EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY: A (mini) Introduction

One of the many many many fields gamification can be applied to, is education. Imagine this: The part of our brain associated with pleasure is interestingly also associated with learning. A complex system, of dopamine release in response to certain activities - “Uh look I am eating this amazing ice cream” & “Uh look I learnt how to make ice cream”. Similar processes happening in our brain. (Ok maybe not the best examples and finding metaphors is not exactly my strong suit, so let’s let the pros handle this)

“Learning can cause dopamine responses to transfer from primary rewards (such as tuna fish to your cat) to reward-predicting stimuli (such as the sound of the can opener). This suggests that reward…may play a central role in how and why we are able to learn.”

Long story short: Our brains are wired to learn AND we have fun doing so, by being rewarded for achievements. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever”, who are these words from? Nobody other than Mr. Mahatma Gandhi and to an extent I agree. Life is a learning process and every day you learn something new, our brains are wired to learn and to be rewarded for learning and achieving. Learning can be fun and doesn’t have to be this awful task. Imagine that :)

This is what I would like you to learn today:

(1) We are not talking about gaming. What we are talking about is gamification, meaning using game elements in a non-game context. What are examples of game elements? Game elements are a toolbox; regular patterns we extract from games. Anything from a beautiful storyline, to receiving rewards and achievements, in form of badges, stickers, points. Creating an avatar that accompanies you through your journey and keeps track of your progress. The idea is to try to understand how to implement game elements to produce a compelling and fun experience. Fun being a very strong motivator.

(2) Time and time again through research, user tests, prototypes and all kinds of studies, it is demonstrated that people who play games (anything from board games, puzzles, to role playing games) have the following traits: they are persistent, they like taking risks, pay close attention to detail and are problem-solving orientated.

(3) Millions of students fail high school every year, many more millions of people play casual games, such as Farm Ville (and are shockingly good at it). Simply put, interest for games outweighs the interest for school (by far). And think about it, before you get good at a game, you have to learn it first. Humans want to learn, so what is wrong with our school systems? Why would kids prefer learning a game over learning a trait? And if it’s not the process of learning, is it then not the structure within learning? If we are naturally wired and programmed to want to learn, what are we doing wrong and better yet, what can we do to change that?

Within the next weeks I would like to show you, what mechanisms of gamification can be used in education and why we need to change our education system.

#gamification #education #educationtechnology