Key points:
- A gamified learning approach isn’t just about building up points–students must be motivated and engaged with learning material
- Educators must be careful about over-gamifying or using gamification merely to follow a trend
- See related article: A gamified career academy aims to boost student success
Colleges and universities are facing mounting pressure to demonstrate the value of a degree and protect students from crushing debt or insufficient earnings. Retaining and graduating more students with in-demand STEM skills will make it easier to justify the cost of education and meet proposed regulations from the Department of Education.
But to plug the leaky STEM pipeline and get more students to stay the course, teachers are challenged to make traditional classroom settings feel as relevant and captivating to the digital natives of Gen Z as the trusty social mobile apps they’ve grown up with–apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, designed to be as appealing as chocolate.
It’s tough for educators with very limited budgets to get access to the interesting tools, material, equipment, and field trips that can successfully compete for students’ shortened attention spans. Even with a course topic as fascinating as science, a textbook and a video (if you’re lucky) aren’t enough to captivate most students these days, especially the back-row ones.
Student disengagement and alienation is a serious issue as it can lead to failed and dropped classes or even complete school withdrawal. The National Center for Safe Supportive Learning Environments offers suggestions for instructors in their efforts to capture students’ long-term attention, which can include identifying and adopting helpful edtech tools and providing resources that support teaching in a way that resonates with and engages students more deeply.
Failure with fun
There’s plenty of evidence that the application of gamification techniques to learning is a successful complement to traditional education methodologies for improving student motivation, as described in a 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology. However, we have to be careful about over-gamifying or using gamification merely to follow the trend. I see a lot of edtech tools that are really fun to use and offer an enthralling game, but when you evaluate the actual learning outcomes … the value is less apparent.
Michael Bodekaer Jensen is the CEO and co-founder of Labster (www.labster.com), whose interactive virtual training simulations have reinforced the exciting connection between science and the real world for millions of students in high schools and universities across 100 countries, empowering the next generation of scientists. He can be reached atmichael@labster.com.
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