Crime and Deviance Gamified: Episode 1

An immersive Sociology Sim in which students take-on the role of a sociological detective to explore concepts of crime, deviance, social order and social control.

For some time now I’ve been interested in the idea of gamified learning – taking the mechanics of game-playing, such as rewards, ranks and challenges and applying them to the non-game environment of a-level Sociology.

Unfortunately, as I’ve discovered, a fully-gamified a-level system involves an extraordinary amount of work. While deciding on a format, such as an RPG (role-playing game) is fairly straightforward and working-out a general gamified structure didn’t prove too time-consuming, creating a gamified playing system proved to be a massive undertaking. This involved taking every aspect of the a-level Specification and devising ways students could independently explore every nook-and-cranny, while also learning what they were supposed to be learning. While it would have been interesting – and I did explore ways it could be done – it’s not a part-time job.

Instead, I decided to go back to the drawing board and lean on some of the ad-hoc materials I’d developed from time-to-time under the Sociological Detective rubric. This, if you’ve been following the blog, involved taking the basic idea of investigating various aspects of sociology and wrapping a simple narrative around them.

This, in a roundabout way, has lead to the idea of creating a resource that allows me to expand the Sociological Detective narrative while simplifying the gamification aspect. Hence, the development of Crime and Deviance Gamified, a PowerPoint Presentation that allows students to take-on the role of a Sociological Detective to explore, in this instance, the Crime and Deviance Unit. The basic idea is to create elements of an RPG – the student takes-on a character – while they explore various aspects of the Specification in a structured way that also allows them to makes choices about how they move through the materials.

The underlying rationale here is that this strategy of encouraging students to immerse themselves in the materials they’re studying provides an intrinsic motivation for studying that’s more effective than the extrinsic motivations traditionally seen as drivers of learning. Whether or not this is the case, only time will tell.

As you can tell from the title, I’ve decided to put this material together as a series of Episodes (the initial effort covers an Introduction to Crime, Deviance, Social Order and Social Control) and was originally aimed at the OCR Specification because that’s the Spec. for which I’ve most recently written resources (CIE didn’t have a Crime option for some reason). The materials should, however, be fine for AQA students. Both Specs. broadly follow a similar path and it will be possible to add AQA-specific material, such as “Media and Crime” in a separate episode.

Playing the simulation is relatively simple and straightforward. Students simply move from slide to slide through the story, making relevant branching choices at various points if they want to pursue one line of enquiry over another. Some slides also have on-page hyperlinks that allow them to pull-up further information about a concept, theory or piece of evidence.

Keep in mind it’s nothing very complicated and not particularly sophisticated but it is the first episode and no-doubt things will evolve if and when I get around to subsequent episodes. That, of course, will depend to some extent on how well – or not as the case may be – the materials are received.

On that point I’d be inclined to say you should play around with the Episode to see if it’s something you feel comfortable with including in your teaching – it will also give you an idea about how you could use the resource as part of a general teaching strategy.

Episode 1 is available in a PowerPoint Show (.ppsx) format because I didn’t want students to be able to see individual slides outside of the simulation, since that would defeat the idea of immersion in the resource. This format also allows me to set the Presentation to kiosk format which means I can disable mouse right-click to prevent students jumping haphazardly from slide to slide.

Download Crime and Deviance Gamified: Episode 1