6 Chapter 6: Getting More Creative

You have seen AI-generated art and heard AI-generated songs. (If you haven’t, you should, and even if you haven’t recently, you need to see and hear the current state of the technology.) Just adding an artistic assignment won’t prevent AI use. What can deter it is an assignment that requires immersion in and documentation of the creative process, rather than just submission of the outcome. We have shown ways to do that with essay-like assignments, and it is important to help students realize that creating an essay, like writing a song or painting a picture, is every bit as much a creative endeavor. AI can produce all sorts of formulaic text, image, sound, and video. Here in this chapter, we reiterate that the process is the point, and reflection on the process is part of the learning experience. What is distinctive in this chapter is the focus on assignments and activities that are less frequently integrated into humanities courses, engage different parts of students’ minds, and make the experience of learning fun. Enjoyment is another facet of “the process” that can get students into that state of flow we talked about earlier, and make them less likely to cheat and more likely to find intrinsic motivation for their efforts.

Playing Games

If you are someone who enjoys games, you may already have discovered that there are ways of integrating games and game-like experiences into your classes. Pretty much everyone remembers a time when learning was fun. The only differences are whether the last time was decades ago watching Sesame Street, yesterday in your college classroom, or this morning using DuoLingo. Making learning fun is not only for elementary education. Most lifelong learners who are autodidacts find ways of introducing fun into their learning if it isn’t inherently provided by the learning materials. We want to emphasize here that adding fun isn’t also simultaneously watering down the rigor or content expectations of your courses. Rather, it is a vehicle (one author imagines it as a Trojan horse) where the learning is embedded within the game. We present the humble opinion that if students learn without realizing they have, or rather that the act of learning doesn’t seem onerous or burdensome, this is a welcome outcome. In this section, we explore the idea of adding games to your classroom.

There are many existing board games and card games that incorporate real world facts in such a way that makes it possible to just play and have fun and have learning happen almost incidentally. For example, there is a game called Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game that teaches students how gerrymandering develops in political structures. Another example is Black Orchestra, which is a game where players play as one of the members of the Schwarze kapelle (conspirators) who tried to overthrow (or assassinate) Hitler. Freedom: The Underground Railroad is a game set around the same events in US history. Tulipmania 1637 is a game that helps students understand the underlying economic pressure that ultimately resulted in the collapse of the Dutch economy in 1637. Hanabi is a game that challenges students to use logic to collectively solve a puzzle. The Bloody Inn is a card game where players play as innkeepers, who need to rob and murder numerous guests in their inn, and mirrors the infamous crimes by Pierre and Marie Martin in 19^th century France.^[1] QE is a board game that teaches about the economic concept of quantitative easing.^[2] There are hundreds of games, spanning across history, disciplines, and conceptual ideas, all designed to both be fun and teach students.^[3]

An experience that reinforced to me the potential for “stealth education” by incorporating factual information into a fun game was when I took my family to visit the military history museum in Vienna, Austria. My son was pointing out all the tanks and commenting on the different models. How had he learned all this? Playing World of Tanks. In another instance, someone was able to find their way around Chicago impressively well despite never having been in that part of the city before, because a first-person shooter game they played was set there. Being able to find your way around in real life is useful, even if significantly duller when there is no need to avoid or fight zombies while doing so.

However, if there is no game that quite does what you need or envision, don’t be shy about making your own! A friend of mine has been working on a game called Impresario that incorporates a lot of music history. I developed a card game called Canon to teach about the process of canon formation in the history of Judaism and Christianity. I developed Canon to use active learning on the second day of an intro course on the Bible. Students aren’t ready for a fast-paced history lesson on that day and most of the material will go over their heads. Leaving the creation of the canon until the end would make much more sense historically. However, the assumptions students bring with them require that the topic be tackled early. Some think the table of contents dropped down from heaven together with the texts themselves. Others think it was imposed by Constantine at the Council of Nicaea, thanks to the detrimental influence of The Da Vinci Code. Neither is the case.

In order to avoid the history lesson on day 2, I replicated the mechanics of canon formation in a card game. Students then play the game, and afterwards we talk about what happened and what they did and relate their experience of game play to how the canon came together historically. I have long wanted to develop an app version of the game, but since I have not been teaching the course online, this hasn’t been a priority. If I had known the pandemic would force my in-person classes online and then to maintain social distancing, I obviously would have prioritized this more. For the purpose of creating the game, I used the website The Game Crafter where the game is still available for purchase. I just heard recently from someone in Australia who met me and only later realized that I was the creator of this game they enjoyed and found useful for educational purposes in a church context. If you develop such tools for use with your own students, you don’t need to keep them to yourself!

Creating custom boards, cards, and meeples or an online game are both possible and much easier now than they have ever been. For most humanities educators doing either will involve learning new skills. This gives us a chance to illustrate lifelong learning. Game creation can also be a final project in a variety of classes. For students to create a game that tackles ethical questions faced in healthcare, engineering, politics, economics, or warfare, they will need to have a serious level of understanding of ethics and the specific area in relation to which ethical principles are being applied. An LLM may be able to generate some game rules based on examples available online, and this may be a legitimate use in this context, as student try to come up with how to incorporate serious content into fun play. Game mechanics are not copyrightable, and so while you would get sued if you called your game Monopoly (which is trademarked), the mechanism of play can be similar without concern.^[4] Also an option is for you and others to adapt and use their creation in other educational contexts. Even if a student group designing a game uses an LLM for assistance, the process of creating the game and deciding what to incorporate will require them to understand the content. The end result will either demonstrate their understanding or the shortcomings in it.

Earlier in the book we mentioned gamified or points-based grading. It is worth revisiting it briefly here. Just as at the level of individual activities and assignments, the entire course can and arguably should aim to make learning an engaging experience. Students should enjoy themselves and not be motivated to cheat because of the high stakes of grades. When the assignments and the structure of the course both reinforce this message, one of the most common motivations for cheating is eliminated. On the other hand, the laziness that leads some to cheat will also be more obvious in gamified assignments and courses, and the result will be what it would have been in a course designed in a more traditional way.

Role-Playing Games

Role Playing Games are very useful for teaching certain types of content. The most famous RPG is Dungeons and Dragons, but you can have role play related to ancient history, future ethical conundrums, and anything else you can imagine. Some people have found role playing games puzzling because they don’t have winners and losers. The game features players who collaborate as a team, and a game master (DM or Dungeon Master in D&D) who facilitates the game experience. The game master sends obstacles in the path of the players, but they are not playing against the other players. Rather, the game master’s aim is to engage in collaborative world-building and storytelling with the players. Each player’s scope is to write their own character’s backstory (who together serve as protagonists), whereas the game master’s scope is to build and craft the environment around those characters.

Players improvise their adventure in the story that the game master either has crafted themselves or is leading them through with a published module. The most successful stories and game sessions are told together; the game master is not trying to kill or maim players’ characters in a competitive way. The game master can fabricate (out of thin air) any necessary story elements – cities, towns, buildings, equipment, items, new characters (called non-player characters or NPCs) designed to further the story, and so on. Players are in a sandbox whose only limits are the extent of their imagination. A game master’s goal is to facilitate that sandbox seeming like a never-ending desert in all directions, so that players never feel as if they are in a limited world. At the same time, the game master provides boundaries and structures which help facilitate the rest of the players sharing the imagined experience. The DM sets the stage but does not determine what each player’s character does. Thus, the story that unfolds is a mutual creation of both types of participants.

There is a whole organization dedicated to the development of role-playing games and the fostering of their use for teaching history: Reacting to the Past (RTTP). RTTP has scenarios ranging from ancient history to relatively recent events. The learning potential for students who reenact these stories is phenomenal. Even just the process of character development involves research. Obviously, an educator can assign to students the roles of real people in history. To perform in character, each player will need to research their character in order to do so. To role play a figure, you have to really understand them. A student who will play the role of Athanasius or Arius in a game about the Council of Nicaea will understand those individuals and that period in history better than someone who learns about them from a textbook without this gaming component.^[5] Introducing gaming isn’t about diluting learning for the sake of fun that engages students at the expense of content and progress. On the contrary, gaming increases the engagement of students and the depth of learning. As we have discussed before, increased interest is a necessary precondition to active learning.

All of this has already been true since the advent of teaching through role play. In the era of AI, the potential value of this approach is revolutionary. A student might use ChatGPT to learn about Constantine the Great. If they do so without fact checking, it may be to their detriment. Either way, that will be revealed as the role-playing game unfolds. A student who performs the role of Constantine in this activity can be evaluated in terms of how well they embody the role, as well as character development preparation materials they submit to the instructor. Even if a student uses AI to explore the historical figure, you as the instructor will evaluate the accuracy of what they found and the extent of understanding reflected in their performance. AI may be used, but not in a way that allows a student to bypass learning or avoid rigorous assessment. One advantage of this style of activity is that it is a human interaction (in the same vein as a one-on-one oral exam), yet you can evaluate many students at once in an efficient manner. Each student will learn the most about the character they are preparing to be, but they will learn about the other characters as well through the enactment and the associated reading material.

Surprisingly enough, this sort of activity will also work in an online asynchronous course! Already in face-to-face gaming, the notion of turns was introduced to allow for smooth play, even though it does not closely replicate how a scenario unfolds in real life. In an in-person class, students may all gather for the final church council, trial, or UN meeting all at once and enact the event. That can also be done with students recording their speeches and delivering them via video in a forum in the LMS, followed by whoever’s turn is next. The same way that dice can be rolled in person, there are means of randomizing whose turn it is or how non-player characters (NPCs) react in online play. People who wanted to be able to play their favorite RPGs over the internet have developed ways of doing so, including software specialized for this specific purpose.^[6] There are thus already-existing resources that can be used, and as more educators use role play scenarios, we can advocate for what we need to be incorporated right into the LMS we use if it is not already.

As in RPGs that are played just for fun, and perhaps even more so, there may be a need for the educator as game master to use NPCs. These not only allow the experience to include individuals for whom there are no students to play them yet who are crucial to the moment in history, but NPCs also provide a mechanism whereby the story can be influenced in certain directions more directly by the instructor . The aim of play in most instances should not be to force the students to precisely reenact what happened in history. Allowing the event to unfold in a different way provides a fantastic basis for then discussing why this time things went differently. Students may not appreciate just how much just one individual’s ethical values or personality type may have shaped the course of history, and role play can not only make that point clear, but can tie it to a very concrete example. The takeaway message is that the same is true in our present historical moment as we shape the future through our choices and actions.

Role play does not have to take the form of a completely reenacted meeting. Some events involved disparate groups in different places doing things that were not planned to coincide. Some involved two leading individuals debating a topic. Students may be given characters with their names changed to avoid having them recognize the scenario and bring certain instinctive prejudices to it. This, of course, removes the possibility of them doing research for character development on their own. The benefit can be having students discuss free will or celibacy in relation to religion, only to find themselves shocked that the viewpoint they fought for and believed was the right choice is the one their own religious tradition rejected. If one of the characters was named Augustine, it might have led them to make assumptions they otherwise would not have. RPGs in general are the most flexible type of game that exists. There are endless ways that these storytelling structures can be adapted for learning. Evaluation can be woven in, and as already stated, and if a student uses an AI or Wikipedia rather than better sources in developing their character, you don’t need to worry about determining which was the case. If, on the other hand,they were well-informed and participated wholeheartedly in the play, they get a good grade.

For students who already play tabletop RPGs like D&D (and to some extent, MMORPG players as well), there is another analogy that educators can make. No one memorizes the entire Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide by sitting down, reading it repeatedly, and then taking quizzes on its content. That content is considered reference material, so it is more a matter of knowing where to look. Students should similarly understand that the combination of knowledge acquired and knowledge readily accessible quickly is also what they will need in most jobs. Their methods of trying to acquire knowledge and skills in game play and in classes are almost certainly worlds apart. While your gamified course can bring the two closer together, it is worth encouraging metacognition by prompting students to reflect on why there is this disconnect. There are many aspects of math that seem tedious until we are doing practical things with them. The same is true with critical thinking, information literacy, and other humanities skills. There is a place for students learning without realizing they are doing so. There should also come a time when students are asked to think about how they learn, so that they are prepared to continue being lifelong learners. For some of them, they will need to help others learn, whether in a classroom or in the workplace. The learning experience they have can also provide them with the skill to facilitate training for others later in their lives.

Write Fiction

ChatGPT can do this, but not particularly well, and certainly not in a highly original manner. What it produces does resemble what students produce, however, and that needs to be kept in mind.^[7] The key here is that a good work of fiction cannot come about in a single sitting any more than a good essay can. Utilizing the method of looking at the document revision history indicated earlier in this book will be crucial in keeping students away from a temptation to simply use an LLM to generate their story. Whether and to what extent you allow some LLM usage is, as always, up to you. In the case of research essays and subject area content, the big issues with LLMs are that they fabricate, and that even when correct, students may not actually learn the content if they get AI to produce it and then copy and paste. Obviously with fiction the concerns are different, but the need to develop their skills of self-expression is much the same. The genre of writing that we ask students to do sometimes presents them with inner hurdles we may not be aware of. In particular, some students find essays scary, being a genre they do not normally interact with much less write in. They have read fiction more often than they have read nonfiction, and so it is more familiar to them. Students are also often more willing to throw themselves into an activity that invites their creativity (which nonfiction can also do, but they may not realize or believe that yet).

Historical fiction is a very rigorous way of engaging with the past. I have found this to be true in my own research. If you try to narrate the story of events and cannot create plausible dialogue to individuals or attribute plausible motives to them, then something is wrong. In History, Classics, and Biblical Studies, one can ask students to compare different understandings of a particular narrative or event by fleshing out the story in the form of historical fiction multiple times, in ways that incorporate specific views held by scholars. Now, be aware that ChatGPT can be impressively good at this activity. I asked it to tell in story form the birth of Jesus as understood by scholar Kenneth Bailey, and it incorporated precisely the most important distinctive aspect of his understanding of the cultural background. There is sufficient discussion of Bailey’s points—that a manger was typically found in homes rather than barns in ancient middle eastern homes, and the word in Luke historically translated “inn” is better translated “guest room” or “upper room” as it is elsewhere in that Gospel—for this to be part of an LLM’s data set. Therefore, it is always crucial to try out an assignment to see what results you get before you assign it.

Even if not the most famous proponents of views, you can find very recent articles by less well-known scholars or merely less well-known advocates of the views in question and assign them to students. As an example, I asked ChatGPT to do the same thing, except here referring to the view of Stephen Carlson, who has published more recently on the same topic. The LLM did much less well on the same activity. It did a decent job of incorporating a lot of general points found in scholarship. This time, however, it prefaced the entire thing with a proviso and did the same after the conclusion. It also introduced references to what Carlson “might” have to say, indicating that it lacked the necessary data. Since there will continue to be new publications behind paywalls, this fact should make it straightforward to continue to use assignments of this sort.

Types of fiction, including but not limited to historical fiction, can be useful in teaching subjects besides history. For example, fiction has been used in philosophy throughout its history. Asking students to write a conversation akin to the dialogs by Plato or Hume, or those in the Book of Job or the Talmud, requires them to understand the content of the course and the genre, as well as to exercise their own creativity. The dialogue challenges them to think about strong counterarguments to whatever position they lean towards. It does not need to be three or four friends with unfamiliar names gathered at a symposium or some other setting unfamiliar to students. Have them craft a fictional Reddit discussion thread. One beautiful aspect of this modernization is that you can then show them that the kind of writing they might do in arguing with someone on Reddit or elsewhere on social media is not that far from what an essay requires. It is, at its core, a series of arguments with reference to sources. Even the length may be comparable, depending on the depth of the conversation on Reddit.

This idea can be combined with role playing games, since the worldbuilding and character creation for gaming purposes is closely related to what is needed when writing fiction. If students don’t believe you when you tell them this, you can point to The Expanse as one example where developers of an RPG found it natural to also craft fiction set in the world they created. There are myriad examples of D&D games that were then made into popular books and movies (Dragonlance, The Riftwar Cycle, Lodoss War, Malazan, and Order of the Stick, to name just a few).

Pictures Worth a Thousand Words

In a course with gamified grading, you can give students credit for doing anything that demonstrates learning. I tell them this, and a significant number rise to the challenge. I have had students paint pictures and sculpt pottery, completely unexpected and genuinely moving examples of students taking their own skills and hobbies and connecting them with class. Even outside of my course on the Bible and Music, I have had students create songs, sometimes with specific encouragement along those lines from me, but occasionally simply as a response to being given free rein. I love being able to tell students that the system is not one in which I hold up arbitrary hoops for them to jump through and then they attempt to do so, begrudging me if they do not score a perfect 10 on their performance. The onus is on them to demonstrate in any way they choose that they are engaging in a meaningful way with the course content and learning as a result.

Art can be abstract, and so you will want students to provide a commentary on their process and the product. The fact that their text would be accompanied by a highly personal creation makes it less likely that they will be able to turn to AI to produce that for them. The combination thus tackles the AI problem while still requiring that students submit text. AI obviously can produce interesting art, but rarely something that looks handmade at the level of your students. If they work with an AI art generator and manage to get it to produce something that meaningfully connects with course content in an interesting and creative way, that will be an accomplishment in itself and require thoughtful engagement on their part. I have tried to coax AI into creating images that I thought would be interesting and potentially useful in relation to my teaching and research, and I can attest to how difficult it can be. Nevertheless, they still need to write about why a thoughtful image is exactly that.

Asking students to integrate informational text and images is also something that AI does poorly. Having an infographic be the format of an assignment does more than merely reduce the extent to which students can rely on AI. Infographics require students to understand key points sufficiently well so as to be able to communicate them to others. What students produce has the potential to be circulated online (with their permission, of course) and help promote accurate information about the subject being studied. This makes these creative outputs valuable both for that potential impact, and for the way it hopefully gets students thinking about themselves as scholars, content creators, and educators.

Memes are one of my favorite types of low-stakes assignments. Students tend to multitask during class. When I learn that a student was making a meme about the course and its content during class, I’m not at all annoyed. On the contrary, I’m almost always delighted. They were multitasking, in a sense, but in a way that relates to course content. The results have sometimes shown a deep level of understanding of course content. I have shared them on social media and the reactions from other educators and scholars in my field have been overwhelmingly positive. Some of them have incorporated this activity into their own courses. It is also an option to require, or offer more points for, the creation of an accompanying explanation of the meme, how it plays with a familiar image or trope, how it expresses course content, and so on. In addition to providing a fun way to evaluate student learning, the circulation of those memes may be worthwhile in some instances. When that happens, the students become educators themselves, contributing to the public understanding of the subject they themselves were studying.

If you wish to be more intentional about the inclusion of memes in your courses, you can do that as well. The learning objectives in this assignment would revolve around the selection of the correct base image and then completing the meme with words that are relevant to the course. You can sprinkle this assignment in amongst the templates we have talked about previously or let it stand alone as a separate activity. You could require a response to a particular passage in a text, or to represent what a particular character is thinking during a spoken dialogue, or capturing a contradiction, paradox, or other gaffe. You can award bonus points for how funny or clever the meme is. Since both of these tasks are difficult for an AI to do intentionally, you have baked in an inherent resistance to AI-generated submissions. To get started, you can suggest one of a number of nice meme generators that have a lot of source images and draw from popular culture.^[8]