Gamification

Gamification, defined as the use of game mechanics, dynamics, and frameworks to promote desired behaviours. Gamification, as a concept, is defined as the techniques used in non-game settings (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011). The potential of gamification, however, goes beyond promoting healthy lifestyles and marketing strategies. Gamers voluntarily invest countless hours in developing their problem-solving skills within the context of games (Gee, 2008). They recognize the value of extended practice, and develop personal qualities such as persistence, creativity, and resilience through extended play (McGonigal, 2011). Gamification attempts to harness the motivational power of games and apply it to real-world problems eg the motivational problems of schools.

Gamification techniques are commonly used in higher education to increase learners’ motivation and engagement in a learning task. Students’ engagement in a gamified learning activity can result in a better learning outcome (Barata, Gama, Jorge, & Gonçalves, 2013; Eleftheria, Charikleia, Iason, Athanasios, & Dimitrios, 2013; Kuo & Chuang, 2016).Intuition suggests that gamification may be able to motivate students to learn better and to care more about school. Making the case for gamification, however, requires more than intuition. It is important to clearly define what is meant by gamification, evaluate it for its benefits and drawbacks, explore current implementations and future possibilities, and better understand the theoretical rationale behind gamification. Gamification in Education: Three critical questions: What, How, Why Bother? What do we mean by the gamification of education? The existence of game-like elements does not translate directly to engagement. Understanding the role of gamification in education, therefore, means understanding under what circumstances game elements can drive learning behavior. Disengagement from school happens at the social and emotional levels, problems exacerbated by the formal rules of school (Rock, 2004). Gamification can change the rules, but it can also affect students’ emotional experiences, their sense of identity and their social positioning Gamification projects offer the opportunity to experiment with rules, emotions, and social roles.

Existing gamification projects apply principles at vastly different scales. At one end is gamification at the micro-scale -- individual teachers who gamify their own class structures. For example, Lee Sheldon, professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, discarded traditional grading in favor of earning “experience points” and converted homework assignments into quests (Laster, 2010). At the other end of the scale, Quest to Learn, a new charter school in New York City, uses game design as its organizing framework for teaching and learning. Game designers work together with teachers to develop playful curricula and incorporate game elements into the entire school day (Corbett, 2010). In practice, few people will ever get the opportunity to design a school from scratch. Gamification can help schools do school better. In fact, this is the standard that gamification in education must live up to. It is not good enough to gamify school because it is the next fad, or because we believe students are motivated by points, or because we think badges will cause students to change their behaviors permanently. It is important to know what problems the education institutions are trying to fix, design systems that fix those specific problems, develop ways of evaluating whether those fixes work, and sustain those fixes over time. Gamification can only provide tools, and those tools must produce results that are worth the investment. How: Goals and Techniques Educational gamification proposes the use of game-like rule systems, player experiences and cultural roles to shape learners’ behavior. To understand the potential of gamification, however, is paramount to consider how these techniques can best be deployed in practice.

Gamification techniques have been used to gamify learning experiences such as points, prizes, badges, leaderboards, scoreboards, challenges, levels, and feedback (Barata et al., 2013; Kim, Rothrock, & Freivalds, 2016; Yildirim, 2017). Applying gamification techniques in a curriculum can help provide a more inclusive activity through its effect on students’ sense of competition, interaction, and motivation (Aşıksoy, 2017; Davis, Sridharan, Koepke, Singh, & Boiko, 2018).Gamification can serve as an intervention in the following areas: Cognitive. Games provide complex systems of rules for players to explore through active experimentation and discovery. For example, the apparently simple mobile game Angry Birds asks players to knock down towers by launching birds out of a slingshot. Players must experiment with the game to figure out the physical properties of different tower materials, the ballistics of the slingshot, and the structural weaknesses of each tower. They launch birds, observe the results, plan their next moves, and execute those plans. In short, players’ desire to beat each level makes them small-scale experimental physicists. More broadly stated, games guide players through the mastery process and keep them engaged with potentially difficult tasks (Koster, 2004). One critical game design technique is to deliver concrete challenges that are perfectly tailored to the player's skill level, increasing the difficulty as the player's skill expands. Specific, moderately difficult, immediate goals are motivating for learners (Locke, 1991; Bandura, 1986), and these are precisely the sort that games provide (Gee, 2008). Games also provide multiple routes to success, allowing students to choose their own sub-goals within the larger task. This, too, supports motivation and engagement (Locke & Latham, 1990). These techniques, applied to schools, can transform student perspectives on learning. Students in schools are often told what to do without understanding the larger benefits of the work. Gamification gives students clear, actionable tasks and promises them immediate rewards instead of vague long-term benefits. In the best-designed games, the reward for solving a problem is a harder problem (Gee, 2008). Gamification hopes to make the same true for schools. Emotional. Games invoke a range of powerful emotions, from curiosity to frustration to joy (Lazarro, 2004). They provide many positive emotional experiences, such as optimism and pride (McGonigal, 2011). Crucially, they also help players persist through negative emotional experiences and even transform them into positive ones. The most dramatic example of emotional transformation in a game is around the issue of failure. Because games involve repeated experimentation, they also involve repeated failure. In fact, for many games, the only way to learn how to play the game is to fail at it repeatedly, learning something each time (Gee, 2008). Games maintain this positive relationship with failure by making feedback cycles rapid and keeping the stakes low. The former means players can keep trying until they succeed; the latter means they risk very little by doing so. In schools, on the other hand, the stakes of failure are high and the feedback cycles long. Students have few opportunities to try, and when they do, it is high stakes. Little wonder that students experience anxiety, not anticipation, when offered the chance to fail (Pope, 2003). Gamification offers the promise of resilience in the face of failure, by reframing failure as a necessary part of learning. Gamification can shorten feedback cycles, give learners low-stakes ways to assess their own Lee, J. J. & Hammer, J. (2011).

Gamification allows students to publicly identify themselves as scholars through playing the game. The game can provide social credibility and recognition for academic achievements, which might otherwise remain invisible or even be denigrated by other students. Recognition can be provided by the teacher, but gamification can also allow students to reward each other with in-game currency. Such a design encourages students to reinforce the development of a school-based identity in other students as well as in themselves. A well-designed gamification system can help players take on meaningful roles that are fruitful for learning. By making the development of a new identity playful, and by rewarding it appropriately, we can help students think differently about their potential in school and what school might mean for them.

Why Bother: Risks and Benefits The strengths of gamification and schools can be complementary, but they are not necessarily so. There are significant ways in which gamification and schools could each make the other worse. Bringing education and game elements together could turn out like peanut butter meeting chocolate: two great tastes working together, leading to results that are especially important for developing 21st century skills. Gamification can motivate students to engage in the classroom, give teachers better tools to guide and reward students, and get students to bring their full selves to the pursuit of learning. It can show them the ways that education can be a joyful experience, and the blurring of boundaries between informal and formal learning can inspire students to learn in life wide, lifelong, and life deep ways. The challenges, however, are also significant and need to be considered.

Gamification might absorb teacher resources, or teach students that they should learn only when provided with external rewards. On the other hand, playfulness requires freedom - the freedom to experiment, to fail, to explore multiple identities, to control one’s own investment and experience (Klopfer, Osterweil & Salen, 2009). By making play mandatory, gamification might create rule-based experiences that feel just like school. Instead of chocolate and peanut butter, such projects are more like chocolate-covered broccoli. In short, some gamification projects will succeed, and others will fail. Gamification is not a universal panacea. If we are to improve the odds of gamification providing value to schools, we must carefully design gamification projects that address the real challenges of schools, that focus on the areas where gamification can provide the maximum value, that are grounded in existing research, and that address the potential dangers of gamification for both games and schools. In tandem with the creation of gamification projects, we must develop meaningful assessments of whether they are achieving their aims. As gamification spreads throughout the real world, there is little question it will also impact our schools. By leading with research-based, theory-driven gamification projects, we can work to ensure that the impact of gamification is a positive one. Gamification will be a part of students' lives for years to come. If we can harness the energy, motivation and sheer potential of their game-play and direct it toward learning, we can give students the tools to become high scorers and winners in real life.

Despite the positive effects demonstrated by the use of gamification techniques in higher education on students’ behavioral and learning outcomes (Bovermann & Bastiaens, 2018; Huang et al., 2018; Ortiz-Rojas et al., 2017), there are a number of hiccups that need to be addressed.

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