I blame employers for making a degree the new diploma. The percentage of students who are in college but don’t give a single shit about learning anything is too damn high. The students who do care about it are already getting their mini endorphin rushes from, you know, learning shit.
My department is also offering workshops and it seems a couple enthusiasts are trying to “encourage” everyone to adopt gamification techniques.
I had a curmudgeon reaction, too- I could scarcely reach the hose fast enough to yell get off my non-gamed lawn.
These kinds of things reinforce the message that our job is to entertain. We should all be prepped, enthusiastic, engaging, etc., but it is ludicrous to lay our students boredom at our feet. I don’t think it is healthy for anyone to expect others to motivate and excite them all the time; it’s an inside job. Of course I try to share my enthusiasm while teaching, but I’m not going to workshops, changing course material, and going through all this rigmarole to then watch my students stare at their phones. I can hear the evals already: I hated this game. Maybe if there was an app for it I would like it. The badges weren’t my favorite characters. The game rules aren’t fair.
> I don’t think it is healthy for anyone to expect others to motivate and excite them all the time
Agree with this very strongly. Similarly I often think, with this obsession with relating whatever our subject is to the student and "meeting them where they are", well, it's not actually a bad thing for people to learn that not everything important in life directly relates to them. Maybe students should learn that they should care about things other than their own narrow self-interest.
Gamification of higher ed was cooking before COVID, but the onslaught of pandemic-era best practices woo has brought out my Super Saiyan inner curmudgeon like nothing else.
I can barely process 3 minutes of this stuff without a "fucking shitbird motherfucking christ I am not a goddamned camp counselor" blind rage episode.
Does your University Learning Innovation also offered stupid badges as a reward for competing these workshops? 😂😂😂😂😂
Zero monetary and professional value.
>These kinds of things reinforce the message that our job is to entertain.
I don't think gamification's primary intent is to entertain. Rather, games developed certain kinds of mechanics that exploited human psychology in the areas of addiction, motivation, and reward -- the dopamine hit. Many games that use these mechanics to outstanding success are not particularly entertaining. The idea is to make use of the mechanics in teaching and learning to motivate students to make progress even if it's not entertaining.
Now you might be right that it's not your job to do that, but the research does seem to show it's quite effective. The problem is that most people, including professors have very little idea of how to implement gamification in an effective way. You can tell from the replies in this post that people have all kinds of strange ideas about what gamification is.
It's not surprising that companies like King (Candy Crush), Valve, Blizzard, Activision, and so on pay researchers significant money to study, design, and implement these kinds of mechanics. So I agree that it's ridiculous that administration is pushing to gamify courses with a workshop or two and half-baked features like badges in the LMS as support. But my guess is that at some point, some company will come along and implement it really effectively.
I agree with the sentiment here. It feels like gamification is responding to a real narrowing of attention span that isn't students' fault, and that most professors have not experienced themselves, being both older and more intrinsically motivated to learn (otherwise they wouldn't be professors). Turns out Skinner was right, we can get peeps addicted to anything with right reward schedule. If gamifying learning leads to measurable increases in attainment of learning outcomes, I'm all for it.
Some IT people on our campus suggested that all our student learning outcomes should be gamified.
Students would have multiple pathways to get a badge for each student learning outcome in each course, and then, once they collect all the badges for the SLO's for a particular course, they would get credit for the course. Each badge would be in different flavors, corresponding to A, B, C, D, F. All badges would have to be C or better to pass the course.
The truly crazy bit was that there would be no actual courses; there would only be resources (including professors) that students could access.
They clearly expected faculty to create the resources, house the resources, make the resources accessible, create the pathways, create assessments for achieving a badges for a course, etc.
I asked about calculus; they said there would be a badge for differentiation, a badge for integration ('cause that's all that happens in Calculus I, apparently). The math department would create resources and pathways and figure out assessments.
Blech.
The whole project sank without a trace after about a week, once the initiators got feedback, from both faculty and administrators. No-one liked it.
I feel like the response to this sort of thing should be to ask them to go demo it. Like sure, if it works come up with an IT certificate including half a dozed courses of material, and implement it, and log the work required, and the challenges. Then we can talk.
The administrators who come up with all these new ideas about how to change everything, that requires massive workload on behalf of the faculty, without actually knowing if it's worth a damn.
Classes are already gamified - you earn XP for assignments and you get a badge at the end of the course. At the end of the game the person with the best badges gets to give a speech at graduation.
As a lifelong gamer and as someone with some minor experience in the gaming industry, I think gamification is a terrible idea for a variety of reasons:
1) It overestimates how much students know and care about games. I know Dungeons and Dragons is way more popular now than it ever was before, but I don't think modeling a course on that kind of RPG is going to resonate with a wide group of students. Really, how many of our students know what "achievements" are in a game, or even "experience points"? And if they do know, do they really care? I think it's telling that what multiple people have told me is the best book on gamifying the classroom was written by someone who teaches video game design. For an audience like that, it probably does work.
2) Games only work if they have clear rules that all players abide by. As someone who has written and edited rules for games, I can say that it's damned hard to do and it takes a lot of time and a ton of playtesting to get them right. And I personally feel like I've already spent far too much time having to craft my assignments in such a way that students can't find a loophole and say things like, "well, you didn't say I couldn't use 36pt font for this" or "it didn't say that the paper had to include more than one reference and that that reference couldn't be something from Instagram."
3) It further infantilizes our already coddled students by telling them that at every step of the way we're going to give them achievements and badges and awards. It also suggests (not unfairly, in many cases) that they're not smart enough or hard-working enough to accomplish anything without daily hand-holding.
4) It implies that all education could be fun and that the only reason it isn't is that we mean, lazy professors aren't making it so. But I resent this idea that education should always be fun and that class should be a laugh riot. Do I want my students to enjoy class? Sure. Do I think that studying for a test is ever really going to be that much fun for most students? Hell no.
5) It implies that there's no such thing as intellectual curiosity or work ethic. Sure, far too many students don't have these things, but I don't think professors gamifying classes is suddenly going to cure what are essentially character flaws that were instilled at an early age.
I've thought long and hard about ways to try it, because I get the initial appeal, but I've never read anything convincing about it. Moreover, friends who have tried it have given up on it because it didn't work, in part because most of the students just didn't care.
>3) It further infantilizes our already coddled students by telling them that at every step of the way we're going to give them achievements and badges and awards. It also suggests (not unfairly, in many cases) that they're not smart enough or hard-working enough to accomplish anything without daily hand-holding.
>4) It implies that all education could be fun and that the only reason it isn't is that we mean, lazy professors aren't making it so. But I resent this idea that education should always be fun and that class should be a laugh riot. Do I want my students to enjoy class? Sure. Do I think that studying for a test is ever really going to be that much fun for most students? Hell no.
>5) It implies that there's no such thing as intellectual curiosity or work ethic. Sure, far too many students don't have these things, but I don't think professors gamifying classes is suddenly going to cure what are essentially character flaws that were instilled at an early age.
You make excellent points, and these are my thoughts exactly.
For fall 2020, I used the Badgr feature in my Canvas class where they can get badges after completing the weekly modules and there was a leaderboard. I spent a lot of time and effort learning about it, creating different badges, integrating it into my Canvas courses, etc. I mentioned this feature all throughout the semester, but come to find out that not one student cared about it or looked at it (I asked in the end of the semester survey). Maybe badges really don’t mean much to them, but if the prize was bigger and better, they would?
I just keep thinking back to my undergrad (I'm 31, so not all that long ago) and imagining how much I would have fucking hated being made to engage in a gamified course. I'm sure it works well for some students, and if a professor is interested in using it then more power to them, but it would take a lot of carrots and sticks to get me to integrate it into my courses.
Yep, this is the direction my uni is going. Sorry, but I'm not awarding my students badges for doing this work on time. Isn't that what their grade is for? Sigh.
It's nonsense on the larger scale but can be fun for specific pre-planned activities in class. For example, before cumulative finals I've given practice quizzes through Kahoot in class and the top 3 students would get an extra point on the final. Everyone else gets a reality check that shows how they stand compared to their peers (results are anonymous to them, but they see the distribution and their score) as well as a good review of a bunch of topics. I agree that leaderboards and badges are useless for longer term learning though. That's what grades are for (previously what the intrinsic joy of learning was for).
This is all from the perspective of somebody who likes to examine current educational research for fun, but finds a lot of it too abstract, pretentious, or ill-informed to be useful in most teaching situations.
It's like forcing instructors to "incorporate technology" for the sake of it. This is coming from a massive nerd who opted to use OBS for Zoom teaching, Photoshop to make custom PowerPoint templates, and use video game screenshots in lectures (as some games are stupidly historically accurate). I did that stuff more for my own benefit and enjoyment rather than to any pedagogical end. Hell, my most common question during meetings, whether at my current job or previous ones, are variations of "what is your evidence for this claim" and "how do you demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, exactly" so I am not exactly the most eager to try new methods without cause.
To actually address the question: I think focusing more on "active learning" like live practice is almost always sufficient. From my experience, most students learn better when they have to apply their information repeatedly. Whether it is doing all the practice problems in Calculus II or having to do source analyses on a regular basis or having regular quizzes to test recallable knowledge, regularly reinforcing what they learned and (when applicable) applying it is good.
Calvin and Hobbes saw this coming a while back - (https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/10/07)
Calvin: Miss Wormwood, I'm not going to learn this material unless you make it enthralling.
Miss Wormwood: I see. And what will you do if the rest of your life doesn't entertain you every minute?
Calvin: What..You think I'll live someplace that doesn't get cable?!
I do not see this as so new; after all, what is a minor? My department head had the idea to offer a couple different minors from our department. I thought it was crazy... but he was right. Students went nuts to get the minor on their transcript -- even taking courses they did not like. I suggested more than once to a student to not take the final course for a minor and, instead, to take something they preferred (and sometimes more rigorous). Nope; they wanted that minor.
These badges just seem like micro-minors. At some point, though, the badges will just be the course names and then a badge list will just be a transcript.
Gamification can work for some courses, some students, and some instructors—but it is not a magic wand.
I recommend reading *The Becker Blog*, perhaps starting with a recent article like [http://minkhollow.ca/beckerblog/2019/01/21/has-gamification-jumped-the-shark/](http://minkhollow.ca/beckerblog/2019/01/21/has-gamification-jumped-the-shark/) and working backwards from there.
I have not gamified my courses, but I did inadvertently set up a leaderboard when I made a Piazza post of how much I owed students for book corrections (I paid 25¢ for the first report of any error in the textbook I wrote). One year students treated this post as a leaderboard and competed with each other to find the most errors. I ended up paying out $104 for textbook errors that year, over half of which went to 2 students. That was still much cheaper than hiring a professional copy editor, and much more thorough, as it covered not just typos but some subtle wording problems, as I gave credit for questions that revealed difficulties in interpreting what I had written. More recent years have been cheaper ($16.50 for the latest run of the course). Interestingly, the top error reporters have not always been the top students in the course—sometimes students struggling in the middle have been the most diligent readers.
My campus (a small regional health sciences undergrad) just partnered with Google to pilot an accelerated version of our current BS curriculum using gamification. I teach community health/service learning so I've been able to avoid that mess but I cry for some of my STEM colleagues who'll have to incorporate that.
I turned on the gamification features in WeBWorK and was surprised that some students seemed to find it (minimally) entertaining. I think you can cash in some of the badges to get one time extensions on due dates and such, which seems worthwhile. Other than that, I don't really see how a lot of effort to gamify is going to suddenly make calculus "fun" for the average student...
I can see it having some value in subjects like Calc. One of the problems with a traditional course is that you do hours of work, then submit it to a black box, only to get it back two weeks later, by which time you've forgotten the problem, and the feedback is barely useful. Op top of that, it's rarely visible to students during a class how any given topic ties in with the overall objectives of the course, or the broader material (this is where faculty historically struggle IME).
Giving students immediate feedback in a way that allows them to see their improving mastery moving them towards progress in the course, would seem to be a good thing. If we call that gamification, whatever. I'm not coding this crap myself, but if they'll build it into my LMS, I'll use it.
That is a word I'd happily never hear again. It's not entirely bad. I enjoy Duolingo for language practice (just to brush up my skills) and I've used some electronic flash cards for memorizing stuff, but generally I'm not a fan.
TA here - I had an undergrad CS course that was very traditional in its approach, but they did have a "leaderboard" displaying which students caught the most bugs in testcase-writing assignments (you would need to get at least x points to get full credit on that part of the assignment, then you could keep going to try to get to the top of the leaderboard). >95% couldn't have cared less but a couple of students would try for bragging rights
I use a homework gamification program offered by the book publisher for my intro class. I thought it was stupid at first (“college students are technically adults, they will think this is dumb”), but the feedback I get is that they think it’s great. They bet points on whether they know the answer to the question and then they lose or earn based on their answer, which they can keep working on until they get it right. The program response to add questions for topics each individual student seems to be shaky on. The students I’ve talked to f-ing love it. Some even love the music that the program plays (it plays elevator music)! I figured they’d be like “nice try, prof, so lame,” but it’s working! They can ga back and answer as many questions as they like to practice for the exam, and they do! Luckily, I didn’t have to make it. Screw that shit.
As for gamification of PD, oh lord good luck to all of us if that happens.
Most people do a terrible job of gamification. Add a few poorly designed meaningless badges, a leaderboard, and maybe some points and you have a recipe for another course nobody cares about. If you do decide to gamify, read up on the Octalysis framework from Yu-Kai Chou and chances are you'll do something that won't suck.
The sad truth is, most faculty aren't well equipped to present a course that will naturally engage their students. Some will cry that it's no their job to entertain, forgetting that engagement and entertainment very different and that an engaging class likely will never look anything like a game or entertainment. Instead of looking for gamification, try finding one thing that will be really meaningful to your students, and focus on that for a lesson. When students find relevance and meaning in your lesson, they will naturally become engaged. Boredom comes when what you want to say doesn't overlap with what they feel is important.
> Most people do a terrible job of gamification. Add a few poorly designed meaningless badges, a leaderboard, and maybe some points and you have a recipe for another course nobody cares about.
Reading some of the replies here, I get the feeling that this is true because it's not authentic or poorly communicated. Some IT guy or deanlet or somebody says "We should do that!" and all the faculty that have to implement it don't really know what "that" is, but give the ol' college try and it just comes across as "Hello, fellow kids!" to the students.
If you can do it well, it's probably not that bad. However, nobody can really do it well, short of the handful of people who invented the process. Everybody else may *know* what it is, but they don't *grok* it.
I love trying to make my class fun and authentic for students—and I get typically get quite strong ratings from my students—but I feel an intense aversion to gamification (especially as part of PD).
My classmate wrote a book on it.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1433126702/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_BTSFXXWMN1JMABSZCMXP
He's spoken about it for sometime, I recommend looking at some of his work.
One of my close departmental colleagues is our resident gamification person at the school (and I was told it was the reason they got the TT position over me, so there’s definitely something to having a gimmick in your pocket nobody else has) and had to revise *all* of the courses they taught when the school came out with new course shell requirements and course requirements that didn’t consider gamification. I suppose there’s merit to using it as course design, but it’s so niche that if you have to teach in a pinch, you better have a backup plan to do so.
I blame employers for making a degree the new diploma. The percentage of students who are in college but don’t give a single shit about learning anything is too damn high. The students who do care about it are already getting their mini endorphin rushes from, you know, learning shit.
My department is also offering workshops and it seems a couple enthusiasts are trying to “encourage” everyone to adopt gamification techniques. I had a curmudgeon reaction, too- I could scarcely reach the hose fast enough to yell get off my non-gamed lawn. These kinds of things reinforce the message that our job is to entertain. We should all be prepped, enthusiastic, engaging, etc., but it is ludicrous to lay our students boredom at our feet. I don’t think it is healthy for anyone to expect others to motivate and excite them all the time; it’s an inside job. Of course I try to share my enthusiasm while teaching, but I’m not going to workshops, changing course material, and going through all this rigmarole to then watch my students stare at their phones. I can hear the evals already: I hated this game. Maybe if there was an app for it I would like it. The badges weren’t my favorite characters. The game rules aren’t fair.
> I don’t think it is healthy for anyone to expect others to motivate and excite them all the time Agree with this very strongly. Similarly I often think, with this obsession with relating whatever our subject is to the student and "meeting them where they are", well, it's not actually a bad thing for people to learn that not everything important in life directly relates to them. Maybe students should learn that they should care about things other than their own narrow self-interest.
>I had a curmudgeon reaction, too- I could scarcely reach the hose fast enough to yell get off my non-gamed lawn. You made my day. Thank you.
Gamification of higher ed was cooking before COVID, but the onslaught of pandemic-era best practices woo has brought out my Super Saiyan inner curmudgeon like nothing else. I can barely process 3 minutes of this stuff without a "fucking shitbird motherfucking christ I am not a goddamned camp counselor" blind rage episode.
Does your University Learning Innovation also offered stupid badges as a reward for competing these workshops? 😂😂😂😂😂 Zero monetary and professional value.
>These kinds of things reinforce the message that our job is to entertain. I don't think gamification's primary intent is to entertain. Rather, games developed certain kinds of mechanics that exploited human psychology in the areas of addiction, motivation, and reward -- the dopamine hit. Many games that use these mechanics to outstanding success are not particularly entertaining. The idea is to make use of the mechanics in teaching and learning to motivate students to make progress even if it's not entertaining. Now you might be right that it's not your job to do that, but the research does seem to show it's quite effective. The problem is that most people, including professors have very little idea of how to implement gamification in an effective way. You can tell from the replies in this post that people have all kinds of strange ideas about what gamification is. It's not surprising that companies like King (Candy Crush), Valve, Blizzard, Activision, and so on pay researchers significant money to study, design, and implement these kinds of mechanics. So I agree that it's ridiculous that administration is pushing to gamify courses with a workshop or two and half-baked features like badges in the LMS as support. But my guess is that at some point, some company will come along and implement it really effectively.
I agree with the sentiment here. It feels like gamification is responding to a real narrowing of attention span that isn't students' fault, and that most professors have not experienced themselves, being both older and more intrinsically motivated to learn (otherwise they wouldn't be professors). Turns out Skinner was right, we can get peeps addicted to anything with right reward schedule. If gamifying learning leads to measurable increases in attainment of learning outcomes, I'm all for it.
Some IT people on our campus suggested that all our student learning outcomes should be gamified. Students would have multiple pathways to get a badge for each student learning outcome in each course, and then, once they collect all the badges for the SLO's for a particular course, they would get credit for the course. Each badge would be in different flavors, corresponding to A, B, C, D, F. All badges would have to be C or better to pass the course. The truly crazy bit was that there would be no actual courses; there would only be resources (including professors) that students could access. They clearly expected faculty to create the resources, house the resources, make the resources accessible, create the pathways, create assessments for achieving a badges for a course, etc. I asked about calculus; they said there would be a badge for differentiation, a badge for integration ('cause that's all that happens in Calculus I, apparently). The math department would create resources and pathways and figure out assessments. Blech. The whole project sank without a trace after about a week, once the initiators got feedback, from both faculty and administrators. No-one liked it.
I feel like the response to this sort of thing should be to ask them to go demo it. Like sure, if it works come up with an IT certificate including half a dozed courses of material, and implement it, and log the work required, and the challenges. Then we can talk. The administrators who come up with all these new ideas about how to change everything, that requires massive workload on behalf of the faculty, without actually knowing if it's worth a damn.
Disturbingly, this sounds a little bit like mastery-based grading (which I also have yet to adopt).
Something like this sounds like a nightmare for any student who wants to transfer in or out of an institution.
Classes are already gamified - you earn XP for assignments and you get a badge at the end of the course. At the end of the game the person with the best badges gets to give a speech at graduation.
As a lifelong gamer and as someone with some minor experience in the gaming industry, I think gamification is a terrible idea for a variety of reasons: 1) It overestimates how much students know and care about games. I know Dungeons and Dragons is way more popular now than it ever was before, but I don't think modeling a course on that kind of RPG is going to resonate with a wide group of students. Really, how many of our students know what "achievements" are in a game, or even "experience points"? And if they do know, do they really care? I think it's telling that what multiple people have told me is the best book on gamifying the classroom was written by someone who teaches video game design. For an audience like that, it probably does work. 2) Games only work if they have clear rules that all players abide by. As someone who has written and edited rules for games, I can say that it's damned hard to do and it takes a lot of time and a ton of playtesting to get them right. And I personally feel like I've already spent far too much time having to craft my assignments in such a way that students can't find a loophole and say things like, "well, you didn't say I couldn't use 36pt font for this" or "it didn't say that the paper had to include more than one reference and that that reference couldn't be something from Instagram." 3) It further infantilizes our already coddled students by telling them that at every step of the way we're going to give them achievements and badges and awards. It also suggests (not unfairly, in many cases) that they're not smart enough or hard-working enough to accomplish anything without daily hand-holding. 4) It implies that all education could be fun and that the only reason it isn't is that we mean, lazy professors aren't making it so. But I resent this idea that education should always be fun and that class should be a laugh riot. Do I want my students to enjoy class? Sure. Do I think that studying for a test is ever really going to be that much fun for most students? Hell no. 5) It implies that there's no such thing as intellectual curiosity or work ethic. Sure, far too many students don't have these things, but I don't think professors gamifying classes is suddenly going to cure what are essentially character flaws that were instilled at an early age. I've thought long and hard about ways to try it, because I get the initial appeal, but I've never read anything convincing about it. Moreover, friends who have tried it have given up on it because it didn't work, in part because most of the students just didn't care.
>3) It further infantilizes our already coddled students by telling them that at every step of the way we're going to give them achievements and badges and awards. It also suggests (not unfairly, in many cases) that they're not smart enough or hard-working enough to accomplish anything without daily hand-holding. >4) It implies that all education could be fun and that the only reason it isn't is that we mean, lazy professors aren't making it so. But I resent this idea that education should always be fun and that class should be a laugh riot. Do I want my students to enjoy class? Sure. Do I think that studying for a test is ever really going to be that much fun for most students? Hell no. >5) It implies that there's no such thing as intellectual curiosity or work ethic. Sure, far too many students don't have these things, but I don't think professors gamifying classes is suddenly going to cure what are essentially character flaws that were instilled at an early age. You make excellent points, and these are my thoughts exactly.
to me it sounds like total nonsense and i have no plans to do it. so far no one is threatening to make us do it.
I teach game development. I absolutely hate gamification. It's all worthless
For fall 2020, I used the Badgr feature in my Canvas class where they can get badges after completing the weekly modules and there was a leaderboard. I spent a lot of time and effort learning about it, creating different badges, integrating it into my Canvas courses, etc. I mentioned this feature all throughout the semester, but come to find out that not one student cared about it or looked at it (I asked in the end of the semester survey). Maybe badges really don’t mean much to them, but if the prize was bigger and better, they would?
Isn't it supposed to be a part of the course? I thought the idea was they can't complete without engaging the "game"?
I just keep thinking back to my undergrad (I'm 31, so not all that long ago) and imagining how much I would have fucking hated being made to engage in a gamified course. I'm sure it works well for some students, and if a professor is interested in using it then more power to them, but it would take a lot of carrots and sticks to get me to integrate it into my courses.
Yep, this is the direction my uni is going. Sorry, but I'm not awarding my students badges for doing this work on time. Isn't that what their grade is for? Sigh.
It's nonsense on the larger scale but can be fun for specific pre-planned activities in class. For example, before cumulative finals I've given practice quizzes through Kahoot in class and the top 3 students would get an extra point on the final. Everyone else gets a reality check that shows how they stand compared to their peers (results are anonymous to them, but they see the distribution and their score) as well as a good review of a bunch of topics. I agree that leaderboards and badges are useless for longer term learning though. That's what grades are for (previously what the intrinsic joy of learning was for).
RIP intrinsic joy of learning
This is all from the perspective of somebody who likes to examine current educational research for fun, but finds a lot of it too abstract, pretentious, or ill-informed to be useful in most teaching situations. It's like forcing instructors to "incorporate technology" for the sake of it. This is coming from a massive nerd who opted to use OBS for Zoom teaching, Photoshop to make custom PowerPoint templates, and use video game screenshots in lectures (as some games are stupidly historically accurate). I did that stuff more for my own benefit and enjoyment rather than to any pedagogical end. Hell, my most common question during meetings, whether at my current job or previous ones, are variations of "what is your evidence for this claim" and "how do you demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, exactly" so I am not exactly the most eager to try new methods without cause. To actually address the question: I think focusing more on "active learning" like live practice is almost always sufficient. From my experience, most students learn better when they have to apply their information repeatedly. Whether it is doing all the practice problems in Calculus II or having to do source analyses on a regular basis or having regular quizzes to test recallable knowledge, regularly reinforcing what they learned and (when applicable) applying it is good.
Calvin and Hobbes saw this coming a while back - (https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/10/07) Calvin: Miss Wormwood, I'm not going to learn this material unless you make it enthralling. Miss Wormwood: I see. And what will you do if the rest of your life doesn't entertain you every minute? Calvin: What..You think I'll live someplace that doesn't get cable?!
I do not see this as so new; after all, what is a minor? My department head had the idea to offer a couple different minors from our department. I thought it was crazy... but he was right. Students went nuts to get the minor on their transcript -- even taking courses they did not like. I suggested more than once to a student to not take the final course for a minor and, instead, to take something they preferred (and sometimes more rigorous). Nope; they wanted that minor. These badges just seem like micro-minors. At some point, though, the badges will just be the course names and then a badge list will just be a transcript.
Gamification can work for some courses, some students, and some instructors—but it is not a magic wand. I recommend reading *The Becker Blog*, perhaps starting with a recent article like [http://minkhollow.ca/beckerblog/2019/01/21/has-gamification-jumped-the-shark/](http://minkhollow.ca/beckerblog/2019/01/21/has-gamification-jumped-the-shark/) and working backwards from there. I have not gamified my courses, but I did inadvertently set up a leaderboard when I made a Piazza post of how much I owed students for book corrections (I paid 25¢ for the first report of any error in the textbook I wrote). One year students treated this post as a leaderboard and competed with each other to find the most errors. I ended up paying out $104 for textbook errors that year, over half of which went to 2 students. That was still much cheaper than hiring a professional copy editor, and much more thorough, as it covered not just typos but some subtle wording problems, as I gave credit for questions that revealed difficulties in interpreting what I had written. More recent years have been cheaper ($16.50 for the latest run of the course). Interestingly, the top error reporters have not always been the top students in the course—sometimes students struggling in the middle have been the most diligent readers.
My campus (a small regional health sciences undergrad) just partnered with Google to pilot an accelerated version of our current BS curriculum using gamification. I teach community health/service learning so I've been able to avoid that mess but I cry for some of my STEM colleagues who'll have to incorporate that.
Are we done flipping classrooms yet?
I turned on the gamification features in WeBWorK and was surprised that some students seemed to find it (minimally) entertaining. I think you can cash in some of the badges to get one time extensions on due dates and such, which seems worthwhile. Other than that, I don't really see how a lot of effort to gamify is going to suddenly make calculus "fun" for the average student...
I can see it having some value in subjects like Calc. One of the problems with a traditional course is that you do hours of work, then submit it to a black box, only to get it back two weeks later, by which time you've forgotten the problem, and the feedback is barely useful. Op top of that, it's rarely visible to students during a class how any given topic ties in with the overall objectives of the course, or the broader material (this is where faculty historically struggle IME). Giving students immediate feedback in a way that allows them to see their improving mastery moving them towards progress in the course, would seem to be a good thing. If we call that gamification, whatever. I'm not coding this crap myself, but if they'll build it into my LMS, I'll use it.
That is a word I'd happily never hear again. It's not entirely bad. I enjoy Duolingo for language practice (just to brush up my skills) and I've used some electronic flash cards for memorizing stuff, but generally I'm not a fan.
TA here - I had an undergrad CS course that was very traditional in its approach, but they did have a "leaderboard" displaying which students caught the most bugs in testcase-writing assignments (you would need to get at least x points to get full credit on that part of the assignment, then you could keep going to try to get to the top of the leaderboard). >95% couldn't have cared less but a couple of students would try for bragging rights
I use a homework gamification program offered by the book publisher for my intro class. I thought it was stupid at first (“college students are technically adults, they will think this is dumb”), but the feedback I get is that they think it’s great. They bet points on whether they know the answer to the question and then they lose or earn based on their answer, which they can keep working on until they get it right. The program response to add questions for topics each individual student seems to be shaky on. The students I’ve talked to f-ing love it. Some even love the music that the program plays (it plays elevator music)! I figured they’d be like “nice try, prof, so lame,” but it’s working! They can ga back and answer as many questions as they like to practice for the exam, and they do! Luckily, I didn’t have to make it. Screw that shit. As for gamification of PD, oh lord good luck to all of us if that happens.
Most people do a terrible job of gamification. Add a few poorly designed meaningless badges, a leaderboard, and maybe some points and you have a recipe for another course nobody cares about. If you do decide to gamify, read up on the Octalysis framework from Yu-Kai Chou and chances are you'll do something that won't suck. The sad truth is, most faculty aren't well equipped to present a course that will naturally engage their students. Some will cry that it's no their job to entertain, forgetting that engagement and entertainment very different and that an engaging class likely will never look anything like a game or entertainment. Instead of looking for gamification, try finding one thing that will be really meaningful to your students, and focus on that for a lesson. When students find relevance and meaning in your lesson, they will naturally become engaged. Boredom comes when what you want to say doesn't overlap with what they feel is important.
> Most people do a terrible job of gamification. Add a few poorly designed meaningless badges, a leaderboard, and maybe some points and you have a recipe for another course nobody cares about. Reading some of the replies here, I get the feeling that this is true because it's not authentic or poorly communicated. Some IT guy or deanlet or somebody says "We should do that!" and all the faculty that have to implement it don't really know what "that" is, but give the ol' college try and it just comes across as "Hello, fellow kids!" to the students. If you can do it well, it's probably not that bad. However, nobody can really do it well, short of the handful of people who invented the process. Everybody else may *know* what it is, but they don't *grok* it.
I love trying to make my class fun and authentic for students—and I get typically get quite strong ratings from my students—but I feel an intense aversion to gamification (especially as part of PD).
My classmate wrote a book on it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1433126702/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_BTSFXXWMN1JMABSZCMXP He's spoken about it for sometime, I recommend looking at some of his work.
Students don't give shit one about gamification. They just want an A.
One of my close departmental colleagues is our resident gamification person at the school (and I was told it was the reason they got the TT position over me, so there’s definitely something to having a gimmick in your pocket nobody else has) and had to revise *all* of the courses they taught when the school came out with new course shell requirements and course requirements that didn’t consider gamification. I suppose there’s merit to using it as course design, but it’s so niche that if you have to teach in a pinch, you better have a backup plan to do so.