The First Rule of Classroom Gamification

Wise or Otherwise Pieces, from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dharma_for_one/3235061625/in/photolist-5VSx7z-rHFE-5WM12L-pwStB6-fcCSLi-cFUM2y-eDvHC9-xw5LB5-59Nxjk-c1dVzU-4Gtttm-bfZvUP-24CP72-cFVrNQ-2vNrQ-bkaEoA-4jDwjv-cFUG9Q-aGqZ2H-6Yit7c-e4mYUP-6DSVH-7R7ShG-9gLAeH-dhX7FY-9htLHE-orZx3i-7pbSgc-bsAXsX-9CWspY-86iMTZ-dsyiG4-s9ZvLJ-fFtsZV-tTAnFo-9hqGiX-59SEYW-hmU8EG-8vjevX-uaihn-9Zhj8f-NLV8Y-AbDY4-bdFiX-cFVvYw-qxSwhj-dz9p2B-5Xk9NB-bAfABf-35ueu

A great article from a few years back makes a case I’ve been making for years. When thinking about gamification in education, it is a mistake to focus only on the games themselves. As I have begun to argue in the GAME section of this blog, games can and do have a role in your classroom. That role, however, is limited and must be carefully monitored. The game doesn’t serve its own purpose. It has to serve your learning objectives and your deeper goals for your students. Sometimes a game is uniquely suited to those deeper objectives. If it is, by all means use it! As I argued about the game Zendo, it is a particularly powerful tool to have students not just think about critical thinking abstractly but to actually do critical thinking (and to do it in a way that is meant explicitly to be fun…they can then apply the skill learned in the game in contexts that aren’t necessarily meant to be fun).

Rather than focusing on the games, focus on the gamification. What does this mean? A quote from the article gives a direction. “…gamification isn’t about games, but about game mechanics. Users don’t need to win or lose an entire game experience to become involved.” This is where gamified instruction has unique potential benefits. Every great game (and I mean this without exception) is an involvement engine first and foremost. Games want to be played! And great games make playing easy, richly rewarding and highly engaging.

The first rule of gamification in the classroom: it’s not really about the game. It’s about how your learning objectives can be served by one or more game mechanics.