Gamification in Action

Gamification has become a bit of a dirty word in Education, and there have been many detractors in business as well. I recently read this Quora question, “Is Gamification Evil?” and I wanted to both respond to the response, and also show an example of Gamification that most developers who use GitHub are familiar with, and why it’s not a bad thing. I’ll be honest, I support Gamification in Education and in Business. When the participants are part of the game it’s an amazing tool to inject some fun into task management.

There is a certain degree of behaviorism there

Nathan Ketsdever

This is exactly right, John B Watson, introduced the term ‘Behaviorism‘ to describe the research by Thorndike and Pavlov (think dog experiment, Pavlovian response.) This line of thinking explains responses to stimuli. Behaviorism seeks to define the responses of the brain, in terms of stimuli alone. Skinner (think Skinner box) is also known for this way of thinking. I think the response by Nathan is trying to warn us, that Behaviourism failed to explain motivation, or perhaps that it was not very successful at all in the end.

I would also say that an over-zealous pursuit of gamification as a strategy might hook students more fully on reward. At some point providing a reward for everything ends up with counter-productive new habits and practices.

Nathan Ketsdever

I know many classrooms that have a reward system that they use to motivate their students. Many are not digital, but there are many classrooms that use ClassDojo (A point-based system that educators can use to motivate their students) to manage a gamified reward system for school. But it’s up to the educator to decide how to use the points, and how often. I understand the fear of having students become more interested in the reward than the actual activity, but this is part of the mechanism and part of why it works. Internal motivation can be much more difficult to build, so we use external motivation to hoist the engagement and motivation to build the habit and help the students to build a practice of participation and learning.

Overall I’m still defending Gamification as a genuinely useful technique that educators can use to build motivation into their practice.