Assessment Technology: Gamification

Part of me thinks gamification is stupid. 

This is unfair, I know. Gamification has real research behind it. People way smarter than me have written about how game mechanics can increase engagement and motivation. And I get the appeal. Students are more motivated when things feel like games. They engage more, they persist longer, they feel rewarded for their progress. And, don't get me wrong, I love a good Kahoot every once in a while!

But, do we really need to trick students into learning by making everything fun?

I think part of my resistance comes from believing that learning to work when things aren't fun or interesting is actually one of the most important things school teaches. I like my job. I genuinely enjoy teaching. But that doesn't mean I have fun every time I have to grade finals or write progress reports or sit through another faculty meeting. And that's fine. That's just part of work. Most worthwhile things require doing boring or difficult tasks along the way. Writing a thesis means reading dozens of studies. Training for a marathon means running when you're tired and it's raining. Building anything meaningful requires grunt work. Part of being an adult is doing things that need to be done even when they're boring or tedious or not immediately rewarding. And, I believe that by relying on leader boards and badges and class points to motivate students to learn, we deprive them of the opportunity to learn this.

Duolingo Badges

Maybe that sounds harsh. But my students are 15, 16, 17 years old. Some of them will be in college in a year. If not now, when will they learn that motivation isn't always external? Then again, even I break up tedious grading with coffee rewards and mini-deadlines: isn't that just personal gamification ? The question might not be whether we use motivational structures, but what kind we use and when.

Now, this doesn't mean we can't learn anything from games. Gee (2005) argues that "challenge and learning are a large part of what makes good video games motivating and entertaining" (p. 34). That's different from gamification (or maybe it isn’t and I’m just getting them confused…). When I designed Assessment #9 for CEP 813, the macromolecules video project, I wasn't adding points or badges to get kids to compete against each other. But I was applying some of Gee's principles. They can take risks because peer feedback happens before final grades. The project is challenging but feels doable because it's scaffolded over ten days. Those are good learning principles that happen to show up in games, but they're not about making learning feel like a game.

Assessment #9 for CEP 813

We read about actual game making in education, and there's an important distinction here. Kafai and Burke (2017) write about Rosemary, a ten-year-old who designed a game to teach younger students about planets. She reflected afterward that "it is very hard to put together your own game. You may think it is easy to do because of all the video games people play. They look so simple, but try making your own game and it's a totally different story!" (p 21). That's the kind of learning I think has value. Rosemary discovered that real work is hard. She persisted anyway. She learned astronomy, programming, design, and probably most importantly, she learned something about her own learning process. If a ten year old can handle that, surely my high schoolers can too.

Kafai and Burke (2017) point out that "learning programming and designing content was hard work" and that students had to "adjust their early ambitions" (p 21) I think that's exactly the lesson we should be teaching. Not everything can or should be entertaining. Sometimes you set out to do something ambitious and realize it's harder than you thought. That's not a failure of the assignment design; that's life. And in high school , students are old enough to learn this lesson.

But, is there really even a difference between vocabulary drills with badges and what I'm describing? Maybe gamification isn't the problem when it gets students through necessary but genuinely tedious material. Maybe it only becomes a problem when we use it as a substitute for making learning genuinely worthwhile.

I don't really have a clear answer. Rosemary didn't need points to make her game, but she was also working on something she chose, with probably more time and freedom than I can give in a semester of required curriculum. My students don't always get to pick what's worthwhile, sometimes they're stuck with macromolecules whether they care about them or not. And maybe badges help with that. Or maybe they just teach kids that work only matters if someone's keeping score. I go back and forth. What I do know is this: when I sit down to plan a lesson, I’d rather ask, “Is this actually worth doing?” before I ever ask, “Okay, but how do I make it fun?”.  Those questions might sometimes lead to the same place, but I don't think they're the same question.

References:

Gee, J. P. (2005). Good video games and good learning. Phi Kappa Phi Forum, 85(2), 33-37.

Kafai, Y. B., & Burke, Q. (2016). The serious side: Making games for learning. In Connected gaming: What making video games can teach us about learning and literacy* (pp. 19-37). MIT Press.