Learning
task 1
Read and understand the concepts of: Gamification, Gamification of teaching and learning, and learning games. Give your thoughts about the above concepts using a number of examples.
Read and understand the concepts of: Gamification, Gamification of teaching and learning, and learning games. Give your thoughts about the above concepts using a number of examples.
Gamification
[Noun] The process of turning an activity or task into a game or something resembling a game:
"Teachers can use gamification to motivate their students."
The above definition from Dictionary.com, puts as succinctly as possible what gamification means. Note that the example used refers to gamification in education.
Of course, this raises another question: What is a 'game'? It is my experience that when we start asking questions like that, all sorts of crazy opinions come out of the woodwork. People seem to have very strong feelings on what constitutes a valid video game, for example.
The following is a video from Extra Credits, a YouTube video lesson series set up by people in the gaming industry.
The narrator of the video rails against the very idea of even asking the question, What is a game? The problem seems to lie in how some people would be down on some interactive experiences (in the medium of video games) as they are not hardcore enough and don't fit a quite narrow definition of 'game'.
If I had to state my own definition, and I think I do, I would say that a game is... an interactive experience with interesting choices.
This definition takes care of the need to make the "player" active and also shifts the explanatory burden onto the actual choices with the word 'interesting'.
What makes a choice interesting? I would say that a choice is interesting if it has challenge involved. Challenge can come in many forms. It could come from not fully knowing the consequences of one's choices, or from knowing but not being able to pick easily between different consequences, or even from just not really being able to choose at exactly the right time or in exactly the right way.
So, that would be my definition of a game: an interactive experience with interesting choices. That seems broad enough. Therefor, gamification, in my opinion, is when an activity becomes interactive and involves interesting choices.
In A Practitioner's Guide to Gamification in Education (Hsin-Yuan Huang & Soman, 2013) "gamification guru" Yu-Kai Chou describes the phenomenon as such:
"The craft of deriving all the fun and addicting elements found in game and applying them to real-world or productive activities."
Here the emphasis moves away from my interactivity and choices, towards addictiveness and fun. I don't find this incompatible, though it does ask more questions about the nature of fun. Many games (and pursuits in the real world) we engage with enthusiastically, but would hardly describe as fun. I like to wash the dishes because I like having a clean and tidy kitchen, but I'm not sure it's fun. Similarly, I can play a game like Duet, which is has great music, but is fast, frustrating and infuriatingly difficult... but it is fun? I'm not sure.
What seems to me to be the real key here is the addictive quality that good games have. A game that balances challenge and reward, which exists in just the right flow state, which has something that keeps you coming back... that's what is needed in gamification.
Gamification in teaching and learning
The concept of gamification in education is fairly straightforward, but the application can be hard. Hsin-Yuan Huang & Soman offer a 5-step process for how to do just that:
1. Understanding the target audience and the context
This involves looking at who is studying, why they are there and what are the potential "pain points" which will prevent productivity, such as method of learning, motivation, distraction etc.
2. Defining learning objectives
This could include general instructional goals (like completing an assignment or project), specific learning goals (understanding a concept, performing a task) or behavioral goals.
3. Structuring the experience
This involves structuring achievable milestones within stages, depending on the learning objectives and possible pain points.
4. Identifying resources
This involves implementing currencies, levels and essential feedback for the participants
5. Applying gamification elements
There are two types identified, self elements (such as points, badges, rewards, storyline advances) and social elements (such as leader boards, interactive cooperation and virtual goods)
There is an interesting case study in the literature mentioned above which documents how one degree programme from the School of Computing in the National University of Singapore identified certain learning challenges of the students, such as inability to implement theory or lack of motivation and how they overcame those problems with the help of gamification. Two key methods used were much faster feedback from work done as well as a scoring system which was presented in a leader board (though only the top 15 students, to eliminate the risk of demotivating students further as a result of public embarrassment).
For me, what was interesting to note, and something the researchers were happy to point out, was that the only reason this gamification of the course could be implemented was through a methodical and sober approach to the issue (as in the 5-step plan) as well as significant financial backing from the learning institute. If you believe in something and want to to it, then you want to do it right and that might mean having to convince the people who hold the purse strings to let you do it. Without the backing of the institute, this would not be so simple.
Learning games
Learning games, as I understand the term, are games which have the goal of teaching something (which is useful outside the game world) to the player. This marks a significant difference from most popular games which are only really concerned with entertaining you and keeping you playing.
The medium can be board games, video games, cards... And they can aim to teach just about anything, from languages to maths, sciences, social skills, history etc.
The website Learning Games for Kids offers a bunch of browser-based games designed to teach children a wide variety of skills, for example spelling, music, maths, colours, animals... The one I played was based on learning to type, called Typing Challenge.
For me, the game was poorly executed. I played it a couple of times and there was no variety in the sentences it was asking you type, there was no way of keeping track of your own high scores within the game. There was also no story element to the game, so it really was just about typing faster and more accurately. I can imagine that a child would get quite bored of this game quite quickly.
What comes to my mind is that, like any game, there has to be resources to make it good and for there to be resources, someone has to pay for it. In this case, a free, educational browser-based game doesn't bring in any money, so nobody is going to invest much in making it very playable.
Sources
Dictionary.com "Gamification" definition
Extra Credits: What is a Game?
A Practitioner's Guide to Gamification in Education by Weny Hsin-Yuan Huang and Dilip Soman (2013)
Duet (a free to play mobile game by Kumobius)
Educational games, on Wikipedia
Learninggamesforkids.com
Typing Challenge game