Have you tried playing a video game where you have learned and enjoyed? Any type of game that has tasks to accomplish, levels to attain, players to interact? Well, isn’t it similar to School, wherein after every grade level, every year level there would always be tasks to be accomplished, assignments to finish, exams to pass, and people to interact? How about trying to incorporate games on schooling? That’s where gamification of education has been a thought up to this time.
What is Gamification? Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems and increase users’ self-contributions. Gamification has been studied and applied in several domains, with some of the main purposes being to engage (improve user engagement, physical exercise, return on investment, flow, data quality, timeliness), teach (in classrooms, the public or at work), entertain (enjoyment, fan loyalty), measure (for recruiting and employee evaluation), and to improve the perceived ease of use of information systems. A review of research on gamification shows that a majority of studies on gamification find positive effects from gamification.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification)
According to Lee, “Students get points for completing assignments correctly. These points translate to “badges,” more commonly known as grades. Students are rewarded for desired behaviors and punished for undesirable behaviors using this common currency as a reward system. If they perform well, students “level up” at the end of every academicyear.” Which is true in our current state of education system. Furthermore, “Given these features, it would seem that school should already be the ultimate gamified experience. However,something about this environment fails to engage students. In contrast, video games and virtual worlds excel atengagement. As evidence of this, 28 million people harvest their crops in Farmville on adaily basis, and over five million people play World of Warcraft for more than 40 hours perweek.“
As we progress through technology, Education certainly needs to catch up. The old ways of teaching a student and motivating them in the class room has been a cumbersome experience for the new generation of students. At this time of digital age, Students have mobile devices that keep up with the present world. Learning today can be as fast as a flick of a finger, not like in school where students have to read and learn by staring at their books, looking at pictures and listening to their teachers.
So how can we incorporate games in learning?
Gamification can work with both methods of education delivery. It can accentuate the user experience one has with instructor led courses by introducing a level of interactivity and practice. This reduces the burden on the instructor a little bit to keep the attendees motivated and involved. In instructor led courses, gamification can also be the appropriate transition from one module to another or from one instructor to the next. Games provide the much needed interactivity between the participants and also the ‘teacher’. Here, the teacher needs not be an actual person but game based logic that can help a participant when they do not understand something or need help.
The problem with most computer-based learning systems is that, while initially novel to students, they can become repetitive and disengaging after extended use. This is especially problematic when extended use is required for sufficient depth of understanding.
Successful educational games must identify the ability level of the player, provide rapid feedback and be slightly more challenging than the learner’s skill
The strengths of gamification and schools can be complementary, but they are not necessarily so. There are significant ways in which gamification and schools could each make the other worse. Bringing education and game elements together could turn out like peanut butter meeting chocolate: two great tastes working together, leading to results that are especially important for developing 21st century skills. Gamification can motivate students to engage in the classroom, give teachers better tools to guide and reward students, and get students to bring their full selves to the pursuit of learning. It can show them the ways that education can be a joyful experience, and the blurring of boundaries between informal and formal learning can inspire students to learn in life wide, lifelong, and life deep ways.
By: RYSY MAY G. CONSTANTINO | Teacher I, | Limay National High School | Limay, Bataan
