For about three years I worked as a program assistant at a large historical institution on an iPod application called Play the Past. The object of the app is to help school age students on field trips, part of the “Digital Native” generation, connect the content they learn in the exhibits at the museum to resources back in the classroom. I started on this project when I was an intern in college, and for the next few years after I was hired full-time, my work life revolved around the new field of gamification.  I have to admit, when I started this project, I was worried that using technology would take away the pure immersive experience of visiting a museum. It’s probably no surprise that I was the kind of kid who would hold the field trip group up because I was reading every single panel, so my level of engagement was quite high. The reality is that there are so many different ways of taking in information, and it was interesting to see how our app could help students who may otherwise be uninterested or unengaged. Working on this project was a marathon rather than a sprint, and because it is such a new field, at times it felt like I was taking a masters class. Because we didn’t have a model to work from, we had to depend on feedback loops from testing. This experience shaped my early career, and I learned a lot about the power of immersion in education and using social media as a classroom connector.  Here’s just a few of the highlights I learned observing student interaction with our game.

1. Give students the power to personalize. This may seem obvious, but by giving kids the option to take a profile picture at the beginning of the game gave them ownership over their experience, resulting in a higher level of engagement.

2. Include a variety of tasks tailored to different learning styles within the app.  For example, some kids were obsessed with the mining exhibit portion that focused on hand-eye coordination, while others enjoyed the information collecting at the fur trade area.

3. Don’t over think it.   It was tempting to make the experience more complex to stretch the limits of what the platform could do, but we realized that we should really be harnessing the power of the kids’ innate imaginations.  They already jumped into the roles of the physical exhibit, such as miners or prairie farmers, we just needed to keep our activities simple and to the point.

4. Actually listen to the students.  This is a no-brainer, but it’s amazing how fast you can get sucked into the rabbit-hole of “what if we put this widget into the game??” If you spend a lot of time and energy on a feature that you think kids will love, but in testing it falls flat, it can be really hard to let go of an idea you’ve become attached to.  I think this was one of the biggest lessons I learned from this position.  Fight for a good idea, but know when it’s time to let go and move on.  With this mindset, it becomes more and more easy to create a product that will actually be successful, rather than one you think/want to be successful.