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Can Games and Badges Motivate College Students to Learn?
By Sandra Law 6 August 2015 @ 11:16am Comments (1)
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/04/20/can-games-and-badges-motivate-college-students-to-learn/
Discusses the role that game-based learning and gamification can play in post-secondary education. Highlights the work done by University of Victoria professor, David Leach, in his "Human Uses of Technology" course in which half of the class acquired badges and points and engaged in quests.
Comments
I like the quote "Surprisingly, despite their higher activity on the class site, the gamified group demonstrated no improved learning outcomes in their academic performance in the course."
I'm increasingly a sceptic. Often, games and gamification (especially crudely applied extrinsic motivators like badges that completely misunderstand the point of such things in games, where they actually define success rather than act as a proxy reward for some other activity) are just another way of controlling students and, far too often, the constructive alignment is poorly thought through or fails to justify the effort put into creating or even finding appropriate games. When they work, they do work well, but there are relatively few contexts in which it is possible to truly align game outcomes and learning outcomes, and it takes a great deal of effort to build them well. Simulations are great, whether realistic or using simplified models but, when the main thing that is learnt is how to win a game, it is really important that doing so also means a win in learning.
The funny thing is that most institutional teaching has most of the characteristics of a game already, including the notion of winning, challenge, artificial constraints and rules, etc. Unfortunately, we tend to miss out one of the most important defining features - voluntary participation - and we are really bad at allowing multiple attempts until success is attained. There is much to learn from games!