CBC’s The Current had a recent story about Gamification: Creating new education tools by applying video games to classroom learning.
Here are my thoughts on that. While I totally agree that the word gamification is a misnomer like edutainment, and better described as game based learning, I am not sure I am totally down with it. I understand that for younger learners, the idea of game based learning is beneficial. Much like working with wood objects to represent squares and circles, or using marbles to show how addition works, the digital form has it’s place.
But does the idea of letting students at all levels have full access to any game and say that minecraft can help work? How does a non educational game help learn the history of the Benzentine Empire? Rewarding someone for intrinsically learning is called an A. The real world does not let you continue to try to do over an exam until you get it right. We need to let students fail and learn. Otherwise we will have a workforce that expects all work to be game based. Really… you can make a case for everything and make numbers support any cause.
A gamer culture might be there, but it is not the way the business world works. Just because we like to socially interact and entertain ourselves with games does not mean that we need and have to spread that to all forms of action.
I think that yes there might be a place for some game based learning, but to think this is the be all and end all of learning just reaks like other failed ‘new’ learning methods.
Life is not a game.
If you can struggle past the speaking of the interviewed inflection voices, it is an interesting listen.
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