Playing with Education

When I think back onto my educational background, the only thing I remember that even slightly resembled a “game” would be FCAT Explorer. Granted, I did go to grade school in the late 90’s early 2000’s when games were just starting to make their way into education. Since then, the “gamification” of classrooms has become a huge topic of interest for educators and researchers. What initially intrigued educators to incorporate game-like qualities into their teaching method was the fact that games such as World of Warcraft and Farmville manage to attract and maintain the active engagement of their millions of players on a daily basis and for several hours at a time.

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Gamification attempts to harness the motivational power of games and apply it to real-world problems – such as, in our case, the motivational problems of schools. Motivation and engagement are major challenges for the American educational system(Bridgeland, Dilulio, & Morison, 2006). American schools also face a shockingly high dropout rate:approximately 1.2 million students fail to graduate from high school each year (All4Ed, 2010).

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When designed correctly, games can be used as a new and exciting platform to motivate learners and effectively aid students in achieving mastery of the common standards defined for their age-level. This does not mean to imply that all of the games utilized must be ones created specifically for a subject area, such as Foldit where students can design their own proteins. Actually, there is a vast gaming market where one could find almost any game needed to tie into their standard-oriented lesson.

The end goal is to use games in the classroom in order to transfer all of the positive qualities of gamers, “attention to detail, problem-solving skills, higher level reading comprehension, collaboration, persistence, reaction to feedback, engagement, understanding”, over to the educational sphere of students’ lives. Although this sounds perfectly reasonable and achievable, there are some that have their hesitations on whether allowing the incorporation of gaming, therefore more freedom, into the classroom will result in negative management related issues.

Watch this short TedED video on Gamification of Education taken from the 2011 Microsoft Innovative Education Forum and decide for yourself.

-Class Dismissed-