Gamification: What, and How it benefits Digital Learning
Gamification in learning is using game design and mechanics to enhance areas that involve non-gaming circumstances. It helps create an effective learning environment, where students can run through real life scenarios and challenges in a safe environment. And like any game, these include points, competitions, badges and stickers, but are more than the awesome dashboards that are presented to you. Due to their usefulness in aspects of growth, they can be used in industries as varied as retail, healthcare - and of course, education.
What is Gamification?
According to resources such as Wikipedia and eidesign,
Gamification is more than playing games. It's techniques strive to use people's natural desires for socializing, learning, mastery, competition, status, achievement, self-expression, altruism or closure.
Basically, applying game logic to an area of study or work that utilizes non-game thinking and it's applications. For serious learning, Gamification's game based logic is applied to content to meet specific learning outcomes.
Gamification has worked its way into the automative industry as well, with the innovative dashboard of the Ford Fusion hybrid. The high-resolution display features vine like leaves that withers if you waste gas, and blooms if you don't. The idea in this small example was to enhance loyalty. But how does Gamification affect the education sector?
How important is Gamification in Education?
Games do a lot to increase motivation through participation. The lack of motivation can lead to a disastrous reaping, such as the high-school student drop out rates: 62.1 million students in India are out of school. Though organizations do not consider Gamification as a practical source of learning due to reasons such as longer turnaround time and higher costs, it has proven otherwise, with students having a higher retention and incentive.
How does Gamification enhance Learning?
Learning isn't only about formal training, but is a combination of three elements:
-
70% of learning comes from real life scenarios, on-the-job experiences, tasks and problem solving
-
20% comes from observing our peers and leaders and the feedback we receive for our work
-
10% comes from formal training.
From the above, gamification provides an effective approach to enhance learning. With these built-in features, one understands that:
-
Gamification evokes friendly competition
-
Provides learners with a sense of achievement
-
Provides engaging learner experience which leads to behavioral change
-
Encourages learners to progress through content, motivate action and influence behavior.
Benefits of Gamification in Learning
-
To better learners' experience. The learner's experience during the game creates an environment that is both high on engagement and fun. A good gamification strategy with high levels of engagement will lead to increased retention.
-
Better learning environment. Gamification in learning provides an effective, engaging and safe environment for a learner to practice real-life situations and challenges. This helps in facilitating better knowledge retention.
-
Instant feedback. It provides instant feedback so that learners better themselves for the following levels to come. This too, facilitates better learner engagement and thereby better recall.
-
Prompting behavioral change. Points, badges, and leaderboards would make training a truly wonderful experience. Yet, gamification is a lot more than that. It can drive strong behavioral change when joint with the scientific principles of repeated retrieval and spaced retention.
-
Can be applied almost anywhere. Gamification has its use cases anywhere, as it can fulfill most learning needs. This includes induction and onboarding, product sales, customer support, soft skill development, awareness creation and consent.
-
Impact on the bottom line. Along with the above mentioned points, it can also create a significant performance gain for the organization.
What you need...
While Gamification in the field of education provides benefits as outlined above, much of it has to do with the concepts it uses to drive the process of learning. To succeed in using gamification in learning, we need to create a concept that:
-
Captures and retains learners' attention
-
Challenges them
-
Engages and entertains them, and lastly
-
Teaches them
Here are a list of articles I've written that you could check to understand more about of Gamification in the education sector. I hope this article has given you insight on why gamification could be the new face of learning.