Another Take: Gamification in Education – It’s Not Always About Winning
This week, I’m completing our second “Take Two,” a back-to-back series of blog entries between me and Shannon, with my take on gamification in education as part of our Olympic theme. To see the first entry, check out Take Two: It’s Not Just About Winning in the Olympics – Lessons for Higher Education.This weekend, the city of London opened itself up to the world and kicked off the 2012 Olympic Games. I’ve been glued to my TV ever since. (I also came across this handy website that allows you to find out when each event is being shown on your local network: Olympic TV schedule - enjoy). The Olympic Games are such an inspiring example of international unity, and hearing the stories of Olympians are sometimes even more amazing. Their journeys are full of discipline, passion, and learning. There are so many lessons that can be applied to higher education, but I want to focus on one that has been trending up lately: gamification in education, specifically using social media. Let’s take a closer look.
What is gamification?
Gamification is the use of game design techniques, game thinking, and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. If I had to translate that very formal definition into an educational framework, I’d say gamification is adding incentive or external motivation to promote action.
About gamification in education
Of course, since there has been a lot of hype about gamifying lately, there also comes some speculation, and some appropriate thoughts at that. On the other hand, a recent whitepaper published by MIT called “Moving Learning Games Forward” makes a case for educational games and learning through play. Below is an infographic that helps to highlight some major takeaways from the paper. Some food for thought comes in the first quote mentioned: “Game players regularly exhibit persistence, risk-taking, attention to detail and problem-solving, all behaviors that ideally would be regularly demonstrated in school.”
A great visual summary of MIT’s whitepaper on gamification in education. Click the image to be taken to the original blog entry where I found this graphic.
About gamification on social media
In a recent study detailing why people follow brands, it was revealed that approximately 37% of people follow brands on Facebook for “Special Offers/Deals” and 43.5% have similar motivations for following a brand on Twitter. Further, 70% of the respondents in the study reported that they have participated in a brand-sponsored contest or sweepstakes. The motivation and evidence are there: people want to be engaged in “gaming” via social channels.
Examples of gamification in higher education
We’re all just getting started here, but there are some very interesting developments already taking place. Here are a few:
- Penn State developed an “Educational Gaming Commons” to bring games into teaching & learning. Many examples there.
- Educause’s paper, “7 Things You Should Know About Gamification,” discusses how Dartmouth used gaming to help students and archivists tag thousands of photos for researchers and offers another cautionary note about gamification
- Seven of the Ivy+ alumni associations are currently engaged in the “Alumpics” where they’ll each post an alumni-related photo on their Facebook Pages. The university with the most Likes on the picture will win the gold.
Personally, I think there’s potential to gamify with educational goals in mind when it’s done right, whether it’s promoting learning or growing an affinity to your university. I, for one, will be experimenting with the idea more this year, and I think using social media is one fantastic way to do it.
What do you think? Share your thoughts or examples of gamification in education in the Comments and let’s play!
By Kevin
Just wanted to say, whenever I think about playing “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?” I get a warm fuzzy feeling. That game made me so happy. It also taught me a lot about geography and I can credit Carmen San Diego for teaching me where Seoul is located.
I loved the shout out to Carmen Sandiego in that infographic, too, Melissa. I’ll always remember playing it and the theme song sung by Rockapella. I didn’t even think about it as an educational game right away because I associated with so much fun, but it absolutely is. Great flashback!
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At Cornell, we recently published a Facebook trivia game that we sketched out in-house, then hired an external developer to build. Sharing, friend invites, and leader boards! Look up Cornelliana Challenge”
Thanks for sharing, Keith! I just found your Tumblr post about it. Looks very interesting. I’d love to know some of the outcomes from this once the game concludes. I haven’t seen much in the way of engaging an external developer either, so curious about your experience working with them, too. Just followed you on Twitter – perhaps we can trade thoughts there and take to email if needed.
Keith, that sounds like such fun for your students and alumni! At Penn Career Services, we’ll be taking our first stab at a trivia contest/scavenger hunt strictly through social media. Similar to Kevin, I’d be interested in learning more offline.
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This is a very timely post! The degree to incorporate gamification and gaming features into education is a big question. We took on the positive stance, and believe gamification can be a powerful tool to encourage learning. We have designed three video games to encourage students to get involved in science, especially in classification tasks for researchers and scientists. You can find us at http://www.citizensort.org
Thanks for your post. Interesting that you’re using this with students involved in science. In the US, we have a long way to come in STEM education.
You said:
“…37% of people follow brands on Facebook for “special offers/deals” and… Further, 70% of respondents… Reported that they have participated in a brand-sponsored contest or sweepstakes.”
Which you then interpreted to mean:
“The motivation and evidence are there: people want to be involved in “gaming” via social channels.”
Please re-read what you wrote and consider the huge logical leap from *people want a deal/special offer* to *clear evidence they want to be involved in “gaming”*. This is not just a flaw, but a dangerous one when discussing education.
Educators need to do a far better job of making crucial distinctions between the many favors of behavior-influencers currently lumped under the “gamification” umbrella. To make any broad, sweeping generalizations about motivations that happen at polar opposites of the Motivation Continuum (Self-Determination Theory, the predominant theory of motivation today in most universities) is both irresponsible and potentially harmful. We would not expect a psych professor to be sloppy about mixing Skinner behaviorism with cognitive neuroscience, yet that’s exactly what we do when we mix actual games, gamification, play, and serious games and attempt to reach useful conclusions.
And this does not even begin to cover the potential damage from misapplication of extrinsic reinforcers to the subset of behaviors which ARE intrinsically motivating (I.e. rewarding for their own sake).
But really, I am still just so confused by your jump from people wanting a deal to people wanting to be involved in “gaming” — and how you also believe that maps somehow to using gamification in education. As a former teacher and now parent of a newly-minted/credentialed teacher, this lack of fine-grained, subtle distinctions troubles me, a lot. Because the distinctions in this case REALLY matter. See: Deci/Ryan, Amabile, or at least Dan Pink’s TED talk on “Drive” which gives a mainstream/popular take on the underlying psychological research that applies here. When motivation is at stake, we cannot afford to risk making things *worse*, and the supporting evidence — however counter-intuitive– demonstrates the potentially devastating effects of applying seemingly-harmless rewards in the wrong contexts.
Thanks for reading our blog and for your response, Kathy. I appreciate your comments and I am taking a thoughtful pause.
I agree that gamification has become an umbrella term, and I am sorry if there was any confusion in my post along those lines. I also agree that it’s a very, very careful thing to consider – adding external motivation to learning. I included a line in the title of this post “It’s Not Always About Winning” because I do believe it should be about learning if there is a game or game-like scenario put in to something educational. I’m interested in what people across the country are trying, and thought I’d share those examples here.
Regarding the line drawn between people’s motivation to follow a brand on social media, their desire to participate in a contest, and how that relates to education & gaming, here’s what I meant. Many social media users follow brands or brand pages because there is a chance they will be given a special offer or deal. For managers of brand pages, one way to engage the entire group is through a contest for that deal, which I think of as a kind of game. Since 70% of people reported that they have done this, I’m drawing the conclusion that they’re interested or at least willing to play/enter. By participating in the contest, users often become more engaged with the brand or company, and perhaps we can use the same idea to get people more involved with their education or institution. As higher education starts to figure out how social media can play a role in learning and university life, I’m wondering about creating this kind of game and opportunity to engage constituents in a meaningful way that results in benefits for all, using game ideas as vehicles for learning.
I hope this clears things up, and thanks for presenting another side to the discussion.
These comments are an important reminder of why Kevin and I started this blog – an interactive and open discussion on social media and education.
Kathy, you highlight how we all still have a lot to learn and to consider, especially from other disciplines that are relevant to both areas. Thanks for bringing your perspective to social @ edu and sharing this information on gamification.
We look forward to learning and discussing more from everyone who visits.
Kevin, thanks for being so understanding of the tone of my comment… It takes very little to push the gamification button for me these days, primarily because *I* spent a lot of time not making the crucial distinctions, and now regret that.
So for me today, I have a high bar set for being precise when talking about anything related to games, game mechanics, and education. I also do not want us to draw too heavily on what works in *marketing*, because again — there are many different forms of engagement, and only some are what we want. Engagement around a reward system can look so useful and positive and yet still be a trip to the Skinner box from which we might never recover (given that just one of the possible side effects of an incentive program is that *removing* it can leave things worse than they were before, or that the participants develop a tolerance for the rewards and you need to *increase* them once the initial novelty wears off).
All that said, there is much to be learned from good game design, though virtually all expert game designers recognize that what their work designs for and what most gamification designs for are entirely different, and incompatible. Game design is about intrinsically rewarding activities, where the extrinsic reinforcers are not used as rewards but primarily feedback and recognition. Most gamification surgically removes the soul of a game — the intrinsically rewarding part — and then assumes (cargo culting) that the thin veneer of extrinsic reinforcements found in some games are somehow *what really matters*. But when you have primarily extrinsic reinforcers — game mechanics — you end up with mechanical behaviors. Granted, mechanical behaviors can appear extremely complex when chained together: Skinner trained pigeons in missile guidance. But he acknowledged that it was never complex behavior, just a highly reinforced chain of simple ones.
The feedback part of games and gamification holds great power and comes with very little risk… The evidence keeps building that the key to virtually all growth/development of skill/expertise comes from high-quality, low-latency feedback. And the recognition part of games can be similar to a martial arts ranking system where it is purely about deeply meaningful achievement — REAL achievement.
Rather than looking directly to games, (and especially the subset of video games)I hope we begin to look to what game designers looked to. Then we end up in a strange recursive place: it is about learning and mastery. If we want a model for the kind of engagement that produces deep growth in knowledge and abilities, we can look to coaches of athletes, musicians, chess masters, martial arts, or any other domain that manages to balance constantly-increasing challenges with opportunities to use what is gained during challenging (often painful and tedious) practice to do “really awesome things”
Kathy – thanks for your kind and thorough reply. I can tell you’ve dedicated a lot of time to this subject, and I’m glad you were willing to share your thoughts. I really would like to follow up and check out the resources you suggested. As a professional in higher education, I love to learn – this is an opportunity.
I did my best to interpret your tone as more coming from a place of dialogue than of argument, which is how Shannon and I really want this blog to take form. We plan to use this blog as a platform to share what’s inspiring us and what’s inspiring others at the intersection of social media & higher education. We hope everyone comes with an open mind and good intentions to the conversation. Together, we’ll be able to do more of those “really awesome things!”
Shannon, Kevin — your responses are kinder than mine would have been to my comment. Thanks again. Just for context, gamification lives at a unique intersection of the three things my adult life has been about: teaching/learning, game design/development, and… horse training. Understanding the richness of the full spectrum of motivators for behavior is crucial to both game design and getting a 1000 pound animal to do what you want without wanting to kill you in the process
. And I have made every mistake imaginable, though I’m sure there are still plenty of unimaginable ones in my future.
Thank-you for the opportunity to join this discussion.
Kathy – thanks for this response as well. The more I read about “gamification,” the more I see this is an often confusing term, sometimes associated with cheapening the educational experience. In no way would I support doing that. I see “gamification” and game-like ideas as a way to get people engaged, but the second real learning is compromised, then I’m just not sure it’s worth it. I hope we can all make the crucial distinctions between terms clearer to avoid this confusion in the future. I’d like to not make that mistake myself! Thanks again for bringing this discussion into focus.
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Education & Gaming in one thing are the best invention ever.
Any recomendations for LMS systems to Work with allround games/ vesus regular educational content?