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Our teachers, tutors and lecturers do an incredible job – but it isn’t always an easy one. With social media, mobile phones and video games constantly vying for attention, keeping students engaged with their learning can be a challenge.
Rather than trying to compete with discouraging distractions like video games, some educators are instead taking inspiration from them.
The idea is called gamification, and it seeks to blend study with game-style rewards to encourage learning. As those of us who have ever procrastinated by playing Fortnite or Candy Crush can confirm, there’s something very compelling about games.
But, while the idea might sound perfect in practice, there are certainly challenges of gamifying learning among the potential benefits. To help us get to the bottom of gamification and its challenges, we sat down with Chris Zomer, research fellow at Deakin’s ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.
Learning can be fun – but it’s not a game. And yet, the techniques of gamification can make study seem game-like in the way it encourages and rewards learning. If you’ve ever celebrated a language-learning streak in Duolingo or risen to the top of a class leaderboard, you’ll know that game-style milestones can be encouraging – and this is what gamification is all about.
‘Gamification is not turning something into a game – as some people think – but rather using a number of specific techniques commonly found in computer games in order to make tasks more engaging,’ Zomer says. ‘Examples include the use of points, badges, levels, progress bars, leaderboards or time limits.’
In the context of education, one study suggests that gamification ‘leverages the inherent appeal of games to create immersive and interactive learning experiences, potentially transforming traditional educational practices’.
For Zomer, gamified learning is usually digital, taking its cues from the semantics of video games.
‘Think of it as a teacher saying to the class: you have now unlocked access to Chapter 2 of your economics textbook!’ Zomer says. ‘It sounds silly, but this is exactly what is happening in many gamified applications.’
While the theory isn’t inherently good or bad, there are certainly pros and cons when it comes to gamification in education. Navigating both sides of the argument is one of the big challenges of gamification that educators face in the classroom.
On the positive side, some research suggests that gamification increases motivation, performance and engagement in students. This can lead to ‘increased participation, productivity, interest, ease of learning, and enjoyment’ – all clear benefits.
As for the negatives, Zomer explains that gamification risks motivating students towards task completion, rather than increasing academic performance.
‘The focus becomes increasing one’s score rather than increasing knowledge, shifting the focus from learning to maximising numbers,’ Zomer says.
The competitive elements of gamification can be a challenging problem, too. ‘Some students are put off by overtly competitive interactions in the classroom afforded by applications such as Kahoot! in which the best students are ‘celebrated’ on a leaderboard for everyone to see,’ says Zomer.
According to Zomer, some studies report that gamification hinders academic performance, with students more focused on game mechanics than on the academic content, while other studies suggest that gamified motivation decreases over time.
According to Zomer, there currently isn’t enough evidence to suggest that gamification is effective. This isn’t to say that gamification can’t help learners achieve good results, but Zomer points to a few reasons why it may not be the solution some educators are looking for.
‘Many studies have looked into the effectiveness of gamification to engage students or to increase learning outcomes, but results are mixed,’ he says. ‘Some authors have pointed at the ‘novelty effect’, showing the limits of gamification to guarantee engagement over longer periods of time. There is also evidence that different personality types react to specific forms of gamification differently, prompting some authors to propose different forms of gamification for different personalities, something that seems largely unfeasible in practice.’
In education, what renders a learning tool good or bad often depends on the context it’s used in. Gamification could be considered good if it helps students learn effectively and with motivation, but bad if it becomes more about task completion or competition at the expense of education.
But what about the ethics of gamification?
According to one definition, gamification is unethical ‘when the designer uses the psychology of players to manipulate them to do things that are not in their best interest.’
It is through this lens that Zomer refers to the idea of ‘behaviourism’ – a psychological learning theory popular in the mid-twentieth century, but now largely discredited by educators.
‘However, behaviourism is still a very popular theory in Silicon Valley and among those who create digital applications,’ Zomer says. ‘Behaviourists see learning as a process of rewarding (or reinforcing) desired behaviours. Behaviourists are not concerned with what goes on inside the students’ minds. Many scholars and educators find that a very narrow idea of learning that reduces students to guinea pigs or Pavlov dogs.’
If the means of gamification (like the techniques of behaviourism) are used for unethical ends, this could certainly pose a challenge for its use in the classroom.
In the classroom and beyond, the challenges of gamification are worth investigating. Zomer’s own research, for example, looks at how gamification reflects ideas of neoliberal governance and entrepreneurialism, including the relationship between gamification and social media influencing.
‘In the digital economy oftentimes our labour is free,’ Zomer says. ‘For instance, when we are posting stories or reels on our social media profiles, this adds value to the social media companies who can sell our data to advertisers. However, we are not always getting paid in monies but more often-so in virtual rewards such as likes and (perceived) popularity.’
Weighing up any positives against the potential negatives of gamification – whether that’s a less-than-ideal relationship with learning, or habituating children to virtual rewards for unpaid labour, in Zomer’s words – is an ongoing concern for educators and administrators.
For the next generation of teachers, balancing the pros and cons of gamification looks set to be an ongoing challenge.
Associate Research Fellow
School of Education, Deakin University
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