This week we are examining gamification. As much as I am about getting kids outside and engaging in nature during the weekend the statistics on gaming cannot be ignored. Gaming plays a huge part in the lives of so many of our students, how can we hook into this and utilize this passion in education? The following reading provides a useful set of guidelines for 'gamifying' activities - as I thought not all activities are suitable for gamification and not all games have value.
http://www.journalofplay.org/issues/7/1/article/2-video-games-play-can-do-serious-good
Here are some interesting parallels I noticed between gaming and education:
-Rewards: The guidelines for rewards in games are the same guidelines I follow for my behaviour management system - extrinsic rewards are motivational as long as they are rewarded randomly, and the players have the understanding that their next positive action may lead to a reward "reinforcement
must come at proper intervals and in proper relationship to in-game events.... because the individual never knows exactly when the next reward
will come, he or she is strongly motivated to keep at the task."
-Task difficulty: Task difficulty was also closely related to engagement with the game - it needed to provide sufficient challenge but also be easy enough for the player to maintain hope of success.
My wondering: At the end of the article I was left wondering about this....
Skill development: Typically when someone develops a specific skill they are not easily able to transfer this skill to a different context. However early research on users of action based games has actually shown that their cognitive processing skills are improved after playing some action games "The results thus far are consistent with
the overarching idea that games that constantly challenge different aspects of
perception, attention, and cognition in a variety of contexts are likely to result
in enhancements of these base abilities."
It would certainly be interesting to see the evidence of this in real life, e.g. students who love Minecraft transferring these skills into designing 3D models for production or actually building something in class.
