Skillshare, Codecademy and the gamification of education
plasticresume.wordpress.com
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Overall, though, I'm not sure the secret to education is that we just haven't invented a better scoring system to feed you Skinner-box-esque reward pellets whenever you do every incremental good thing. In fact we're already pretty decent at that. We're less good at convincing people why they should care beyond that. It's very easy to convince students that they should care about their grade and the badge (degree), but much harder to cultivate any sense of actual interest.
There's also some research that extrinsic rewards tend to reduce intrinsic motivation: once you start doing something for the brief high of getting the "ping!", it becomes much harder to bring yourself to do it later if the reward is removed, even if it's something you originally enjoyed; which means I think we have to be very careful in gamifying/badgifying/achievementifying things. It's a bit different debate, but Chris Hecker has a good talk about that where he worries that modern videogames are focusing too much on the "achievement unlocked!" aspect of gaming, at the expense of deeper and more actually engaging game mechanics: http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F And if that's true in videogames, I would also worry about it irl.
I absolutely agree. "Badges" and the like are a half-assed (quarter-assed?) way of going about gamification. But some game mechanics simply act like heroin on the brain. World of Warcraft and Ultima Online had this effect on me in past years.
I can't put my finger on it precisely (hence the ambiguity in the post), but I can't shake the feeling that there is something special about the incentive designs of WoW and UO that we can leverage to improve engagement in education and in the working world.
It's obvious why the USSR found the idea enticing: since they didn't have tools like higher pay or bonuses to reward workers with, they hoped that they could incentivize workers with some kind of inner cognitive motivation, patterned after whatever secret sauce works in games and sports. It's probably fair to say that their attempts were of decidedly limited success, though it's less clear whether it was the idea that was bad, the Soviet implementation of the idea, the context, or some combination.
The conventional explanation among capitalist economists has been that the idea was bad: you can't incentivize workers with games, but only with actual payment, so of course the Soviet attempts failed. But now a bunch of businesses, presumably run by capitalists, seem to think that the idea is worth a second look, which suggests that either they're wrong (and it's not worth a second look, for the same reasons it wasn't good the first time), or the answer for why the USSR's model didn't work is more complex.
The relationship of monetary reward to engagement has always seemed a bit weird to me.
I've heard it said that compensation over $75K does nothing to increase happiness. However, I've also heard of fabulously wealthy people using money as a motivating scorecard, divorced from its purchasing power, simply used as a measurement of their success. Not sure if these are in conflict, or simply proof that money actually has a very oddly shaped marginal utility curve.
I'm especially interested in your first point on the difficulty of cultivating care beyond all the "games" in school (grades, etc.). To extend on this, I agree you can be motivated to do work because you want a good grade, however the real struggle, and where it really pays off, is to be motivated to do work because you inherently want to. In a majority of school, students don't see the purpose or don't care about any given assignment, which is why the games/external motivators have been introduced. An alternative here is to spend much more time convincing the students why it's worth learning/doing, for example through providing more contextual information, introducing real-life scenarios, long-term projects, and so on. Once the students see the value, everything else (and so much more) will follow.
In games, a bad score can be re-tried usually as many times as it takes for you to be satisfied with it. You're not at a loss as long as you take the time to re-do them until a good score is earned. On the other, in school, usually, your bad score sticks. That's it for you. Better luck next time or you might fail the entire year. Retrying in school takes an entire year of your life, you have to re-do even the things that you got right. It's quite punitive. That's without mentioning social aspects of it (peer view, self-esteem, etc).
Also, there's a big difference between scores and game reward system. Game rewards (nowadays) are designed for addiction. Rewards begin plenty and often, then are made scarcer and occasional. Not any school system can beat that behavioral craving.
While people do need to be made aware of their progress, this shouldn't necessarily take the form of badges, awards or other superficial sources of recognition. These are ultimately hollow and meaningless measures of completion - nothing more.
Where I think education - "gameified" as well as traditional - often tends to fall short, is in demonstrating the value of the skills learned. It's the classic problem of applicability. Algebra is boring until you recognize all the situations in which it applies - likewise for Calculus, derivatives, statistics, physics, etc. Likewise for the liberal arts.
TLDR : We don't need to be trained like canines to seek education for the sake of virtual trinkets, but rather to become educated for the sake of doing.
The blogger quotes Dan Pink, "job satisfaction is driven mainly by autonomy, mastery, and purpose." -- however I believe Dan Pink's findings are contrary to the blogger's points. "Mastery" is generally attained and sought for when one is intrinsically motivated. This is because extrinsic motivations are much less likely to lead to mastery as mastery is often not the goal in games, but rather the successful completion of the goal of the game. For example, grades in school prove some level of proficiency in something, however grades are often very loosely connected to proficiency in the discipline. E.g. If someone tells me they received an A in calculus, I have absolutely no inclination to then trust they are proficient in calculus. If someone tells me they majored in Computer Science I have no inclination to then trust they are skilled computer scientists or engineers.
Alternatively, if someone tells me sincerely that one of their passions in life (ie. "purpose") is to build computer programs, or play with numbers, and they have something to show for it (which they must if it truly is a passion), then I am instantly inclined to trust that they have some competency and deserve some respect.
So this being the case, gamifying may lead to people learning at some level, however forming such a dependency I think could be dangerous. Once the game is removed, ie. once the primary purpose of taking action is removed, what do people have left? The discipline itself (without the game) may have absolutely no intrinsic value to the person, so what good is it to the person anymore?
The idea behind the "gamification" of education is not to trick people into mastering a discipline. It's to introduce them to it.
Secondly, the blogger isn't arguing for games to introduce people to new disciplines, but rather to let games drive their entire learning career.
How come a love of computing can't be born inside a game consisting of building programs for points? I was introduced to programming because I wanted to make video games. I didn't want to program - I just wanted the satisfaction of a completed game. My love of programming came over time as I experimented.
This is, of course, very subjective but whenever I think about any of my hobbies I recall always being led to them because of some outside factor. It was only after I began practicing them that I learned to enjoy them for what they were.
An external motivator would be someone telling you that if you create a game you will get some irrelevant award, and so you go ahead and create a game. The next time you have the idea to create the game, and the award isn't there, you'll be less inclined to do it.
aik has it right elsewhere in this thread that Dan Pink's findings are contrary to this blog post's points. Dan Pink's most interesting finding in my mind is that applying extrinsic financial motivation has positive effects on methodical, repetitive work, but a strongly negative effect on creative, out-of-the-box work. I'd be shocked if gamification had a different effect, though of course I have nothing empirical to offer. I expect that gamification works for repetitive tasks like playing WoW, but is not that effective for actually learning something, even if it does push you through Codecademy's tasks.
We have an educational system that repeatedly de-emphasizes intrinsic motivation. How much of school is driven by what you want to learn and what you are interested in? I didn't take my first elective until junior year of high school.
Given that most Americans (and most inhabitants of OECD countries) spend the first 12 years of their conscious life in a gamified environment, as _delirium points out, is it so surprising that the "underachievers'" intrinsic motivation is weak, and that the author finds gamification powerful and useful? I don't want to sound conspiracy theory-ish, but I think we've been quite effectively trained to respond to exactly this kind of stimulus.
Games work because they mimic life. (By life I mean, you, your emotions, the circumstances you encounter and how you handle those circumstances.)
Essentially this whole post is a semantic piece interchanging the words "emotions" with "gamification"
Everything about life is driven by gamification (read:emotions) already, and everything about games is triggering emotions. forcing people to make decisions using logic, experience, and driven by their emotional needs.
In other words, we like games because it is life, except there is such a thing as do-overs.
MIT and Stanford's courseware - AMAZING. The courses are THE SAME courses as CS courses. Now, there's no excuse not to learn it, and a lot of people in 3rd world countries ARE learning it.
The classroom is going to drastically change very soon. We're entering a great time for eduction.
I've recently started gamifying life. It's amazing how much just a little change of perspective can make you more happy.
What would you do with the character that is yourself if you were playing it in a game?
That completion-oriented learning is effective seems hard to dispute. Somehow it currently gets lost once we leave primary school.
It's not that I think gamification makes everything better, it's that creating a well-controlled enviroment with some rewarding goals makes learning specifically more focused and fun.