Games, gaming and gamification in Education

A group of researchers in MIT’s Education Arcade are trying to harness the power of MMO games to teach high school students to think like scientists and mathematicians.

This visual takes a look at how game-based learning activities are designed, why they work, and how well they work in classrooms. Keep reading to learn more.

The role of video games in teaching and learning is a source of debate among many educators, researchers and in the popular press. Detractors and advocates have been discussing the influences and the potentials of video games for quite some time, and we feel that sound evidence and informed advice on these topics is still very much needed. Against this background, Futurelab at NFER felt that it was timely to provide practitioners, industry and researchers with an up-to-date account of what the evidence tells us about game-based learning and its potential impact on learning and teaching. The review aims to bridge academic and non academic domains, to provide insights that will be of interest to educators, educational researchers, industry and others seeking to engage in a more thoughtful debate about the types of educational values that can be attached to gaming. In particular, we provide accessible advice for practitioners, in the belief that innovation in education is always underpinned by informed and critical teaching.

We carried out a rapid review of key literature to identify relevant theoretical contributions and evidence. This involved systematic searching and a consistent, best evidence, approach to the selection of the literature. We focused on a range of sources, including empirical, practice-based evidence and more speculative literature, published from 2006 onward.

The main findings are as follows:

The literature was split on the extent to which video games can impact upon overall academic performance.

The studies consistently found that video games can impact positively on problem solving skills, motivation and engagement. However, it was unclear whether this impact could be sustained over time.

Despite some promising results, the current literature does not evidence adequately the presumed link between motivation, attitude to learning and learning outcomes. Overall, the strength of the evidence was often affected by the research design or lack of information about the research design.

Imagine if earning a living, or getting an education, or developing talents of any sort was just a game. Imagine if every smooth move, every good choice, and every new relationship you developed earned you a virtual (or real) reward. Imagine if work had a payoff as well as a paycheque. Well, imagine no longer. Through a computer, mobile device, or interactive television, you will soon find your work and life being gamified. Read on to find out how you will soon be levelling up the gamification way.

This is the blog of the Gamification Lab at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University (see About page). It is inheriting some the posts of the Art and Civic Media project, so you’ll see some posts before this one. From now on this space will be used to discuss about different ways of ‘rethinking’ gamification. Through different examples and case studies we will discuss the political and social implications of the emergence of gamification. Also, in the following weeks you’ll see papers, audio and video files from the workshop we had in May at the Centre for Digital Cultures and also a new call for papers and works of art.

Higher ed gaming labs like Rochester Institute of Technology’s MAGIC center are expanding gamification’s possibilities.

"Games are really good at representing complex systems, so educational experiences that are framed on learning those systems work really well for games."

In the last weeks I have been working on some papers about Oinas Kukkonen’s Persuasive Systems Design model, and I have been working on the relation between game mechanics and    the persuasive support elements listed by Oinas Kukkonen, this is my model now (yoo-hoo, I have a model now), as you can see it is like the stages of a rocket ship, more to see as soon as the paper is published.

Gamification is one of the new buzzwords in social media circles. It's the idea that by making non-gaming applications more game-like -- by adding points,

How do you motivate students who don't care about grades? You take a turn with badges in education and see how different results can come about.

The study of roleplaying games has remained a small and somewhat separate tradition within game studies writ large. Yet roleplaying games arguably defined and influenced many design elements of today’s digital games, and constitute a formational experience for many influential digital game designers. More importantly, the peculiarities of non-digital roleplaying games as a socially shared effort of imagination, storytelling, simulation, and gaming have generated insights that have much to offer to the wider field of game studies.

Kaplan University's School of Information Technology is expanding its gamification and badging efforts following positive results from a recently conducted pilot program.