As an all round nerd for anything technological, educational, and fantasy, I’m still unsure how I feel about Gamification. There seems to be a lot of positive publicity, and web presence of gamification around: This video from Microsoft, This TED talk, Michael Matera who gamified an entire 6th grade classroom and world history class. But can gamification really be a widely adopted, and successful way to educate the next generation?

Summary

Gamification is perhaps a bad term, it’s all about motivation. It does, however, provide us with a useful toolbox and framework to think around student participation and engagement.

Games, in their true sense, are probably useless.

The ubiquity of technology, and successful examples suggest that gamification is definitely worth pursuing as a means to motivate students to actively participate in their education. This is good.

Introduction

By way of an introduction this video (by Extra Credits) provides an excellent overview of what gamification is, especially in an educational setting.

One definition you could use comes from(Deterding et al. 2011):

The use of game design elements in non-game contexts

However the best definition I found, for this context was (source):

Using social gaming elements, such as team-work, game thinking, and game mechanics, in [education]. The main promise of gamification is that it gives the educator a number of powerful and predictable tools for influencing human motivation and behavior and, when done right, to activate various types of students in pursuing learning activities.

In short then, gamification gives a pathway to student motivation, to make people want to learn. Sounds ideal doesn’t it? So let’s look a little deeper.

Why it could work

As just stated, the concept basically revolves around making people want to learn — motivating them. But what does this mean?

Broadly speaking we can identify two types of motivators: internal and external (or intrinsic and extrinsic respectively). Internal motivation comes from the experience itself, i.e. the act of studying. External motivation comes from the result or product of the experience, e.g. improved grades, better job opportunities, further study, Et cetera.

Gamification could really work through both of these mechanisms. Internally by making the act of learning or studying more enjoyable. This may be the image that ‘game’ conjures up immediately. For example BBC Bitesize and externally by providing rewards. Formally gamification creates an intrinsic motivator by improving the following (source):

enjoyment of school learning characterized by a mastery orientation; curiosity; persistence; task-endogeny; and the learning of challenging, difficult, and novel tasks”.

BBC Bitesize’s Spherox game which can be tailored to test GCSE level English, maths, and science knowledge.

However, it seems that gamification is much more useful in creating extrinsic motivators. Games can motivate students by setting goals and targets. This alone is not impressive or conducive to learning — how many goals have you set yourself but never completed??

What does make them promising, and successful, is they do it just right. Specifically they set immediate goals which are moderately difficult. These are the goals which can best motivate learners — and anyone really. Games can provide these goals, and increase motivation through it. Think about it: it’s what makes the Civilization games so damned time consuming, it’s why MMORPG’s are so popular, it’s how Duolingo gets you to practice. All of these games set you short term, immediately do-able tasks, and reward you for them. So why not just 5 minutes more?

Duolingo’s completion screen. 3 minutes work, grew a level, and gained in-game currency. Look how easy they make it to practice again.

What’s more, games give instant feedback, for both individual problems and question sets as a whole. This is fantastic: it immediately lets students know what they understand, and highlights where they need to focus. Understand the concept of polarity? Understand that water is polar and why? Brilliant — let’s move right on to the idea of solubility of salt in water. Still not 100% sure exactly what is it that makes water magically polarised? Let’s take a minute to re-do that, you’re going to need it before we move on.

You know what’s even better than understanding how salt dissolves in water? Being able to show off that you know how/why salt dissolves in water. The prestige, e.g. virtual ‘badges’ that come with passing a particular level, or homework set with perfect marks, are potentially excellent motivators. This has a great side effect: by leveling or grading the rewards (and associated knowledge), you make more difficult things desirable. Once a student solves a problem, levels up, or gets a badge, they’re rewarded by being able to solve a harder problem. It glamorises high performance.

Log in to Khan Academy and your points and badges are right there, so are the ones you haven’t got yet, which you can address by starting this mastery challenge.

This kind of motivation is especially important when learning pieces of a theory which are essential, but not in an immediate way. Take the example I gave above: the idea of partial charge. Partial charge is really quite useful to (especially organic) chemistry. But not in an immediate way. Students pose the eternal question “but when am I ever going to need to know this?!”. I’d argue that you, the educator, cannot easily respond, and students cannot truly appreciate, the ramifications of such knowledge until they have it. Here the rewards and incentives that games offer effectively provide students with the desire to learn.

Why it’s not everything

While games can demonstrably introduce a problem and motivate students to solve it, this is not what education is or should be about. Games and gamification cannot solve everything

Despite motivating students to complete tasks, games do not truly provide the knowledge behind learning. In doing so, something may stop being a game, and start being an interactive (or even passive) presentation of knowledge. This raises the issues with teaching as it is, which I’ve written previously (and you should totally go check it out).

A meta-analysis of motivation in educational settings found that using a reward system reduces a person’s internal motivation. This means students may become reliant and dependent on the game for motivation, which is obviously not ideal. The same analysis found that if a student already found the task boring, then rewards don’t suddenly make it interesting — there is no internal motivation to build on so to speak.

Gamification is not the sole solution to engaging all students, all of the time, in all learning. It would not be advisable to teach students that there will always be tangible, immediate, external rewards for their efforts, as this is simply not the case.

As a quick aside to this point — I would like to raise the case of CodeAcademy — a website/application dedicated to teaching the principles behind coding, and introduction to syntaxes for various programming languages. These tasks are themselves, arguably boring, however it overcomes this by providing a lot of little achievable, and rewarded challenges.

CodeAcademy’s problem / task layout.

This raises a very important point: designing the system itself is important: the aesthetic, usability, balance of reward and punishment, are all key factors in the success of motivating students to work. If points, achievements, or rewards are distributed frivolously, students may not put as much effort in as possible, or value the rewards. Too few points and students feel the system is unfair. If students can’t use it, or find it too difficult to do so, then it’s a hindrance not a help. Here is where gamification is likely to problems in real-world implementation.

However to design, or even re-design, a system is resource intensive. Teachers are stretched as it is, and even if a common framework for gamification is established, and widely adopted, creating syllabuses for each class, subject, and year is going to be difficult.

Furthermore, there’s also a notorious problem with long term engagement and participation. This has been written about a lot regarding Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) — a series of videos / lectures and problems, usually provided by an existing University, which are completely free and open to anyone. For example EdX is associated with various institutes including Harvard. It is clear that a lot of people start, but few complete, online courses. There are many potential reasons to explain this, but whatever way you look at it, there is definitely a problem in long-term behaviour change.

A lot of effort needs to be put into not only designing an effective system, but also in implementing it. This is largely down to the educator — if they can integrate such a system, making it essential to student assessment or marking, then you’re on your way. This, of course, must be accompanied by training and teaching educators on how to use such systems (another point for discussion entirely).