trust. So it's up to me to anticipate as much as possible the ways in which people will transgress, people will try and break the rules or get around the rules or whatever, just like we do in game design. And that is something I think that truly requires experience on the part of the designer or instructor.

It is not something I would recommend you lean into too heavily if you're new to this game, the teaching game.

Dave Eng:

I see. I think that I take a lot of that to heart because with my courses overall, I'm doing a lot of the same thing where I'm examining the entire course, trying to determine where there are pain points or parts of these benign transgressions that you talked about before and being able to improve on it. Do you happen to have a story or at least an example of when something like this occurred, you talked about being able, your students being able to game the system, which other players and gamers will call like grokking the game.

When you've been able to see another learner or student game the system and the insight that they revealed or the action they took was really kind of like new and innovative and it's not something that you really recognized. And then the next time you taught that class, you integrated that as part of your lesson plan or anything else. Have you ever been surprised by something that a student or a learner has done in your course?

Katrin Becker:

I have frequently been surprised by my students and I revel in it. I love it when they surprise me. I've been teaching a long time.

And so over time, you get fewer surprises. So now when one happens, it's a really big deal for me. And sadly, I cannot come up with a specific example right now, but I can say that I have created assignments.

Oh, there's this is one I had before I had gone fully gamified. What I did was provide my students with six predefined assignments. But I also allowed them to propose a different one.

If they didn't like any of the ones that I had, they could propose one ahead of time and I would review it. And one of the students and for the life of me, I can't remember the exact details of the assignment. But I remember that they proposed one that I thought was a really cool idea.

And so that became one of the assignments next semester. And I asked the student their permission to use it and to credit them with it, which connects these two things. It also helps the student who provided the good idea and gives them credit and recognition for doing so.

But on the other side, it also shows the next set of students that I acknowledge their good ideas and this is something they can do.

Dave Eng:

Wow, that's great. I think that the closest I've ever been able to do that in the past is just take students assignments that I thought did a really good job on it and then ask them if it's OK if I use this as like an exemplar assignment. So the next time I teach the course and tell students like this is the assignment for this course, if you want to see what I think is a really great submission, I've uploaded an example from a past student that I thought did really well.

Katrin Becker:

I have found that I get a lot more creativity with the setup that I have right now because the risk for missing the mark is lowered. So what I found, and this also is another thing I was not expecting with the design that I set up, is that their creativity just goes through the roof because now they can propose something and I can go, no, that's just not going to work, you know, no. And what they've lost, they actually haven't lost anything.

It feels like they've lost time, but they have still learned something. And so we both still win.

Dave Eng:

Great, thank you. And I'll take that into account next time I'm going to be developing my course. So unfortunately, Katrin, we're at the end of today's show.

Where can people go to find out more about you online?

Katrin Becker:

Well, I have a website that is sadly, desperately in need of renovation. But it's www.drkatrinbecker.com

Dave Eng:

Excellent. And I will make sure that I include that link in the show notes. So thank you, Katrin, for joining us.

Katrin Becker:

Thank you so much for inviting me.

Dave Eng:

I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more, then a great place to start is with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in the description or show notes. So thanks for joining us. Again, I'm your host Dave Eng from Games-Based Learning by University XP.

On Experience Points, we explore different ways in which we can learn from games. If you like this episode, please consider commenting, sharing, and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you.

I'd also love it if you took some time to rate the show. We live to lift others with learning. So if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could also benefit.

Also, make sure to visit University XP online at www.universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter and Bluesky as University XP, and on Facebook and LinkedIn as University XP. Also, feel free to email me anytime.

My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on!

Cite this Episode

Eng, D. (Host). (2026, March 22). Katrin Becker on Learning through Playful Experiences. (No. 160) [Audio podcast episode]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/160

Internal Ref: UXPU1Q0XTNPH

References

Becker, K. (2024). Gamification 101: How to bring joy back to learning by making your classroom gameful. Tellwell Talent. https://www.amazon.com/Gamification-101-Learning-Classroom-Gameful/dp/1773707752

Eng, D. (2019, August 20). Play is Work. Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/8/20/play-is-work

Eng, D. (2019, August 6). Meaningful Choices. Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/8/6/meaningful-choices

Eng, D. (2019, July 31). Fun Factors. Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/7/31/fun-factors

Eng, D. (2019, May 29). Structure your gamified learning. Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/5/29/structure-your-gamified-learning

Eng, D. (2019, October 15). Make More Mistakes. Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/10/15/make-more-mistakes

Eng, D. (2019, September 17). Player Interaction. Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/9/17/player-interaction

Eng, D. (2020, August 20). What is Player Agency? Retrieved February 20, 2026, from http://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/8/20/what-is-player-agency

Eng, D. (2020, March 26). What is Games-Based Learning? Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/3/26/what-is-games-based-learning

Eng, D. (2021, April 6). What is Grokking? Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2021/4/6/what-is-grokking

Eng, D. (2022, March 1). What is Player Reflection? Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2022/3/1/what-is-player-reflection

Eng, D. (2023, October 17). What is Player Engagement? Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2023/10/17/what-is-player-engagement

Eng, D. (2024, August 20). Game Goals vs. Learning Outcomes. Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2024/8/20/game-goals-vs-learning-outcomes

Humor Research Lab. (n.d.). The benign violation theory. Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://humorresearchlab.com/benign-violation-theory/

Gamification, Agency, Trust, Katrin BeckerDave EngMarch 22, 2026gamification, agency, trust, safety, reflection, transgressionComment

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Episode 160 Katrin Becker on Learning through Playful Experiences