When I was a kid, games and studies used to be two separate worlds. Life was simple, there was time allocated to games, stretched usually every day, and time for studies. School was more or less only for studies for most of the students. There were lessor options in both the categories and both were serious businesses. Both the parts of a kid’s life were not competing significantly with each other. As I see today, schools have become slightly more interesting and games or entertainment part has massively grown and with enormous options. Games, fun and other activities are far more exciting than education or learning. Children need motivation to study and learn. They need to be engaged in learning activities. They need to be focused from the distractions all around them. Gamification is one of the answers to the challenge faced by today’s schools.
As per Wikipedia, Gamification is defined as
“Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems. Gamification is applied to improve user engagement, return on investment, data quality, timeliness, and learning.”
In this series, we will try to answer questions around Gamification in education. What is Gamification, why Gamification in education is required, how Gamification can be applied to education and what are the advantages and disadvantages of Gamification.
What Gamification exactly means? How different is it from games? This is a very fundamental question and as described above, Gamification is not introducing games. At the core of the games is, either you lose or you win, whereas, Gamification is all about participation. Gamification is about an environment where involvement not result is rewarded. At the same time, it does not mean to digress from the core business of learning. Rather, Gamification is used to increase the involvement and participation in the learning processes.
Though the term Gamification may be new but it is not new in education. It has been in education in some form. For example, giving points or badges for completing homework or classwork correctly. Another example could be to give a quote from some renowned person and asking students to put punctuations in that. It is same as teaching the use of comma but now in a different perspective.
-Krishan B Chandak