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Using Gamification in Education
Game Bytes is a podcast that I created to fulfill the program completion requirements of my degree at the University of Advancing Technology. It is currently in production, and I have released several episodes of the podcast already. You can find them here: GameBytesPodcast.wordpress.com
Project Background
Gamification is the process of applying understandings, concepts, design ideas, and mechanics from games to non-game environments. It can take the form of explicit gamification, which makes a system into a game in an overt way, or implicit gamification, which applies the concepts of behavior learned from observing games in human-focused design to try to mimic the motivational results games get from their players.
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During my MS509 Game Processes & Pipeline class, I read the book Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards by Yu-kai Chou. This remarkable book got me started thinking about ways to apply my knowledge and learnings about games beyond just that space. In the book, Chou cites a study performed by the market research firm Gartner. They predicted that by the end of 2014, 70% of Fortune 500 firms would attempt to use gamification. In that same report, however, they predicted that 80% of these efforts would fail due to bad design. Many of the people tasked with implementing gamification are not game designers or even regular players of video games, and so they may misunderstand or not fully be able to realize the potential gamified systems hold. After reading this projection, it got me considering where else gamified systems might have failed or even never been attempted in the first place.
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I selected education as my focus because it has entered a time of crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the shift to distance learning, educators have struggled with engagement and motivation as the pandemic worsens. Bringing human-focused design to the online classroom is my idea to try and stem some of the bleeding and offer both explanation of the benefits and implementation suggestions for educators for implicit gamification strategies.