Gamification in Education? Game ON or Game Over?

1092 Words3 Pages

Let’s start with Gamification? That’s a complete misconception on what is gamification all about. Many people think Gamification is a branch of gaming, so what is Gamification really? Gamification is the craft of absorbing the fun and addicting elements in games (Game Mechanics) and applying them into real-world applications. According to one of a Gamification Guru Yu-kai Chou, gamification is a design process that optimizes for the human or “human-focused design” in the system, as opposed to pure efficiency or “function-focused design” of the system. Most systems are “function-focused” designed to get the job done quickly, however, Human-Focused Design remembers that people in the system have feelings, insecurities, and reasons why they want or do not want to do things, and therefore optimizes for their feelings, motivations, and engagement. Inside the games there are “objectives”, such as killing the dragon or saving the princess, or in Math Games like dreambox to learn/practice Math, but actually the main purpose of a game is than to please the human inside, to keep the player happily entertained. Through games we are learning how to master motivation and engagement. Games have the amazing ability to keep people engaged for a long time, build relationships and trust between people, and develop their creative potentials. In a nutshell gamification is a way to engage people by making something that’s not a game feel like a game. Gamification is a tool used to meet an objective and in education the goal is to enhance student learning. In my reflection, I would reflect on the use of one of the online Math programs, Dreambox learning to enhance our students learning, particularly in Math. Our school has been using DreamBox Lea... ... middle of paper ... ...unless people want to play”, there has to be a voluntary aspect on it. But overall, we feel that DreamBox is a good idea, and has a lot of things going for it. DreamBox may not change learning, but it clearly changes access to learning, and that's worth exploring. I know there are still lots of debates going on whether Gamification in Education is a fad or future? and whether it have places in our school? I can still see that there’s a lot of potential in the field of Education Gamification. Clearly there should be a way to help kids learn from what they do best – play. This is why many educators are looking into a variety of new tools and techniques in Education Gamification. If we can harness/utilize the energy, motivation and sheer potential of their game-play and direct it toward learning, we can give students the tools to become winners in real game of life.

Open Document