Education, like all industries, experiences large “game-changing” innovations and improvements, as well as a great deal of fads, or faux innovations that are initially pushed by some very passionate pioneers, and later shown to be less helpful than they pretended to be. For example, a recent fad in the education industry was the concept of “learning styles,” wherein every student learned in different manners from one another and so learning content had to be presented in several “styles” so that the broad spectrum of students and learning styles could be able to learn. I remember that being discussed when I was in school.
Yep, that was a fad.
That’s why ‘Gamification,’ a relatively new would-be
innovation to the education industry is under constant fire. There have just been too many fads, and this one really sounds fad-ish.
However, I believe there is some real value to be had from
the gamification education ‘fad.’ I will be covering these values in future
posts because in order for gamification to provide any value to the education
system, it will need to overcome a few obstacles:
- Fidelity
- Difficulty of development
- Misconceptions in Motivation
If developers cannot overcome these obstacles in the
gamification of educational materials, I predict that there will have been a
lot of money with very little return on investment. And in education, there is
usually little to invest in the first place, so wasted money is just not an
option.
Before moving on, let’s take a moment to define some terms.
Gamification is a broad term for the integration of video
game and other game mechanics or game dynamics into a website, service,
community, campaign, or other application. Basically, gamification is the processes
of making something resemble a game or video game in any way.
Gamification in education includes the implication of
educational leaderboards by some institutions, the ability to share
“achievements” in an educational setting, progress bars that represent the
amount of educational material remaining, or the use of actual game scenarios
to teach, test, and review educational concepts.
Now back to those obstacles.
One of the greatest obstacles facing the gamification of
educational materials is the idea of maintaining educational fidelity. If gamification
is going to be of any use to students, the games that are used for education cannot
be far removed from the skills or concepts they are trying to teach.
Simply put, you can’t actually learn to play tennis from Wii
Sports.
Sorry guys, this won’t get you into Wimbledon.
However, I should probably point out at this point that
traditional education has a hard time maintaining fidelity as well.
This would be a perfect educational tool for training 1920’s-era
gangsters.
The second obstacle gamification must overcome to become a
viable option for improving education is the difficulty and cost involved in
development. Creating courses that resemble games require a great deal of work
up front. Programming, content development, video creation, animation, and any
other gamification preparations have to be done ahead of time. A biology teacher turned his class into a video game experience himself, and it required him to
work on it his entire summer previous to that school year just developing a
video game experience for the students. This isn’t something that can be done
on the fly.
Finally, the biggest obstacle that educational gamification
has to overcome is the multiplying torrent of misconceptions that follow it
around.
Several people believe that if we can get our education
system to better resemble video games, we can get our student as hooked on
algebra as they are on Angry Birds.
“All you need to do in order to kill the pigs is solve for x.”
Other misconceptions surrounding gamification include the
belief that it means literally turning every course into a game, that
gamification is only possible on basic (pre-K) courses, that it involves
putting educational material on gaming platforms like Xbox or Playstation, and
that the gamification of educational materials is only possible in skill-based courses
(like woodshop) but not in idea-driven classes (like philosophy).
If these misconceptions cannot be overcome, gamification
will be dead in the water.
However, if we can recognize that gamification is not trying
to make our classes as fun as Call of Duty, there are several concepts that we
can learn from games and gaming that will improve our education system. As long
as gamification is not used to try and sell our education system to the
children who use it, especially if they are given the option between algebra
and Call of Duty, it has a lot to provide us. Educational games will never be
as fun as regular games, and I’m ok with that. At least they will be more fun
than traditional education.
Stay tuned for future posts on the benefits that can be
gained from the gamification of educational materials.
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