I 'm Addicted to Games
I am Addicted to Games
How do you capture a learner's attention and bring topics or
lessons to life in a way that won't easily be forgotten? This is the biggest
challenge for any educator. One of today's significant movements aimed at
increasing learner engagement is gamification or the incorporation of game
elements into non-game settings.
Ask any parent: What do kids today do more than watch TV,
watch movies, or go to the mall, combined? Parents would give the obvious
answer; "They Game." Before we
throw up our hands and conclude that our next generation is doomed because they
are merely playing all the time, let's consider why games are so powerful and
engaging, and how we can harness that power in education, a process known as
gamification.
Charles Coonradt may be considered the godfather of
gamification. He realized that productivity in the United States was failing,
but the sales of sports equipment were rising. Conrad (1973) discussed in
detail in his book titled "The Game of Work" that's fun-and-games might
be useful in employee engagement at work. The same could be true in engaging
students in their educational pursuits. Gamification or gamified learning has
become a buzzword in the field of education. The official definition of
gamification is the use of game mechanics and game elements in a non-game
context. It helps to change people's behavior and adds a playful spirit to some
boring and routine things. In late 2010, the idea of using game elements to
reach various objectives while increasing user engagement and motivation. Nick
Pelling invented the word gamification in 2002, but it was in 2008, Bret Terrill
used the term "Gamification" in the Social Gaming Summit. The year
2017 saw the adaptation of gamification at the World Summit Conference (2016) as
Scott Osterweil, creative director of Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Education Arcade, called gamification as for freedom of
play (2016):
When gameplay defines a learning outcome, it could be termed
as an educational game. Generally,
game-based learning is designed to balance the subject matter with gameplay and
the ability of the player to retain and apply said subject matter to the real
world. In general, an educational game is designed to stimulate learning
specified skills or information. These games can be utilized in bringing
specific advantages to educational processes since these could foster greater
engagement through their internal design, encourage student engagement, and
ultimately creating an environment of intense focus that stimulates learning
and retention of information.
Gamification
can be utilized in bringing specific advantages to educational processes, since
these could foster greater engagement through their internal design, encourage
student engagement, and ultimately creating an environment of intense focus
that stimulates learning and retention of information. Games create
engagement – a necessity for any learning experience (Gogos, 2012). The
question remains, how and to what degree gamification can be used
as one tool among many to catalyze learning engagement while improving
knowledge retention and skill acquisition among learners.
Gamification
is infiltrating in the field of education, and the principles of
gamification have been fully embraced at Quest to Learn (Q2L) in New York City
and CICS ChicagoQuest. Q2L is a public school that teaches 662 students from
ages 10 to 18 and is designed and supported by the Institute of Play
Gamification
has been the focus of increased attention since the beginning of the 2010s
(Deterding et al., 2011; Werbach and Hunter, 2012). The central idea behind
gamification is to harness the motivational potential of video games by
transferring game design elements to non-game environments (Deterding, Khaled,
Nacke & Dixon, 2011).
Educators have realized that they can use the application of
game elements into their classroom. Employing game elements such as storytelling,
problem-solving, aesthetics, rules, collaboration, competition, reward systems,
feedback, and learning through trial and error can take your classroom to the
next level in terms of engagement as well as achievement. Gamification has been
found to increase motivation, strengthens communication processes, promote
students' classroom engagement, introduces innovative dynamics in the learning
environment, and develop cognitive skills. Critically,
individual game elements must be linked to specific behavioral, motivational,
or attitudinal outcomes, which in turn must be connected to learning outcomes
for gamification to be effective.
A little note about my experience in the field of gamification:
I started
my career as a mechanical design engineer for a firm that had a task to design
and deploy a Municipal Solid Waste Power Plant. Before beginning the design
process, we were given the task of appraising the city officials with the feasibility
of the project. For goodness sake, I was chosen to develop the training for the
city officials. Most of the city elected office bearers were non-technical, and
keeping them engaged with the dry technical training was quite a task. With
some planning, I included some gamification in training. That included some simulators and games on Global
Warming, the Greenhouse effect, Ozone Layer depletion, etc. During the learning
process, Every participant enjoyed the hands-on simulator games, and we saw an
attitude change in their behaviors. This training with gamification
incorporation followed the five stages of Attitude Change Theory, as laid down
by Dr. James Proshaka in 2016. I will include those briefly for the sake of
proving my point:
1. Precontemplation: The officials entered the
training with an attitude not to change their minds about the project and were
in the state of denial. (They thought that the $18 million project was a waste
of money)
2. Contemplation: During the first phase of
the training, they were made aware of the problem, but still were not committed
to fixing it.
3. The
Preparation State: They were made aware that it was a serious issue to burn thousands
of tons of trash in the open air within the city limits. It was not only polluting
the air but was also causing the greenhouse effect due to flue gases and was
very hazardous for citizens' health.
4. Action
State: After the training, they were aware of the
problem, got a firsthand experience with the environmental issues as they
played simulator games. There was a behavioral change in their attitude, and they
approved the project.
With
that exercise, I realized that gamification is an important teaching and
learning strategy that could be incorporated into curricular planning. In today's
digital generation, gamification has become a popular tactic to encourage
specific behaviors and increase motivation and engagement. Though commonly
found in marketing strategies, it is now being implemented in many educational
programs as well, helping educators see the balance between achieving their
objectives and catering to evolving student needs." (Huang, Wendy
Hsin-Yuan, and Dilip Soman. "Gamification of Education." 2013. p. 5)
According to Mayer, learning is a process of filtering,
selecting, organizing, and integrating information. The Cognitive Theory of
Multimedia (Mayer, 2003) postulates that dual-channel (auditory and visual) processing
happens when the learner is exposed to multimedia instruction. The addition of
only words to pictures or vise versa may not achieve the same results as
educators could accomplish by using gamification. The behavioral changes due to game-based learning
activities strengthen the instructional design and hence the outcomes.
References:
Clark, J. M. & Paivio, A. (1991). Dual coding theory and
education. Educational Psychology Review, 3(3), 149-170.
Gamification and future of education (2017).
In the World Government Summit.
Gogos, Roberta. "ELearning Resources from EFront
Blog." eFront Blog. eFront, 12 Sept. 2013. Web. 15 Oct. 2013.
History of Gamification (2019, August). In The
Growth Industry.
Hsin-Yuan Huang, W., & Soman, D.
(2013). A Practitioner's Guide To Gamification Of Education. N.p.:
University of Toronto.
Mayer, R. E. (2019). Computer games in education. Annual Review of Psychology, 70, 531-549.
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