I’ve been reading a lot about gamification and learning in the last couple of weeks. Some of this will have an influence on Predict: Current and future trends in e-learning in, which is one of the subjects in the new Graduate Certificate in Learning Design. In some ways, I’m sad that I can only focus a little bit on gamification – it’s only one small part of Predict – because I would love to spend more time on the topic, and I’m aware that some Masters programs do precisely that.
Having said that, I think gamification is an excellent topic to include in the Grad Cert. It’s a good fit for a number of reasons. Firstly, gamification is, in many ways, an explicit application of different learning theories. At its most basic level, many of the basic features of gamification – rewards, feedbacks – are central to behaviourist approaches to learning. On the other hand, more nuanced and complex interpretations of gamification can take on aspects related to play, exploration and discovery, which are more at home with constructivist notions of learning. And, of course, one must not ignore the social aspects of community and its role in gasified learning.
Having said that, I think that there’s more to gamification than simply badges and feedback, and this is a point that’s made in the research. The very best games skilfully weave feedback along with ideas like story, choice, levels and much more. Any true application of gaming principles to learning will need to do the same – which makes gamification far more complex than a de-facto reward system.
Another area that interests me is the difference between gamification and games-based learning. While there are some definitional debates going on about what fits where, I think the answer is more of a continuum than anything else. Games have long been recognised for their educative potential – I know history and geography teachers that have used games like Civilisation and SimCity to teach particular concepts. Sometimes, these are called serious games in the discussion about learning – but that’s a term I don’t like as it implies that other forms of games-based learning are not serious – and I think they are.
Another aspect relates to the relationship of gamification with the physical world. Often, we think about gasified learning as being restricted to online communities – after all, it’s easy to score badges in this respect – but it’s actually not the case – any primary school teacher has applied at least some principles of gamification in their classroom. More recently, there are now more or less effective technological measures to assist teachers in this – such as Class Dojo. However, there are also games-based approaches that cross between the online and the offline worlds. Tools such as Pokémon go make use of augmented reality to gamify the physical environment.