The Intersection of Learning and Fun: Gamification in Education

Worldwide, we spend more than 3 billion hours a week playing video and computer games.  Approximately 26 million people harvest their virtual crops on FarmVille every day.  More than 5 million people play an average of 45 hours a week of games, and nearly one-third of high school students play 3 or more hours of video or computer games on an average school day. Given this fascination with games, adapting some of the same principles found in gaming for entertainment to gaming for education- “gamification”- offers tremendous potential to impact teaching and learning.

Education-related computerized games were first developed in the 1980s with the emergence of the children’s software industry.  The first popular computerized games for children included Carmen Sandiego and Reader Rabbit.  Curriculum development has increasingly included gamification in recent years. Rather than building a curriculum around a game or vice versa, games and curriculum are being developed in a more integrated fashion.

There is a growing body of literature that draws on learning principles, theories and models to explain why computerized game-based learning is effective, but there is limited research with practical guidance for how (when, who and under what conditions) games should be incorporated into the learning process to maximize their benefits. With a significant existing research base that focuses on the efficacy of computerized game-based learning, researchers should shift their research focus to how to best implement it in classrooms.  Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil and Katie Salen (2009) of The Education Arcade at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology describe several ways that games are used in schools today, including:  

• Using games as authoring platforms through which students produce an artifact, such as a visual model or written text.  For example, when playing StarCraft, students produce visual models of new worlds.
• Delivering content about a particular subject area, such as when playing Pirates, which teaches students about Caribbean history.
• Providing opportunities for simulations where students can test theories and tinker with variables.  By working with available materials and a limited budget in Bridge Builder, students gain a systemic understanding of engineering problems.  Similarly, students think like a city mayor in SimCity.
• Serving as a starting point for discussion.  For example, Dungeons & Dragons can be used to talk about probability.
• Having students reflect and document their learning process to recognize patterns in their performance and decision-making.  The game Zoombinis helps students grow their logical and critical thinking abilities through use of deductive reasoning, pattern recognition and hypothesis testing.

Educational game designers face many challenges, one of which is making the learning experience enjoyable.  Educational game designers must not fall into the trap of focusing too much on the learning objectives and not having the games be motivating for students.  Findings from a research study conducted by Jan Plass, Paul O’Keefe, Bruce Homer, et al.) of New York University provide learning game designers with important challenges to consider.  The authors contend that designers must guard against becoming too focused on the learning outcomes of games, explaining that “...many of the outcomes of learning with game-like environments are of an affective nature and that such affective outcomes of motivation and interest have to be considered in addition to the cognitive learning outcomes of a game.”  Thus, designers must be concerned with making games interesting in order to achieve the intended learning.  

Significant research by a company that “gets it right” is GlassLab (the Games and Learning Assessment Lab).  GlassLab uses an innovative approach to collect gameplay data that serves as an assessment of student learning.  Teachers can review and act on this personalized student reporting in real time without interrupting the learning with assessment.  A 2013 study found that “when digital games were compared to other instruction conditions without digital games, there was a moderate to strong effect in favor of digital games in terms of broad cognitive competencies.”

Like other realms of edtech, entrepreneurs must partner with practitioners and academic researchers as part of the edtech “ecosystem” to develop sound learning tools that incorporate the art, science and culture of game design. The key to the gamification of education is not to privilege one over the other but to find the sweet spot between pedagogy and engagement where learning intersects with fun.