Gamification & Badges

Material in this section originally curated by Michael Hakkarinen and Katie Blunt for the Canyons District EdTech Course "Design & Develop Digital Age Learning Assessments" (Fall 2014)

Canvabadges and other sites like ClassDojo and EduBadges are a great way to motivate students to learn and award progress in a digital environment parallel to the face-to-face classroom.

Before we look closely at badges in general, let's first define...

What is "Gamification"?

Definition: Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems.[1] (Links to an external site.)[2] (Links to an external site.)[3] (Links to an external site.) Gamification has been studied and applied in several domains, with some of the main purposes being to engage, teach, entertain, measure, and to improve the perceived ease of use of information systems.[6] (Links to an external site.)[8] (Links to an external site.) A review of research on gamification shows that most studies on gamification find positive effects from gamification. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification (Links to an external site.))

Quest to Learn (Links to an external site.) - Using quests to drive student learning

Reality is Broken (Links to an external site.) - Jane McGonigal's research suggests that gamers are expert problemsolvers and collaborators because they regularly cooperate with other players to overcome daunting virtual challenges, and she helped pioneer a fast-growing genre of games that aims to turn gameplay to socially positive ends.

The Institute (Links to an external site.) - What is it about games and quests that is so motivating?

Why Gamification's Not a Game (Links to an external site.)

 

What Gamification Is Not:

  • Kids playing video or computer games all the time
  • Slapping points and badges onto an activity and expecting it to magically become more engaging
  • Making applications look like video games
  • Rewarding students with prizes
  • Deciding that our students are all addicted to video games, so we have to keep them entertained at school to get them to learn

 

What Gamification Is:

  • Engagement
  • Meaningful learning tasks
  • Collaboration
  • Goal-oriented
  • Mastery-based learning
  • Progress as the incentive rather than fear as the incentive
  • Focus on progress, achievement, and success
  • Immediate feedback
  • Learning from failures
  • Trying again
  • Using assessment as a chance for students to get to their best
  • Problem solving real-world issues and problems
  • Helping students become career, college, and citizenship-ready
  • Learning to work together
  • Intrinsic motivation
  • Learning to be accountable
  • Leveled (aka. mastery) grading

 

Mastery-Based Learning - There is a school of thought that presumes all children can learn if they are provided with the appropriate learning conditions. Learning for mastery or mastery learning, are terms coined by Benjamin Bloom (Links to an external site.) in 1968 and 1971 respectively. Bloom hypothesized that a classroom with a mastery learning focus as opposed to the traditional form of instruction would reduce the achievement gaps between varying groups of students (Guskey 2007). In Mastery learning, "the students are helped to master each learning unit before proceeding to a more advanced learning task" (Bloom 1985) in contrast to "conventional instruction". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning (Links to an external site.))

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