The Dangers of Gamifying Education

Written by on July 8, 2011 in Education, Tech - 7 Comments

Studying

As someone involved in education and interested in innovative approaches to learning, I was intrigued when I first heard of a movement to bring game design concepts into education. Educators and video game designers are teaming up to ‘gamify’ the classroom. For example, Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, has founded a company called Speed to Learn that is creating video games with educational missions. Other game designers have created games to teach math, reading, and even U.S. history. At first glance, the movement to make education more exciting and interactive seems like a reasonable solution to engage students who are bored or do not participate proactively. For subjects like spelling or math, games may make it easier for students to memorize difficult words or multiplication tables. As the gamification movement spreads through other aspects of our lives, it comes as no surprise that people are searching for ways to make school more fun and effective.

Despite these potential benefits, the gamification trend worries me for a couple of reasons. First, students may start to expect that many or all lessons will come in game form. This expectation that schooling should be turned into a series of games is troubling because of the qualities of video games. Games are entertaining. They are fast. If you get stuck playing a game, you can almost always go back and retry a level or reset the game. Education can be fun, but it is rarely rapid. When a student cannot figure out a complicated math problem or struggles to find the right word in an essay, she cannot press the reset button. In school, students often have to think hard and try a number of different strategies before they find one that works. This process is time-consuming and it requires focus, but it is also how people master skills. Games move so quickly and can be paused so easily that it is doubtful any student would sit and struggle with a complicated problem for very long. The ability to concentrate for a long period of time is one of the most important traits of the educated person, but it is a skill that is not valued in the gaming world.

Finally, and perhaps most worryingly, the gamification trend may devalue subjects that cannot be turned into games. Students may avoid subjects that do not lend themselves to gamification like philosophy, English, and civics. How many students would want to debate solutions to global poverty or write an essay reflecting on Shakespeare or Fitzgerald when they  could play a game in another class? Educational games will always struggle to help students develop creativity, the ability to form and present original opinions, and the capacity to understand another person’s point of view–skills that are important to every child’s development as a student and as a human being. Although innovation in education is always welcome, students are more likely to learn and develop successful habits through books, not video games.

Nabil Hashmi

Nabil Hashmi is Vice President of Education for Compass Partners, an organization that provides resources, training, and support to students who aspire to become social entrepreneurs. At Compass, Nabil develops curricula that train college students to develop the mindset of social entrepreneurs and to launch their own social ventures. He received his BSFS from Georgetown University, and is especially passionate about social entrepreneurship in international development. In addition to contributing to Social Earth, Nabil blogs at Compass, and you can follow him on Twitter at @nabilhashmi.

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  • http://www.matmi.com Matmi

    Hi,

    I can see from an educators point of view how the term ‘gamify education’ might worry you (I too was once a teacher, for my sins :) )

    However, I think you may have been reading the wrong type of material on the subject of gamification, particularly when it comes to Education. If anyone ever tells you that we want to ‘gamify’ you teacher by throwing in a bunch of games into subjects, ignore them. A proper case of education combined with gamification (I really hate that term) is about a fundamental change to the whole educational system. It’s about adding a game MECHANICS layer underneath everything you already do, and so working no matter what the subject. Sure, some subjects lend themselves more readily to adding in actual more recognised games but that is not the be all and end all of gamification.

    Think of the things you already do for pupils. Reward systems you put in place, maybe you have class league tables etc.. these are already a form of adding game mechanics to everyday life. The process of gamifying (adding a more complex system of game mechanics) to education is more of a revolutionary change to teaching. One that aims at bringing back into the fold the disenfranchised and un-motivated pupils, as well as adding an extra incentive and challenge for al pupils to succeed.

    If you look around, you will notice that many aspects of our everyday life are governed by some form of game mechanics. It about using base human psychology to alter behaviour by full-filling base needs (the top 3 needs of Maslow’s Hierarchy).

    So please, don’t give up on the idea of adding a layer/system of game mechanics to the classroom just yet.

    Email me if you would like to know more or want some examples.

    Thanks again for the thought provoking article. It is still always good to find someone critiquing the ‘buzz’ word of the year. Otherwise we would follow like zombies and head over the cliff without question :)

  • http://milwaukeemakerspace.org Brant

    Hi Nabil,

    First off, great read! I was doing a search on Twitter for the @ExtraCreditz video on Gamifying Education and I found your article. Full disclosure: I want to disagree with you because I believe education should be taken in new directions, however I also want to give other ideas a chance so I read what you wrote. I’m 28 and my parents are both grade school teachers. I’m an engineer right now, but I want to teach high school physics someday. Why? Because I caught the bug early on; it’s something I want to do. Learning can be fun and others deserve a chance to find that out.

    I think you have some very valid concerns and anyone who tries to adopt these new ideas to their lesson plans will have to tackle them. Hopefully educators and even parents will learn from discussions like yours and avoid the pitfalls before they even get into trouble.

    I’m not sure I completely agree with the statement that, “Games are entertaining. They are fast. If you get stuck playing a game, you can almost always go back and retry a level or reset the game.” Have you ever played a game that takes thirty, forty, or even eighty hours to complete? Have you ever been stuck on one boss battle for several hours spread over a week or more? I don’t see how resetting the game and starting over is any different than scrapping a whole line of thinking and starting over. Learning is iterative and so is problem-solving. You take what you’ve tried so far and apply it to a new approach. Your statement that “The ability to concentrate for a long period of time is one of the most important traits of the educated person, but it is a skill that is not valued in the gaming world” is only true for some people and situations, it’s definitely not the case for all individuals.

    “Students may avoid subjects that do not lend themselves to gamification…” Yeah, I completely agree that’s a real dilemma. There are some topics that just do not lend themselves immediately to this approach and it’s up to everyone to try and find the balance between new and old ways of teaching. This will be a real struggle ahead.

    “Although innovation in education is always welcome, students are more likely to learn and develop successful habits through books, not video games.” The problem here is that the majority of kids (and their parents) aren’t reading books. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Simply encouraging students to read more because books may teach you better study habits isn’t enough, and I’m not sure it ever was. We have to find way to incentivise learning so people want to put in the effort. When I was eight years old I didn’t want to sit down and learn about grammar and geography, I wanted to run around outside and play video games. It didn’t matter that studying would better prepare me to be a contributing member of society, I was eight and I didn’t care about those things. I doubt kids (eight or eighteen) have changed that much since the early 90s.

    Again, great article. I probably would have never considered some of the possible downsides to these new ideas on my own. Thanks for challenging myself and others to look before we leap!

    -Brant

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  • Andy

    Are you saying that if a game may make you a better mathematician, you should reject it because it is simultaneously drawing you away from philosophy? Really? And not all games are fast paced (chess, WOW), nor do they all have only micro objectives. The good games have a mixture of short and long term objectives. They require quick reflexes, strategic thinking and creative thinking. MMORPG’s have quests that require and teach teamwork skills, investigative skills, leadership skills.  Successful games are not simply those with the most entertainment value (which is a ridiculous oversimplification), they are the ones with the most creative and believable simulations, the ones that provide progressive reward through recognition, and most importantly – they are the games that provide constant difficult yet achievable challanges.

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  • http://twitter.com/jamornh Jamorn Horathai

    I agree that if a school have classes that have been gamified and classes that have not, the students would prefer classes that are gamified as opposed to the ones that are not. However, your assertions that some subjects simply cannot be gamified is unfounded. Gamification of the classroom is just starting to gain traction so who knows whether some subjects can or cannot be gamified. We’ve seen games that require and teaches multiple subjects and skills: deduction, strategy, math, problem solving, leadership, management, etc. I believe there’s a possibility that most, if not all, subjects can be gamified which will increase engagement of students in all these classes. Simply dismissing the idea at this early a stage is just lazy thinking. I’m not saying that there is no risk in doing it wrongly, but there’s also a risk in doing medicine wrongly. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look for all ways we can use this new tool to improve the current system.

  • http://twitter.com/MisterProto Andrew Proto

    This post has shone a spotlight on many of the misconceptions surrounding gamification, the biggest being equating it to using games in the classroom.  While games are a part of a gamified classroom they are merely one tool that supporters of gamification can use.  A gamified classroom isn’t about games anymore then a traditional classroom is about listening to lectures.
    Gamification itself is a term that is hotly debated with some researchers preferring the term “motivational design”. And at it’s core this is what it is really about — motivation.  Gamification takes game mechanics (e.g. extrinsic reward systems, narrative structure, secret information, scaled challenges, etc…) and applies them to non-gaming endeavors. 
    I’m in the midst of writing much more extensively on this topic,  you can find my lastest piece here: http://gamification.co/2011/11/09/the-gamified-classroom-2/ hopefully that will clear some things up for you. I also recomend Lee & Hammer’s piece about Gamification that appeared in Academic Exchange Quarterly. The full text of it can be found here: http://www.gamifyingeducation.org/files/Lee-Hammer-AEQ-2011.pdf

    One last thing; Games aren’t easy. We play them for the challenge they present. If that wasn’t so the holes on golf courses would be much wider.