The Benefits of Gamification in Academics

In one of my previous blog posts, I talked a lot about the obstacles that face gamification in the education system. However, I think it’s very important that we take a step back and acknowledge the things that gamification stands a good chance to improve—because it turns out gamification really can do a lot for instruction and learning. In this article, I set out to discover what gamification does well, when it is properly implemented, and compare it to the traditional lecture paradigm. I’ve learned that gamification is definitely not a cure-all for the education system, but it sure stands a good chance to make a difference when people use it to better education, rather than just making education more like video games. 

Some of the greatest contributions to the education that could come from gamification include:

• boosting student motivation
• encouraging social interaction between students
• transitioning courses to the mastery model
• pushing education forward and exiting the current paradigm

and these are all benefits besides the obvious—giving children a greater chance to enjoy their education. Let’s not forget that gamification provides both the ability to improve educational outcomes, curriculum, and courses, AND the ability to make education accessible and interesting for those who are driven to learn. Sure, there will always be students who are motivated just by the fact that they want the knowledge and learning excites them, but should those students be punished by the chloroform-laced history courses I had to take? Of course, making education fun is not the central goal of gamification, but let’s be all the more happy that it is one of the side-effects of this approach.

Let’s take a moment to look at the listed benefits of gamification one by one.

In my article about the obstacles of gamification, I mentioned the misconceptions about motivation as one of the major drawbacks to game-ifying the educational system. However, with those misconceptions aside, gamification itself does do a lot to help students maintain interest and motivation to do well on a course. Is this motivation rock-solid and will it make math as addictive as World of Warcraft? Of course not. Can we expect these boosts in motivation to fix our graduation rate and help all of our apathetic students to begin caring? Again, the answer is no. But anyone who works with students in the education system (teachers, tutors, parents, etc.) can tell you that when it comes to keeping students motivated to achieve, every bit of help makes a difference. Anything we can do to help students hang in there, to not give up and continue to work towards bettering themselves, is not effort wasted. 

Second, games are often inherently social, while traditional education rarely is. So many video games mean nothing if there is only one participant, and those games often have different players in varying roles. However, in a normal lecture there are only two roles, and one type of interaction—students and teachers, with the students being taught by the teachers. Students are taught knowledge or skills individual in the classroom, and the level of that skill and knowledge is tested individually, when in the post-education world, very few of those people will exist in a bubble. Students of science may join research teams, students of marketing will join marketing teams, etc. And on top of all that, students tend to learn better in situations that have relativelylong-term, social consequences.

Another thing that games do really well, but education seems to be struggling with, is applying the mastery model for learning. The mastery model involves the instruction of skills and concepts one at a time, and requiring mastery before one can continue to learn. The greatest advantage to this type of learning is simple—you don’t build on weak foundations. For example, I had some friends in middle school that loved to play Mortal Kombat. They memorized list after list of meaningless combinations (A, B, B, A, A, etc.) so that they could execute moves in the game that would help them move forward. 

I have now attained a Level 43 mastery of grammar and punctuation

Now, coming from an educator, that’s some serious learning that one could  never expect from a traditionally educated student. And why did they invest the time and mental power to master these combos? Two simple answers: they could not move on in the game until they had (and they really wanted to move on in that game) and those combos were presented as challenges that could be overcome with practice. When one is not in the mastery model, there is less accountability to learn something because you know you will have more chances later, and there is less sense of accomplishment, because you have no concept of what opportunities mastering a concept can “unlock” for you. For some reason, every day video games excel at teaching millions of people meaningless and extremely esoteric information and skills (like Mortal Kombat Combos and RPG skill trees), but the education system can’t get those same people to figure out how to properly use a comma.

If education could require students to systematically learn concepts, and bar them from progression until they mastered those concepts, courses would not have to be taught twice (I took the same history course 4 times, it just had a different name each time) and students wouldn’t be pushed into advanced courses when they had not mastered the basics—a very common problem in the current education system. I’ll speak more about the mastery model of learning in a later post.

Finally, and I can’t iterate this enough, while gamification is not exactly where education needs to be, and it doesn’t solve all of the many problems that the system, the teachers, students, parents, and administrators face, it is closer to that ideal than where we are now. Just the fact that gamification is starting to break the classroom lecture paradigm, and helping people realize that there are other options, and that innovation in education is both possible and necessary, is a bounding leap towards the ideal. If gamification did nothing to the education system but help those involved shake things up, it would be worth every penny spent. 

Gamification really does facillitate and improve learning, but do the costs outweigh the payoff?  Several other models for learning improvement exist, and have been shown to be effective, and several ideas for improving education that have nothing to do with learning models have also been proposed. Do you think gamification has anything unique to add to education? Do you think it's a valuable model to emply in public education?