What a Game Designer Learned About Making Assessment Fun Again

What if learning is not boring at all, and somebody simply engineered the fun out of it? In this new episode, Richard Culatta sits down with Joseph Baird, Senior Lecturer at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Before he became a professor, Joseph ran a mobile game studio whose learning apps topped the App Store education charts, won design awards, and earned him an invitation to a game jam at the White House. Recorded at ISTELive26 in Orlando, this conversation explores how Joseph brought that game designer's instinct into the business school classroom, where his students build fake sheep to fool their classmates, chase him across campus with GPS data, and learn Excel by solving the strangest problems he can invent. Joseph and Richard dig into why our obsession with measurement has drained the joy from assessment, how educators working inside rigid systems can still find room to experiment, and why the best defense against cheating is an assignment worth doing. Richard and Joseph discuss: Why learning is intrinsically fun, and how assessment design accidentally strips the joy out of itHow over-optimizing for numbers leads to tests that neglect why we measure learning in the first placeWhy college students should spend class time going places AI can't go, using human judgment and contextHow to find wiggle room to innovate inside standardized coursesWhy constraints fuel creativity, whether at hackathons or in course designHow relevance, not AI restriction, is the most effective way to reduce cheatingWhy the best path to innovation is to experiment, fail forward, and iterate Follow Joseph: Kelley School of Business faculty profile Follow Richard: XLinkedIn Stay in touch with ISTE+ASCD: WebsiteXFacebookLinkedInYouTubeInstagram