How does gamification work?
Gamification, or the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, incorporates elements that, according to Knewton’s infographic, can be harnessed for educational purposes; for example:
- Progression: This element helps the student see success visualized incrementally through levels that ramp up and unlock content, as well as points that increase the running numerical value of work.
- Investment: This helps the student feel pride in their work in the game through achievements earned for public recognition, appointments to receive new challenges, collaboration to accomplish goals, “epic meaning” or working to achieve something, and “virality” that incentivizes involving others.
- Cascading Information: This element helps unlock information continuously through bonuses, countdowns, discovery, loss aversion (playing to avoid losing what’s been gained); “infinite play” (learn until expertise is developed), and “synthesis” (working on challenges that require multiple skills to solve).
An Ethical Island, a learning blog for innovators, also produced an infographic about the elements of gaming that can be applied to 21st-century learning, and discusses how gamification incorporates the Self-Determination Theory (SDT).
The SDT, coined by researchers Deci and Ryan in 1985, describes the confluence of competence, autonomy, and social relatedness.
Students ‘seek out optimal stimulation and challenging activities and find these activities intrinsically motivating because [students] have a basic need for competence,” said an Eccles and Wigfield study in 2002.
Ultimately, the design elements used in games gives the user “freedoms,” many of which are the learning “freedoms” touted in colleges and universities; such as the freedom to fail, the freedom to fashion identities, the freedom of interpretation, the freedom to experiment, and the freedom of effort, says Ethical Island’s infographic.
Theory into practice
The Knowledge Guru emphasizes that creating a learning game, or gamification of learning, is a dual process of both creating a game-like solution and a learning solution.
“You are doing both,” says the infographic. “You need to design gameplay that is fun and balanced AND you need to design a solution that achieves specified learning objectives. Because of its dual nature, learning game design lends itself to an agile development process as opposed to an ADDIE method.”
The infographic explains that in an agile process, the designer brainstorms concepts and quickly mocks them up, refining as the process evolves. Therefore, gamification should start with defining instructional goals and objectives, moving to brainstorming concepts, followed by creating a prototype, ending with a cycle of refining, play testing and evaluating before finalizing the game/course.
According to an MIT paper, “Moving Learning Games Forward,” games in education can be used as:
- Authoring platforms: Games are used to produce an artifact (another game, model, visual or written text), such as students producing a model in StarCraft.
- Content Systems: Games deliver content about a particular subject area; for instance, students gain knowledge of Caribbean history by playing Pirates.
- Simulations: Students use games to test theories about systems and tinker with variables; for example, students gain a systemic understanding of engineering problems by working with a limited budget and available materials in Bridge Builder.
[More examples of concrete gamification in learning are in the infographic on page 3 and 4 of this article.]
“Today’s games are massively multiplayer, involve virtual reality, role-playing and user-created content, as well as new elements like augmented reality,” says Knewton, and all of these elements should be considered in learning design.
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