My experience with gamification for the advancement of learning comes from two experiments that I conducted in two separate classes in a higher education environment. Both had to do with teaching IT skills. The first one was a class about web design:
- I designed the course and the activities, so as to have the Codecademy platform as the main platform for teaching and practicing web design skills (Html, CSS and Javascript). Codecademy offers game mechanics such as points and badges and the vast majority of the students (78%) stated that they highly enjoyed earning points and badges and that it was something to keep them engaged.
- Besides using the platform in the classroom, I was asking students to practice at home and send me a snapshot of their dashboard just before every class. By checking this, I developed a leaderboard where students on top were the ones with many points and badges. Although not all of them liked this kind of competition (around 50% said that they liked the leaderboard), most of them (78%) said that this was a motivating factor for more hard work and participation outside the classroom.
The second class was an Introduction to Programming. Edmodo was chosen as the main platform for communication and management of learning activities. The course was gamified through the following mechanics:
- There was a mission (programming exercise) every week for the students outside the classroom. Upon completion of the mission and the submission of their work, students were gaining experience points and according to their performance they were awarded with Edmodo badges (i.e. hard worker, student of the month, homework helper etc.).
- Participation and engagement were very high, as 87% of the students followed the missions and submitted their work. Almost 60% said that awarding badges was a good thing and a motivating factor, while 93% liked the missions and the fact that they gained experience points.
Lessons learned: Although gamification is not effective for everyone and besides the fact that a limited gamification approach was implemented (limited to points, badges, and leaderboards), I saw that most of the students enjoyed it and it seems that benefits in terms of active participation and engagement are great. It is evident that more advanced approaches are needed to further explore the learning effectiveness of gamification in education. First empirical data show that it is worth the effort.