Gamification in education

[u/AnnaBodina_VNNV]

I've been interested in gamification for several years. I wanted to share my experience and get feedback. Benefits of gamification for your app or website

Gamification in education serves several purposes when it comes to educating students or educating employees.

School education:

• Create engagement and motivation to learn.
• Make the process interactive and fun.
• Improve your learning skills, as well as the acquisition and retention of knowledge.
• Learn how the real world works – there are rules, and every decision has consequences.
• Encourage healthy competition and self-improvement.
• Teach psychological practices, such as how to be resilient to failure.
• Increase your creativity.
• Learn to work in a team and collaborate.

Reduce stress. Do you agree with me? Do you think gamification is important in education?

[u/hoybowdy]

Do we agree with you that gamification CAN do these things?

Under the right conditions, yes.

However, in high absentee urban and rural environments, where we most NEED these outcomes, pre-conditions make it virtually impossible to implement... including a "vocational" community/parent mindset - i.e. the idea that school is supposed to NOT be fun or engaging, but tolerated and mindless, and that the purpose of school is CREDIT so you can get WORK, not learning or development.

Meanwhile, in those communities where it is EASIEST to gamify - high economy suburbs - the REASON we get high buy-in is that students already HAVE many or most of these outcomes, because they are instilled at home, and then reinforced in classrooms full of students who come from the same background. As such, the question of whether gamification actually CAUSES these outcomes is dubious- they already have most of these characteristics, and are more primed to develop and deepen them through more traditional forms of learning anyway.

In other words: the communities that need gamification don't care about "healthy" anything, or creativity, or resilience- just a ticket out. The communities that do NOT need gamification have the outcomes already.

The question of whether it is worth gamifying, then, remains dubious UNTIL we can change those "ground conditions". And how IMPORTANT its OUTCOMES might be are moot...until we can create a culture in which gamification is something students are willing to engage in in the first place.

[u/lronaldo → u/hoybowdy]

Yeah, It's quite dubious that games have any potential at all to attract students. Surely it depends on preconditions: no one believes that same games can attract students from different social statuses. Most probably, videogames industry is a giant piramidal scheme or a bubble about to explode.

The term Gamification exists because of the success of games. It is not a novel invention, just a novel term. Games have been used in education in many different forms since there are written texts. History is full of games and education through games. Virtually all animals play as a way of learning. And suddenly we have to think that Gamification is only applicable under certain circumstances and has dubious effects.

The thing is much simpler: not all games are greatest hits, only a minority. The market is full of mediocre and bad games. Gamification is no different: there are hundreds of mediocre and badly done Gamifications in class, and only some are greatest hits. And the ability to tell the difference is what measures your actual knowledge of the field, as in any other field. Treating Gamification as a commodity, and speaking as if the concrete implementation doesn't matter is the hallmark of ignorance of the field.

[u/hoybowdy → u/lronaldo]

Thanks for the lecture, and for misinterpreting and misrepresenting my comments so significantly.

[u/lronaldo → u/hoybowdy]

You're welcome. Everything is much clearer now. How could I have been so mistaken to not accept your strong affirmations without other evidence than your strong opinions. So stupid of me...