It’s easy to knock computer games as a distraction, but a growing number of educators are seeing the potential in their ability to keep students engaged. The result is a gamification of learning that is on track to become a cornerstone of the classroom.
Gaming encourages many of the behaviours we want to see in our students, including curiosity and persistence. And tapping into those elements of game design that provoke almost superhuman levels of concentration can be a way to stimulate student engagement.
It’s not just students who are hooked on games. A member of the U.K. Parliament found he was unable to resist the allure of Candy Crush, apparently playing non-stop for two-and-a-half-hours during a committee hearing.
We may not want to encourage this behaviour in our legislators, but for students brought up with games, translating this approach to learning can pay dividends.
A strong narrative, instant feedback, collaborative working and the opportunity for sustained progress and eventual mastery are all integral to many games, and have obvious application in a learning environment.
And while gamification is rapidly gaining credibility as a classroom tool, for those at the leading edge of learning technology it is on the cusp of a major breakthrough.
“I love gamification, because it is all based on learning,” said Anthony Salcito, vice president worldwide education at Microsoft. “Gamification is designed to drive behaviour to enable people to do more.”
Gaming encourages players not to give up at the first hurdle, just as teachers encourage students not to give up if they get a question wrong. “Students who have a gaming device don’t throw their game up,” said Salcito. “The game play has reinforced the behaviour they needed to overcome obstacles.”
Gamification also provides an example of harnessing technology to teaching style, rather than letting the technology dictate the teaching.
“Teachers driving pedagogy is a far better way than the reverse, where technology drives pedagogy. That is a broken model,” he added.
Salcito was speaking today on the opening day of one of the biggest events in the EdTech calendar. Around 35,000 people are expected to attend the four days of Bett 2015, a showcase for learning technology held in east London that attracts educators not just from the U.K. but from all over Europe and even further afield.
And his words were echoed by another of the opening day’s speakers, futurist, educator and author Bryan Alexander.
Alexander, who has worked with the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, portrayed increasing gamification as a key element of how technology’s role may change over the next decade.
In this scenario, computer gaming becomes the world’s largest culture industry by 2025, games are used in all kinds of contexts, including learning, and game studies is to academia as movie studies was to the late 20th century.
And in this scenario, gaming has become integral to teaching and learning. “A lot of learning content is gamified,” Alexander told the Bett audience.
In this future, he said, the typical 18-year-old of 2025 identified with a game character when they were younger and see game developers as their role models.
But, more importantly for schools, they find it hard to imagine a world without gaming. “Most of their work, most of their schooling has been gamified,” he said.
Some will no doubt view this vision with horror, a world where knowledge is given the same status as virtual candy. But if teachers can harness the enthusiasm and determination which games bring out, then it could be integral to getting students engaged in learning.
