The Engagement Layers of 'Papers, Please'

Papers Please is a gem of a game that I couldn’t recommend more highly – especially for those that aren’t really interested in video games. However, instead of reviewing the game or nerding out over the themes, art style, or gameplay, I’d like to dive into how Papers, Please remains engaging and enjoyable when it seems on the surface that it shouldn’t. You see, on paper (no pun intended) Papers, Please sounds like a premise that should be 100% devoid of fun – a trait that it shares with public education. But Papers, Please is interesting and engaging from start to finish, and there is something

there that I think  games, education, and gamification can learn from that.

WARNING! This post contains spoilers, but not enough spoil the game. You should still play it if you haven’t.

In Papers, Please, you play as a citizen of a fictional eastern block country that has been assigned to work at an immigration checkpoint and determine whether people wanting to enter the country have sufficient documents to enter legally. The gameplay is very simple, you have two stamps – Accept and Deny – and you must look at each person’s set of papers and decide whether to let them into the country or turn them away. If you are correct in letting people through you earn money to feed your family, and the faster and more accurately you can correctly see if they should be allowed through or not, the more money you can earn. However, when you incorrectly let someone pass or turn them away, you are given a citation, which ultimately results in a dock in pay. The reward structure is simple and binary; do things right and you get a reward, do them wrong and you get a punishment. It’s a classic Skinnerian feedback and reward structure

At least that’s how you think it works.

CREDIT: Flickr User ANDVERSUS 

A Quick Sidebar

A common criticism of educational games and gamification is that they rely too heavily on Skinnerian reward structures to drive engagement. They sell the user on the opportunity to perform an action, and then either be rewarded or punished depending on whether or not he or she performed the action correctly. 

For readers less familiar with B.F. Skinner’s contribution to Psychology, he is most well known for clearly demonstrating the idea (that we now take for granted) that says the pattern by which people react to rewards could be used to train people to do things. By giving rewards for correct behavior and punishments for incorrect behaviors, we can ultimately change how organisms behave. He trained rats to push a lever in order to receive food, and it seems like we believe – based on how widely those who are striving for student engagement have adopted his ideas – that this a good model for engagement. Engagement is about mental involvement and enjoyment. By using Skinner's model for rewarding behavior to increase engagement we must assume that because that rat continues to push that lever to get his food, he must be thinking in his mind “I am loving this!” Or by association, do we assume that the people who click the button that says “Watch video for a chance to win an iPad Air” are thinking to themselves “I am loving this!”?

No. There’s just no way.

However, it seems in both cases we are implying a belief in Skinner’s core philosophy - that the emotional and mental context of the participant doesn’t matter. What matters is that the rat keeps pushing that lever – for as long as we can make him. To my mind, this sounds like the opposite of engagement – instead it sounds like mindless participation. Sure we can use this model to get students to play an educational game for hours, but that's quite different from them actually utilizing their mental faculties to make connections and process information with a level of attention to make it meaningful. The main goal of engagement should be to push students and users to use their brains in as many unique and as deep of mental processing tasks as we possibly can, and you can’t get that from simple Skinnerian reward structures. On the other hand, tasks that require deeper thought and consideration, or more personal and varied interpretations are interesting and fun. But how can education, games, and educational games foster this type of deeper introspection and conflict resolution.

Back on Track

Let’s look again at Papers, Please.

Did I say that the reward structure and decisions in Papers, Please were simple? I lied; they’re not. Papers, Please presents the player with an ordinary and binary decision: accept or deny this person entrance to the country.

Then, onto that it layers a reward system: do it correctly, get money; do it incorrectly and lose money. By this model we are still in Skinner’s wheelhouse – simple, binary rewards and punishments.

The correct answer gets a reward, incorrect gets a punishment

However, Papers, Please still has several twists to throw our way. The gameplay is broken into days – each day takes about 15 minutes. On day 4 a woman tries to gain entrance to the country in order to see her son. Her papers are not correct but she pleads to be able to enter anyway. If you deny her access you earn your money, same as always, but if you have the guts to fight the system you find something else remarkable – there is another reward structure in place for doing good deeds. If you allow her entrance, you still get the same citation and no extra money, but the game rewards you with an in-game achievement – a type of gaming currency to reward players for extraordinary actions.

So then our reward model has to change. You still have a binary decision to make, only now we’ve uncovered that there are some instances where following our gut and being compassionate will yield different rewards. Another layer of rewards is present and these rewards are at odds with the previous reward layer so there is no way we can get both simultaneously.

But Papers, Please isn’t done. On Day 8 a member of a group of revolutionists informs you that you are being watched and then provides a list of people you must allow to enter the country.

So the reward structure changes – this new entity will reward you for breaking different rules, which sometimes also go against your new “Good Samaritan” way of playing as well as the initial reward structure of money and citations. Another layer of rewards is now at odds with the existing reward structure. 

On Day 9 a guard bribes you to detain more people – so we can add another layer of rewards.

On day 12 the organization you work for informs you that you are being watched and so any actions of terrorism will get you arrested. This is another layer of rewards and punishments that the player must weigh with each decision to accept or deny people entrance.

Finally, every day the player must choose how to use the money they earn, allocating money for food, rent, heat, and medicine. This is affected by how much you earn during the day, which is often determined on how many bribes you accept, as well as the primary reward of completing your job well. Every day you make the same silly little decision, but the longer you play, the more difficult it becomes to make the "right" decision because there are so many consequences for each little decision that need to be weighed. 

There are more issues that arise and complicate how the player makes decisions within Papers, Please, but this much is enough for our discussion, and will help limit the amount of spoilers I include. When viewed in this light of conflicting reward structures, the method that Papers, Please uses to drive engagement starts looking less and less like a Skinnerian program of regular and predictable consequences and more like balancing and deciding what bad consequences one is willing to live with in order to obtain the rewards that are most meaningful or important. For that, there is another prominent psychologist whose theories can explain what is going on:

Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin was a social psychologist that explained the types of internal conflicts that humans can face when navigating difficult decisions. For him, the choice between an action that would provide a reward and one that would provide a punishment was not a conflict – there was nothing to decide because everyone would always choose a reward over punishment. Conflict, for Lewin, would arise inside the minds of people forced to choose between two rewards when wanting both, two punishments when wanting neither, or between two situations that present a collection of both rewards and punishments where he or she must select which set of consequences to accept. These internal conflicts were how he postulated we made meaningful choices, by understanding the nature of the conflict surrounding a given decision and then resolving that internal conflict and making the decision.

This is useful from an engagement perspective because resolving internal conflict is inherently more meaningful than performing actions to get rewards because the final “reward” is us no longer feeling conflicted. This reward comes from inside, is more personal, and requires deeper thought than responding to a Skinnerian reward structure. It is more engaging. Papers, Please takes this engagement to its limit by finally rewarding you for your personal choices, with the game branching into 20 unique endings depending on how you play your 30 days as a document inspector.

However, just to prove that this model for understanding and designing engagement is not limited to Papers, Please, consider instead another engaging interaction provided by video games: Super Mario Bros. If we were to think of Mario in terms of rewards and punishments, we would probably miss the main engaging factor of the game – the thing that makes it more than just trying to get coins and not die. Think about the red mushroom.

Is it a reward, or a punishment?

In reality, it’s both and neither – the paradigm of rewards and punishments doesn’t accurately describe what it is.

Just like with Papers, Please it is easier to understand the engaging nature of a red mushroom when you think of it as one of Lewin’s internal conflicts. When a red mushroom pops out, the player knows it’s good and that they should grab it, but immediately it flees in the opposite direction and forces the player to run towards peril in order to catch it and obtain the reward. Every time a red mushroom comes on screen the player needs to make a split-second evaluation whether or not the prospect of getting “big” is worth the risk that the mushroom presents. They need to solve internal conflict, and then act. Without that decision-making process, the action would be meaningless and would fail at engaging the player. 

If instead of designing traditional games, educational games, or gamification around the idea of rewarding and punishing players for specific behaviors we tried to create small moments of internal conflict and then help the player resolve them, I believe the result would be more engaging player experiences. Sure, simple rewards and punishments do get people to act a certain way, but they don't get people to care. On the other hand internal conflicts are something we all care about and we are naturally driven to resolve. Papers, Please gets players engaged in the idea of document fact-checking by designing more than just a reward structure, but layering rewards to weave a complex and difficult context around making a very simple decision. Thus, engaging interactions seem to not just be about giving students or users rewards that they care about, but also layering the experience with several levels of interaction and evaluation in order to make each decision more difficult to unravel and thus more intrinsically rewarding to solve. 

What do you think? Is internal conflict a good and replicable approach for designing engaging interactive experiences? 

That Time I Built an App for my Daughter

Early sketches of my main characters

Earlier this year I had the chance to design and build an educational app for my daughter. She's two
and a half, very energetic, and the reason I do everything I do. In reality, I was asked to build any old educational game as part of a school assignment, but instead decided to make it more meaningful by connecting it to her, while giving us more opportunities to hang out together - even if I was calling it homework.

The reason I wanted to build a game for my daughter is because she loves the iPad™ - but sometimes I don't love her playing it. I struggle with the idea of screen time and the reality of what I see with her when she plays these devices. I don't think that giving children iPads™ is inherently evil, but it is easy for me to see that not all experiences built for the iPad™ are created equal. Sometimes when Lydia gets on the device her eyes glaze over and she doesn't move or react - while other times she laughs and gets engaged; she explores and touches; or she mimics constantly. In order to help her have more positive experiences with technology, my wife or I usually sit with her when she plays, so that we can make sure her experiences are more interactive and uplifiting - and also to make sure she doesn't accidentally buy $100 worth of Smurfberries. While I was watching her, I began to recognize the kinds of experiences that she really responded to, and which caused her to shut down and become a passive "watcher." Then, when I read this article on toddlers, and them needing to learn through free exploration early on, I decided I wanted to put my belief that the tablet could be a device for learning and growth to the test.

The Foundation is Set

So I had an idea of the type of educational experience I wanted to create - one that would get my daughter involved mind and body, would encourage exploration, and would cause her to be her normal playful self while using the tablet - but even in concept it was too vague and provided me with very few design action items. In order to make my game design more concrete, I needed to connect it to a real set of experiences or emotions. And that's when I realized I wanted her to behave the way she does when she plays with sidewalk chalk.

Screenshot, Gameplay Prototype 1 - No, I'm not joking

My daughter doesn't love finger paints, she doesn't like the sticky mess that gets all over her hands, and she doesn't go at anything with reckless abandon like you would expect a 2-year-old to do - but once we got her sidewalk chalk she drew all over everything outside. When she is playing with sidewalk chalk she laughs, is social, makes faces, jumps up and down, shares, interacts, and plays. As an experience it is a perfect contrast to how she acts when she gets on the iPad™ and her face goes dead, and she just sits there. So I had my core experience, I wanted my app to feel, for my daughter, like playing with sidewalk chalk.

Just to be clear, this core experience is not to say that I wanted to make a sidewalk chalk app, but more that the emotions and behavior that experience elicited out of my daughter would be my success metric - I would know I had succeeded by how closely her reaction to the app matched how she played with sidewalk chalk. This gave me something concrete - at least in gaming terms - to design for.

I began prototyping various concepts - drawing apps, apps that let you play with digital clay, apps for poking or stroking a character, etc. I went through several ideas until I came up with what would become Splat! Along the way I was able to pick up extra requirements: usability for young children and tablet apps is a real barrier. Most apps are designed like traditional computer programs, requiring input like the click of a mouse in order for it to register. What this means, in reality, is that most inputs for tablets require both a down and up motion - like a click you have to touch and then take your finger off. Toddlers don't touch apps like that. They expect the app to react as soon as their finger touches it, any time that their finger touches it. Often I will see my daughter get frustrated, and she'll be holding her finger down on the screen, waiting for the device to register the touch, while the device is actually waiting for her to take her finger off to register it. Then, she'll try to touch a button, but her thumb will be touching the screen in the corner, and so the device won't register the finger because in terms of "clicks" you can't have two running at a time. It's easy to understand for people who are used to working with computers, but toddlers expect something to happen every time they touch the screen - and the joy comes in the surprise of what does happen.

Design Process

Somewhere around Prototype 10...

My design process revolves around iteration and playtesting. I like to use playtesting and rapid prototyping to work out my greatest fear on a project at any given time, and then when I feel confident I've conquered one design fear, I move onto another. Hands down, my greatest fear beginning this project was the art. The central concept behind Splat! is that with each touch the toddler is either generating cute, squishy characters, or getting them to make faces. Not being extremely confident in my art skills, I thought to myself that I would design and program the game and then get someone else to do the art. When I did finally realized that if it was going to happen, I would have to do it - I decided to use the same process I use for creating games to create art. I drew hundreds of little characters and then opened my notebook up and showed my 2-year-old. I payed close attention to which drawings she liked, which faces she mimicked, and which she just passed over. Each time I started a sketch session I was able to make a more refined character based on what she had liked, and by the end I had a solid idea of what I could draw that she would laugh at.

Once I had conquered my fear of the art, I made a prototype to test the user interface, and see if my sketches/wireframes were too complex for a toddler. When Lydia played with it I learned more about what types of buttons she knew were buttons, and how her first reaction with any app is to just start hitting anywhere - so I decided to make everywhere a button that would do something. Then I tested the core gameplay mechanic, then I tested the ability to use it to teach colors, then I added changing emotions, and each time I brought it back to my 2-year-old to see what she thought. She was my toughest critic and most honest client. It was very eye-opening to go through the process of learning how to make something that she would be happy with instead of just going with what I wanted to make or thought would look cool or sell well.

I repeated that same process - trial and error with a 2-year-old - until I had a game we both really enjoyed. It took me around 4 months to get it right - but as soon as I had it done it became one of her favorite apps (probably second in line after PBSKids).

That was my process, and while it may not seem like the most efficient way to design an app - I learned more and was stretched more as a designer by having my end-user part of my design team than I had in any project previously or since. I really had to take my agenda out of the interaction, and let her drive what I made - while still trying to sneak in the educational elements.

It's a simple app, but I am very proud of it.

In the End

Final Screenshots

I considered the app design for my daughter a success. It's loaded on her iPad™ now. When her and I play it, we play it together. She laughs, looks up at me, and we have a good time making faces at each other.

That's the success story of my meaningful school assignment, but not the end of the story. I was content for a long time to just keep the experience I gained building and designing as what I got out of the app, and never thought it was the kind of thing I should publish. I'm used to working on teams, and hiding my own ideas amidst the great ideas and work of others. But then a close friend suggested that I publish this app, that it could potentially do some good. I decided to go for it and see if an app I made for my daughter can help other parents and other children. I know she doesn't mind sharing it, so I guess I can too.

Splat! A Creative Expression Game for Toddlers is now available on the Apple and Google Play Stores.

   

Why Neuroscience and I Support a Little Edu-tainment

While Edu-tainment can be a hot button for educational debates, there is some research on human memory and attention that may change the way you look at the issue. 

Inside the brain, learning happens exactly the same way for everyone—man, woman, and child.

 Learning is one of the functions of LTP (or long-term potentiation), the term for the biological process of strengthening neural connections that are used repeatedly. However, learning is not just reviewing information until it sticks. If learning was just repeated use of neural connections then learning designs would be the same for everyone as long as they facilitated LTP. If LTP was all there was to learning then late-night cram sessions would work better than they do. In the end, it's just not that simple. Fortunately, LTP may be the neurological process that powers learning, but the gateway through which all information must pass is consciousness or—as it is often called by psychologists—working memory. We learn things based on how we think about them and how long we think about them, but in order for learning to happen the information has to catch and hold our attention for a relatively long period of time.   

Research in cognitive science has shown that the attention span of human working memory is about 2 seconds or approximately 7 mental concepts. That is to say that when you focus listening to someone talk for three minutes, your brain has refreshed its attention on that task at least 90 times. Humans maintain focus by holding ideas and tasks in their consciousness for long periods of time, and that is only achieved by constantly renewing attention or shifting it slightly. After we stop focusing on a mental task, our memory of that task and what we were doing begins to deteriorate after just 2 seconds. However, our memory of that task is greatly strengthened by the amount of time we focused on it in the first place and the depth of our mental engagement in the task.

Think of the process of forming new memories like building a sandcastle, the more time you spend and the harder you work on building that sandcastle, the stronger it will be and the longer it will take to wear down. But if you walk away from it long enough, it deteriorates to the point that you have to start working on it again.

Photo Credit: Flickr User Pragmagraphr via Creative Commons

So what does this have to do with implementing entertainment strategies in education?

In traditional education settings—whether at a public school or as part of corporate training—educators have to deal with the pros and cons of what is aptly called a ‘captive audience.’ These are people who can’t leave, at least not without major consequences such as losing their job or forfeiting their diploma. In some cases, this can be a blessing for education because it keeps people from giving up on topics until they get deep enough in to them to realize the value and find their own interest. However, for several courses and educational materials it can also act as a crutch, because instructors don’t think they have to “sell” the information to the students. However, just after the cursory look at human attention, memory, and learning provided above, we can see the danger here—attending a class is fundamentally different than closely attending to a class. Put bluntly, just because the butt is in the seat doesn't mean the mind is getting anything out of it.

In order to help students or employees maintain their attention for longer periods of time, and process the information on a deeper level, instructors can implement strategies used by the entertainment industry. The entertainment industry has literally made millions of dollars from developing ways to capture people’s attention. Because they can prolong human attention and interest, which leads to stronger mental connections and more lasting long-term memory, using entertainment strategies in education is a viable and even necessary method in creating educational materials.

So, why is entertainment valuable in education? It helps hold people’s attention longer.

On top of that, using entertainment strategies is not nearly as complicated as it sounds. Instructors or instructional designers can work education into narratives, games, or puzzles. In essence, using an entertainment strategy is just designing a learning experience so that it is enjoyable to the learner. Under this model, anything that can be done to make it more enjoyable—as long as it is not at the expense of the educational experience itself—will help towards the pedagogical goal of the interaction.

There are a lot of people out there who think that entertainment doesn't have a place in education, or that the students should be enjoying learning for learning’s sake. But I think that neuroscience gives us some compelling reasons to take a second look at edu-tainment. There might be something there.

What do you think? Should there be room for more entertainment in education? Are the two compatible? Tell us in the comments below. 

Why the Maker Movement May be Just What Public Education Needs

The maker movement is an entire subculture that is currently on the rise in North America, and is characterized by extreme pushes to do-it-yourself. The hundreds of people who have begun to participate in this nationwide movement have one motto: if you want something, make it. Because I enjoy working with my hands and several of my hobbies have a building or making component to them, I had been following the growing movement long before I discovered it was seeping into public education.

Then, when I fully realized all the vast potential for innovation in education that the maker movement held, I was filled with excitement and nostalgic longing. Longing for a world of learning I had found in my basement and carved out of my information-hungry lifestyle, but was never given to me in my many years of education. It reminded me of all those who were close to me that had struggled so hard in public education, and of all the time they spent trying to care about school. I believe that maker-style classes could’ve helped them. 

 

Photo Credit: NASA flickr

Allowing students to participate in the maker movement in schools could unlock a door that leads to the infinite potential of human creativity, and what lies beyond that door is an experience personalized for the student, by they student. 

And yet, the maker subculture in education comes off more like a parent’s, teacher’s, administrator’s, and politician’s worst nightmare. 

Current maker movement involvement in education has resulted in children being told to play with fire, entire classes of fourth graders running free with legos, and hundreds of after-school programs where students are given the resources to make things. Make what, you say? It really doesn’t matter. 

And that’s where the fear springs from. Every class or school that really adopts the maker philosophy must drop the illusion that they have complete control of what their students learn. And when you stop think about it, that really is scary. If we put 3D printers in classrooms, could someone make a 3D-printed gun? In theory, yes. But in practice it's nothing like that. With the freedom to make there is a potential for students who are given control of their own curriculum to choose to learn bomb-making over calculus, although that’s assuming there are no safety nets or limitations in place

However, it’s not the fear-inducing aspect of the maker movement that gets me excited. It’s the idea that the process whereby I have been learning my entire life could potentially be implemented in schools. I’m talking about Autodidacticism. 

The maker movement provides the first truly viable method for allowing students to teach themselves.

Let me illustrate a maker approach to learning, hopefully it will add context to the situation.

First, a student—currently it’s usually a student of life rather than a student of a certain institution—must choose something to make. Students presented with this wide opportunity for creativity tend to stick to the conventional—something they know—but it is important to step slightly out of one’s comfort zone. Otherwise no learning happens. Let’s imagine for a moment that our example student (a true child of the nineties) decides he wants a Rocketeer rocket pack. This student will immediately find that there is a laundry list of skills and knowledge that he yet lacks in order to make his item, not the least of which is some geometry, and maybe even some calculus. One thig for sure, there is no more asking, "When will I ever use this?"

Now the student has a reason to learn, and it was born out of his or her choice. Nothing is forced on them.

In the research and learning phase of the build, the student will no-doubt find out that they are but one of a whole community of people who just have to have that Rocketeer jetpack. The student will find and connect with more people with interests and passions just like him or her.

And here’s the greatest part: it never ends. When you make something yourself, you know all of the faults and all of the flaws; you have a natural motivation to make more; and the process always helps you identify what you are truly passionate about. Some students in this scenario would abandon the jetpack halfway through because they would find that they would rather build a computer or write software, which then sucks them into the fascinating world of robotics; Some students will find themselves unsatisfied with the prop, and will use their fabricating skills to create an actual one-man flying machine; and others still will be completely satisfied with their jetpack creations and move on to more items from film and pop-culture to fuel their craze for nostalgia and fandom. 

The maker subculture welcomes them all. 

If only more schools could welcome this type of learning, I think they would find that more students could maintain interest and become engaged in their education, and more students would recognize the journey that learning represents, and the marvelous places it can take you.

Post a comment with your thoughts or questions. Thanks for reading!

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?