Application of Gamification in Education
In education, many game-like strategies are adopted in order to assist and motivate learners. Expanding on a list of common game elements utilised in education defined by Reiners and Wood (2014), gamification examples can be broadly grouped into categories.
Progress Tracking
Through game-like strategies such as points and scoring, or adding levels to the experience, people can see instant appraisals of their performance. By awarding a score for performance, learners feel the urge to work hard and outperform peers, or to beat their previous high scores. Interface elements like progress bars don’t provide the same power of comparison, but do offer perspective and give achievable targets to aspire to reach.
Achievements
Similarly to points and scoring, by “levelling up” and earning rewards for reaching goals, people are compelled to keep on learning until they succeed and earn their prize.
By mimicking game approaches and offering side-missions and challenges alongside the main educational objectives, learners can tackle big tasks by breaking them into smaller chunks, or take a break from a bigger learning goal by learning something else that is equally valid, but perhaps easier to accomplish, in order to maintain motivation levels.
Competition
Introducing competition to educational situations natural increases focus and attention. With communal leaderboards, peers can compare performance against each other. An important consideration with leaderboards is the demotivational effect that poor performance or “losing” could have on participants. A solution for this is to limit leaderboards to the top few performers, with everyone else unaware of their exact ranking, and simply motivated to reach the high score chart.
Individual high score records also help establish a competitive mindset, encourage learners to perform increasingly better and beat their previous scores.
Narratives
Gamification doesn’t necessarily require interaction or direct feedback. By building learning into a plot-based setting, learners are inspired to progress in order to follow a character or storyline through the learning process, and are motivated to complete the task at end in order to complete the story.
Social Interaction
Competitive experiences where leaners measure performance against peers would also fall into this category. Another social-based game technique is the incorporation of teamwork into multi-user experiences, where learnings need to understand situations and problems, then work together in order to achieve a goal.
Feedback
Feedback is an important method for learners to be able to understand new topics or overcome problems with topics they’re already experienced in. Game-like tutorials can be utilised to help introduce new topics or scenarios to learners and performance grading, with opportunities to “retry”, can help learners to correct their mistakes.
Gamifying learning can encourage students to be more motivated and engaged, and game-like techniques can be used to assist with memorising knowledge absorbed in classes. Teachers using game-like teaching styles have already begun introducing game-based learning techniques to their classrooms, and supplementing them with learning opportunities online or educational applications for their students (Bowman, 2015).
Bibliography:
Bowman, L. (2015). Play to Learn: Great Sites on Gamification | Top5OnlineColleges.org. [online] Top5onlinecolleges.org. Available at: http://top5onlinecolleges.org/gamification/ [Accessed 18 Jan. 2016].
Reiners, T. and Wood, L. (2014). Gamification in education and business.