One of my favourite gamification is apps that gives you badges. Probably the first one I started using is Swarm . I actually started using this app, long time ago when all the company was under Foursquare. Now they are separated in two different apps, actually one only has the social part and earning badges, and the other app, that stills called Foursquare, it’s more like a rating app, similar to Yelp.

It’s a routine for me to check in in places, earn coins and badges for my unlocked places, like: you have been 5 places in a Thai restaurant, here the Thai badge!

Inspired in this app, in 2011 I worked designing and created the education proposal Agora: Citizen participation activities. I did the educational foundation and methodology for children aged 8 to 12 years old, designed the methodology and some activities. The main idea of the proposal that the students needed to create their own city, with the elements and values they wanted. In order to do that they needed to pass some activities. For example, if they wanted to have a green area in their city, they needed to pass the “green area activity”, then they earned the proper badge, and they were allowed to build a green area. I didn’t have many resources and clearly the badges are very handmade, you can check the website I did for this programme here. All the proposal was website based, all the instructions and activities were placed in the Wordpress and basically the kids just needed to read an do it, in real life. I think I created something blended without knowing… Also, my plan was that all the classes shared they results, how many badges they have earned and everyone was able to see the cities of other classes…

It was quite sad because the proposal was not a success. Many teachers found that kids spent a lot of time in front of the computer, and they didn’t want to encourage the use of the blog as a guideline of the activities… Surprising, right? Also, another complaint was the fact of earning badges. Many educators considered that this was not the best way to make the children learn. They argued that they should learn and that is the reward, learning! Giving the badge or points was not really a good way to measure their motivation. I have to say that at that point I shared part of the arguments…

A year after that, I moved to San Francisco, and I started teaching Spanish to young children and teenagers. Teaching in a different country, I had many shock cultural moments, but one that makes sense to mention, is the fact that part of the material classroom they gave me, was a lot of stickers and an ink buffer (star shaped). I was supposed to give stickers everyday and at least use the ink buffer with a couple of kids… Many days I forgot, and actually my manager noticed and told me that I was not motivating enough the kids and I was not giving enough stickers. The stickers were the motivation? I have to say that when I used it, the students were clearly more into the class… I thought it was quite sad.

Checking the badgetheworld.org is very clear than UK and US have more badge points than any other country. Is this a cultural anglo saxon thing? Is this way to do being exported everywhere? Gamification it’s a very interesting approach, however, doesn’t undervalue what is really important (the learning for the pleasure of learning)? Or is that really important?

At the end of the day, we all go to work because we know that we will have a salary at the end of the month, and if we do good, even better than expected, we will be able to ask for more rewards...