Gamification and Education
I’ve been hovering on the edges of “gamification” in the realm of education for a while now, sort of constantly on the verge of deep diving into the literature and the projects, but then I seem to be constantly getting dragged away by a million other things. I’ve wanted to be able to say more about it, because it feels very close to my own drives when it comes to tech in higher ed, but it’s markedly different in interesting ways.
I’ve been of two minds about the gamification movement from the start, though I feel under-qualified to actually state an opinion. My feeling about it, from the casual reading I’ve done so far, is that the concept has its heart in the right place in trying to replicate the engagement games engender in a formal learning environment, but that I’m not convinced we’re entirely clear on why games engender that engagement the way they do, or even that it’s one single thing that’s the same factor from game to game. But what do I know; maybe I’m just over-complicating things. I’m not a gamer myself, really, but I’ve been engaged in a pretty significant number of online communities that also exhibit the level of determined commitment that gamers do. If you can remove the game and still see the same behaviour, maybe the key to what we’re looking for isn’t strictly inside the game.
Then I found this:
In a recent blog post speaking out against the term ‘gamification’, [Margaret] Robertson wrote, “What we’re currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking that thing that is least essential to games and representing it as the core of the experience. Points and badges have no closer a relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and loyalty cards. They’re great tools for communicating progress and acknowledging effort, but neither points nor badges in any way constitute a game.”
“Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are things that should be both. There are many, many things that should be neither.” Margaret Robertson
You may be tempted to jump on board and trade your grades in for badges and call it a game. But this simple act doesn’t dramatically change the learner’s experience. Take some time to really understand what makes a good game great. Create a compelling narrative to pull your students through the course. Set up mentoring and collaboration opportunities such as those you encounter in games to enable learners to share what they know. And frequently chime in with feedback. Use those badges to chart progress, but meaningful instructor feedback is what will truly propel the learner forward.
On some level, higher education is already a game. The points are grades, and students are expected to gain as many of them as they can to level up and win. Many games have elements of grinding (where you do dull and not very challenging or inspiring tasks over and over in order to gain a level, set of skills, or gold that will unlock the next segment of the game experience); I suspect grinding is the part of gaming we have most successfully adopted at this point. We give students lots of activities they aren’t particularly engaged in and expect performance on them. That’s how education has worked for a long tim. We have a general motivation problem.
We attribute that motivation problem to all kinds of things; the classes are too large, faculty teaching loads are too high, too many students enter higher education simply for the certification of it rather than any desire to learn. I’m sure all of these things are true, but there are assignments that work in spite of all that, and students who get engaged even if there are 1000 students in the class with them.
Any work in examining motivation in any learning environment, formal, informal, gaming, affinity group of any kind, is valuable in the end to the end, I think. I don’t think there’s one answer here; I suspect there are a million answers.
I should schedule that deep dive now, shouldn’t I.