A behind-the-scenes look at ‘gamified’ courses at Brown

While some students trek to the Salomon Center for large lecture-based courses or gather in a Page-Robinson Hall classroom for seminars, others turn on their computers and enter the world of gamified courses. Currently, Brown offers a variety of gamified courses across the Departments of English, East Asian Studies, and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.

In these courses, the goal is not to pass exams or finish a final project, but to complete a story and become immersed in a fictional world. Assignments may come in the form of quests and levels, which involve the same general work as a traditional course but are integrated with a related storyline and characters.

The Herald spoke with Brown faculty who design and teach these innovative gamified courses.

**What Is Gamification?**

Gamification entails the use of game elements and game-design techniques in non-game contexts, explained Naomi Pariseault, a senior learning designer at the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning who specializes in digital learning and design.

However, gamifying courses is not the same as “creating a game,” she emphasized. Pariseault works with faculty to create “a course that has game elements in it,” where assignments are completely “story-based.”

All elements of gamified courses are online and asynchronous. This format is, according to English Professor James Egan, who teaches several gamified courses at Brown, more “efficient pedagogically to achieve the (course’s) goals.” He added that through gamification, students “become better writers and critical thinkers.”

**The Origin of Gamified Courses at Brown**

The first gamified course at Brown began nearly a decade ago after Egan read about gamification in pedagogical journals. He developed the class as an alternative to the larger lecture courses he was teaching at the time.

After applying to a University-sponsored program that provided funding for online-only courses, Egan was matched with Pariseault. The two shared a common goal: to create Brown’s first gamified course.

Before designing the course, both became certified with Sententia Gamification, a company that introduces educators to tools for game-based learning strategies. After the training, they became “gamification master craftsmen.”

**Designing the Course**

They set out to build the course using Canvas as the game’s interface and brought aboard Matt Rockman, a Brooklyn-based graphic designer who created avatars and settings for the courses. From there, they designed a story that complemented the learning goals.

After months of preparation, Brown offered its first gamified course in spring 2017 — ENGL 0511C: *Fantastic Places, Unhuman Humans*. The course’s narrative follows a girl named Leila, who comes from the planet Io. Students help Leila determine whether she’s human.

Egan noted that designing a gamified course can take anywhere from six to nine months. When developing the course, Pariseault said she considers the interesting and challenging aspects of the material, alongside ways to introduce elements of gamification.

**Course Structure and Student Engagement**

To progress through the story of ENGL 0511C, students—who each create their own avatar—read literary texts, respond to discussion posts, and perform writing exercises. Students especially enjoy the opportunity to complete alternate assignments, such as diagrams and drawings, Egan said.

In one assignment, students had the chance to recreate Tarzan’s yell and explain how their rendition related to the yell in the novel. Notably, every student chose this option during the semester.

This fall, around 10 students are enrolled in ENGL 1190Y: *Editing as Revision*, a gamified course that introduces students to the fundamentals of editing. Teaching Professor of English Emily Hipchen spent almost 18 months developing the course, which involved writing a narrative “in the neighborhood of 37,000 words.”

The class uses three levels—apprentice, journeyman, and master—and divides students into competing historical writing guilds to teach copy editing, proof editing, and content editing respectively.

**Narrative Characters and Course Design**

The course was designed in collaboration with Pariseault and features two talking lions, Carl and Terry, inspired by the lions in front of the New York Public Library. Their contrasting personalities—Carl as the serious, strict lion, and Terry as the flexible and playful one—represent the two sides of editing, Pariseault said.

Hipchen finds that the most useful parts of gamified courses are “skills practice and skills production.” After about five exercises, students advance from having little experience in a particular type of editing to becoming “pretty adept” at it.

**Student Feedback and Course Impact**

Student feedback plays a significant role in how gamified courses are developed. At the end of each course, there is a “focused survey” that allows students to provide feedback on the game mechanics of the class, Pariseault explained.

The course “attracts a broad range of students,” Egan said. Even though the class is entirely asynchronous, students “got to know the professor better than (they’ve) ever gotten to know another professor,” he added. Egan even voice acts as an avatar in ENGL 0511C.

As Pariseault continues to design gamified courses, she specifically considers the interests of Brown students, who she said value “a lot of autonomy.”

“My hope is that students find joy in learning about the subject matter, and it’s something really different that they’ve never experienced before,” she said.

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Gamified courses at Brown are paving the way for a new kind of learning—one that combines education with storytelling and interactive elements to engage students on a deeper level.
https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025/11/a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-gamified-courses-at-brown

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