Episode 139 Janna Kellinger on Designing Games in Learning Management Systems
Janna Kellinger on Designing Games in Learning Management Systems
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Experience Points, Dr. Janna Kellinger shares her journey from using one-shot games in high school English classes to designing fully game-based courses at UMass Boston. She discusses her book Up Your Teaching Game and how educators can design story-driven curricular games. Janna explains how she transforms Learning Management Systems (LMS) into game engines, embedding narratives and feedback loops to drive engagement. She highlights her Coding for Non-Coders course, where students learn to code to stop tech thieves. Tune in to discover how game mechanics can revolutionize online learning and student motivation.
Janna Kellinger
she/her/hers
Professor
University of Massachusetts Boston
Dr. Janna Kellinger has been using games in her teaching since she was a high school English teacher in the metro Atlanta area. Now, games are her teaching. Her evolution from one-shot games to game-based courses to course-based games is explored in her latest book, Up Your Teaching Game, which also lays out a process for educators to design story-based curricular games. She infuses the book with illustrative examples from her own teaching and from curricular games designed by students in her Introduction to Game-based Teaching class. She is most proud of her latest course-based game for her Coding for Non-Coders class where students have to learn how to code to save the world from thieves stealing their latest invention: technological telepathy. While she games herself with her initial inspiration for game-based teaching coming from playing the Myst series, she is more of a vicarious gamer through her teenage twins. She enjoys spreading the gospel of game-based teaching.
(Facebook): Janna Jackson Kellinger https://www.facebook.com/janna.jackson.7
(Other): https://bsky.app/profile/jannamjackson.bsky.social
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 at www.universityxp.com . On today's episode, we'll learn from Dr. Janna Kellinger. Dr. Kellinger, a former high school English teacher and now a professor of education at UMass Boston fully integrates games into her teaching. Her book Up Your Teaching Game guides educators in designing story-based curricular games. She highlights her Coding for Non-Coders game where students code to stop tech thieves. Inspired by Myst, she champions games-based learning. Janna, welcome to the show!
Janna Kellinger:
Thank you for having me, Dave.
Dave Eng:
Great. I'm glad that you're here. One of the questions I always like to ask people, because I think this is probably one of the more interesting questions to ask at the very beginning, is your journey into games-based learning. My first question for you is you've been using games in your teaching since your time as a high school English teacher, what inspired you to take the leap from traditional instruction to fully integrating games-based learning into your courses?
Janna Kellinger:
Thank you for asking. As you mentioned, I take inspiration from the video game series, Myst. When I was teaching high school, I started playing the Myst adventure games and was really surprised at how immersive they were, but also by how much I learned. I learned new languages, learned new content, learned new strategies, new ways of thinking. Meanwhile, as a high school English teacher, I was using games in my teaching, but it was more like one-shot recall games where students... The games were reinforcing the learning but weren't about the learning itself. For a while, this percolated in the back of my mind, I felt like I could be doing more with my teaching. But it wasn't until I became a professor, and I had more time to think, because anyone who's been a high school teacher knows that it's nonstop.
At first my thought was that video game designers should have educators contribute to the content of the video games. Then I realized I was thinking about it all wrong. It's really the educators who need to learn from the video game designers, because kids were going home and spending all their time playing video games willingly, willingly learning from video games, and especially when video games got hard. If a video game was too easy, they would give it up. Whereas with my homework, they'd do it because they had to, but that was about it. I had this epiphany, educators need to really learn from video game designers. But as with all my good ideas, I quickly learned it was not original to me. I stumbled across Marc Prensky's work, Don't bother me, Mom, I'm learning!
I got the opportunity to see him speak, and that really started the wheels turning in my head. Then I went to a conference where there was a presentation by people who designed games for Reacting to the Past, which is at Barnard College. They designed courses, history courses, that were semester-long games where the students would role play the different historical figures through the different historical events and so forth. That's what really turned on the light bulb in my head that your whole class could be a game. I attempted this with my educational technology class, and I'll have to admit that my first attempt was way too... It was just way overly complicated. I've learned a lot of lessons along the way, which I discuss in my book, Up Your Teaching Game.
Dave Eng:
Nice. Well, thank you for sharing your background. I appreciate it. Janna, you brought back a lot of memories for me actually, because I really remember playing Myst at the very beginning. But for those of us that are listening that may not be familiar with the game, could you summarize what happens in Myst quickly?
Janna Kellinger:
Sure. Myst is a story. It's an adventure game where you have to solve puzzles. You end up on an island, you have to figure out why you're there, what you're doing there. You run across video journals. There's this whole storyline of these two brothers, and they contradict each other. You have to figure out which brother to believe. But meanwhile, you're solving these puzzles and uncovering these clues to find out more about the background on this island. Then you actually travel to other worlds, and each world has its own unique aspect to it. For example, there's one world where all the puzzles are audio.
Dave Eng:
All right. Thank you, Janna. I realize that it's not a game that I think is replicated a lot right now in the current zeitgeist of different games. I think that one thing that is really interesting and I think appropriate is that in Myst, you're playing the protagonist that's trying to find the way around and trying to determine which brother they can believe and which brother they can't. It's reminiscent to, I think, a lot of people's educational journeys. I see a lot of parallels between Myst and your educational journey and mine as well, so I think it's appropriate to be on a show talking about games-based learning and really referencing a game that is about discovery for the protagonist and about us as well.
Janna Kellinger:
That's a good way to put it. Yes. It's discovery learning. Yes.
Dave Eng:
Right. The thing I really want to get into here with the second question, I think this is very appropriate for a lot of people that work in higher education like both of us, but it's about game mechanics and asynchronous online learning. I know that if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably already familiar with games and probably already familiar with games-based learning, but I think that designing asynchronous online games presents a pretty unique challenge. According to you, in your own practice, what are some key game mechanics that work particularly well in an asynchronous learning environment?
Janna Kellinger:
Well, first of all, of course, the core game mechanic is going to be the skill that students need to approve upon in the course, whether it be... In some of my courses, it's curriculum and instruction. In the course you mentioned, it's coding. But what's important is to... Or the approach I take, I should say, is to embed the content in the narrative. For example, in my designing curriculum and instruction class, there are... Some of the NPCs, non-playable characters, are veteran teachers that represent different curricular ideologies. Through their discussions, their conversations, I can tease out some of the nuances, the differences, and the overlaps in these different curricular ideologies. But it's also important to embed the assessment in the narrative as well.
For example, in this class, as part of the job interview, students have to take a quiz on professionalism. One set of questions has case study examples where if they answer it wrong, then they learn about FERPA, which is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. If they violate that, they fail. They have to start over again. I know this sounds pretty basic, but I would say the main game mechanic in all games, I can't think of a game where this wouldn't be, is the learning through the feedback cycle. Trying something, getting some feedback, adjusting your actions based on that feedback and trying again. That's why everything in my asynchronous online courses, they're all revise and resubmit. You have unlimited attempts on assignments, on quizzes, on everything. What I've found is I've had to troubleshoot a good problem, which is that my students want to keep going.
They've used words like, "Addicted," and, "Hooked," onto my class, which I never thought that I would have students saying that about my class, so very exciting that they want to keep going, but I needed time to grade their work, to grade their assignments. Particularly if I had it set up so that they had to earn a certain number of points in order to move forward or a certain cut score on an assignment, because it's really mastery-based learning. That you have to demonstrate mastery in order to move on to a higher level, a harder skill or more complex skill. I took different approaches to troubleshooting this good problem. One is called... Some people call it rivers and lakes, other people call it string of pearls, but basically it's each level or module or whatever you want to call it in your game, in the story.
Students have multiple assignments to do, they can choose what order they do them. They accumulate points, they have to accumulate a certain number of points before they move down the river to the next lake where they have another set of assignments. But once they get to that last assignment in a lake, then they're still waiting for me to grade. Then I tried what I call a double-helix approach, where I have two paths, so in that designing curriculum and instruction class I have, during the pre-planning period, which is when teachers are planning their classes. In the morning, they attend professional development where they have different challenges they have to do. Then in the afternoon, they're designing their curriculum, and again, different challenges they have to do. Then certain choke points, so they don't get too far ahead on one path or the other. But that way, if they're waiting for me to grade something on one path, they can be working on the other path.
Dave Eng:
I see.
Janna Kellinger:
But still students sometimes they would get caught up on both paths waiting for me to grade. Then I came up with what I call “delayed gradification,” where they would turn an assignment and just submitting it would be enough of a trigger to unlock the next segment. But then at some point down the road, they'd have to pass the assignment with a certain cut score to move on. That usually gave me enough time to grade the assignment. But now with my latest classes, I've designed them so that everything is an automatic trigger, so they don't have to wait for me to grade anything.
Dave Eng:
I see. Wow. A lot of great stuff I want to talk about here. One of them is I'm really glad you talked about that feedback cycle because you're right. Basically any game that people play, there's some feedback based on the stimulus. Like the game will offer you up an action or a choice or something. You'll make that choice or take that action, and then you'll be provided feedback on it. All games provide feedback. A lot of good, well-designed training and education also involves feedback as well. But the question I wanted to ask you, because I've discussed this with some of our other colleagues in higher education, is that aspect of unlimited re-tries. I know you talked about that double helix model, but can you talk a bit more about, I guess, how since you allow your students to resubmit and revise an unlimited number of times, how do you manage that in terms of workload and workflow?
Janna Kellinger:
That's a great question. What I try to do is I try to make my rubrics very concrete and then give very specific feedback on rubrics so students know what they need to do. That still doesn't mean that sometimes it's multiple tries before they get it right. If it's a longer assignment, like a paper or a lesson plan, I ask that they highlight what they've changed, or sometimes I'll ask them to write a short paragraph describing what they changed or a reflection. Those are different ways to... I know when I was a high school English teacher, I was always afraid to do this, revise and resubmit, even though it's essential to writing. Because yeah, it's just overwhelming, like you said, the amount of grading. Making it as concrete as possible, and then putting the onus on students to explain what they changed and why.
Dave Eng:
I see. Great. Thank you. I appreciate that. I want to go into our last question here. I think that this is the one that I'm really most interested in, and hopefully a lot of the audience is as well, which is leveraging your learning management system, LMS, as a game engine. I know that in the past you've talked about using an LMS as a game engine. Can you share some of the practical ways educators can transform an LMS into a dynamic interactive game space? Does it really matter what LMS we're using, like Blackboard, Brightspace, anything else like that?
Janna Kellinger:
Well, yes and yes. Most video games you have to accomplish something in order to move on to the next level, story segment or new area to explore, whatever it is. All LMSs I've encountered do allow for that locking and unlocking. It's automatic triggers allowing instructors to use them as game engines because you can design your course so certain things only unlock when students accomplish something. They have to do something to unlock the next segment. In fact, you can also use groups in LMSs to have... For example, my educational technology class, I recognized I had students coming in with different levels of technology, so I had them self-select into different groups on their level of technology. They would get similar assignments, but with different technological expectations. The designing curriculum and instruction class, I had students who were planning on teaching all sorts of different subjects, math, social studies, et cetera.
Then I'd put them in groups based on their content area, and then I could have just the math people see the math standards because the math people don't need to see the English standards. LMSs are really good at tailoring the content to different types of students you have in your class. But what really makes LMSs work as game engines are these automatic triggers, so that if when students post on a discussion board, submit an assignment, pass a quiz, mark something is done, then it unlocks the next segment. A lot of LMSs also allow you for... You mentioned the unlimited attempts. We were talking about the difficulties in terms of grading assignments. Well, another difficulty is when you have students do a quiz over and over again and it's the same questions. Well, then they just look up the answers to those questions. But a lot of LMSs allow you to design question pools or question sets.
You can even do it so that each question, or maybe questions one through three draw from one pool on a certain topic, and questions four through seven draw from a different question pool on a different topic. Maybe you create 10 questions on a topic, but every time a student takes the quiz, it only pulls two of those questions from that question pool. Every time they take the quiz, it's a different set of questions, but it covers the same topics that you want covered. It's really that automatic triggering that allows LMSs to be game engines. Now, sometimes... Another problem I had to troubleshoot is sometimes you want students to do something using a different software or even in real life. Of course, different softwares don't talk to each other, don't necessarily talk to the LMS, so I do what I call out-of-bound activities where they have to do something in another software tool.
Only if they do it successfully can they get the answer to the quiz that's in the LMS. For example, in my coding class, they have to unlock a lock by translating binary code. When it's done, when they do it successfully and they unlock the door, the robot goes through the door and says something in binary code, which they then have to translate to answer the quiz question that's in the LMS. That way it really expands what can be done. Now, to answer your question about does the LMS matter? Yes, it does. There are some commonalities across most LMSs. I will be the first to admit, I haven't used all of them, but the affordances and constraints really depend on the LMS. For example, I have found that Blackboard is better at choose your own adventure branch narrative games because you can use adaptive release on individual items.
One of the ways you can do this is you can have students mark something as reviewed... Give them a choice of things, and then they mark as you reviewed which choice they select. Then you have the items unlocked depending on what item they marked as reviewed. You can do this other ways too, by having them choose groups or answering questions on quizzes or so forth. But yeah, I found Blackboard is much better at the branch narrative, whereas Canvas I found is much better at more of a linear storytelling where you have to complete all items in a module or a level to move forward because you can't assign those automatic triggers to... You can assign them sequentially within, they have to do one item before the next unlocks, but you can't have it choose between the two, except for mastery paths on assignments. That just gets messy.
Dave Eng:
I see. Wow. Thanks for the in-depth response. I appreciate it. My main takeaways from this, if I am a professor in higher education, is that virtually all LMSs can be used in this way. The main things to really focus on are triggers, which I know that my institution uses Brightspace. I've used triggers in the past to be able to unlock content, which is the second part, so triggers and unlocking ability. Also, like you talked about before, is self-selection for students to go into specific groups. I think we see that in a lot of games. We give a lot of players and students agency in order to make a choice that they want to make and also best represents them. All right.
Janna Kellinger:
There's one more thing I'd like to address, Dave, if you don't mind that we-
Dave Eng:
Yeah, go ahead.
Janna Kellinger:
... talked about. You mentioned in the introduction that my focus is on story-based games. How I approach this or how I think about it is the story structure that elementary school teachers use to teach students about plot, which is somebody wanted, but so then. Somebody is going to be the you, the student. In my Coding for Non-Coders game, the you, the student is an inventor who invented technological telepathy. Then the wanted is the goal, so who wanted to protect it from getting into the wrong hands? Then the but are the obstacles or the main obstacles. In this case, but thieves broke into your office and handcuffed and gagged you so, and the so is that core game mechanic, the skill that students practice throughout and improve upon. So, you have to mentally code your robot to free you so you can call the police and get the thieves arrested. Then the then at the end is the final reward or the win state or the final project, so then, in my class, you have time to start coding your own games for your robot.
Dave Eng:
Wow. Great. I know that there's a lot of overlap with games and stories and theme. I think that's an appropriate way to wrap things up because we started talking about Myst, which is a story-based game in which we as the protagonists are trying to find our way around. We drew that parallel between Mystand education, and I think that there is still another parallel just between story structure and narratives and games-based learning as a whole. Thanks for connecting us there. I appreciate it.
Janna Kellinger:
Yeah. Well, thank you for having me, Dave.
Dave Eng:
Janna, thanks for being here today. I appreciate it. Where can people go to find out more about you online?
Janna Kellinger:
I don't have an extensive web presence. I do have a page on my university's website, but if you go to YouTube and you Google my name, Janna Jackson Kellinger, and Blackboard, you will come across an interview that I did where I go into more in depth talking about, in particular, using Blackboard to design games.
Dave Eng:
Excellent. I'll also include that link in the show notes so that people don't have to go search around.
Janna Kellinger:
Great. Thank you.
Dave Eng:
I'll just put it there directly. All right. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Janna. I appreciate it.
Janna Kellinger:
Thank you.
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. 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. 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 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. I 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 @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). (2025, June 8). Janna Kellinger on Designing Games in Learning Management Systems. (No. 139) Video]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/video/139
Internal Ref: UXP1667I864I
References
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Eng, D. (2019, December 03). Core Loops. Retrieved March 12, 2025, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/12/3/core-loops
Eng, D. (2019, June 18). Feedback Loops. Retrieved March 12, 2025, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/6/18/feedback-loops-in-games-based-learning
Eng, D. (2019, September 17). Player Interaction. Retrieved March 12, 2025, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/9/17/player-interaction
Eng, D. (2019, September 26). Game Theme. Retrieved March 12, 2025, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/9/26/game-theme
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Kellinger, J. J. (2024). Up your teaching game: Creating story-based games to engage K-12 students (1st ed.). Routledge. https://www.amazon.com/Up-Your-Teaching-Game-Story-Based-ebook/dp/B0DF2VWZFY
Prensky, M. (2006). Don't bother me mom—I'm learning! Paragon House. https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Bother-Me-Mom-Im-Learning/dp/1557788588
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