Improve Learning through Gamification: How Can the Use of Gamification in Education Help Students Succeed?

Gamification learning is about integrating gaming elements and principles with learning content. The use of such a design in a non-gaming context has become quite popular over the years. Take a very simple example – kids nowadays are given online assignments or quizzes in school where they need to score virtual points when they complete multiple tasks in one level before moving onto the next.

A word derived from 'game'; gamification uses processes and activities similar to gaming elements and can be used in varying perspectives. Such gamification elements are being used to a greater extent these days for several reasons in the education industry. On the face of it, gamification helps bring in a fun element to learning, potentially driving higher student engagement.

Gamification and Learning

The way technology has progressed in the past decade is amazing. 95% of employees love gaming-related elements in work. It has changed how we work, play, live, and learn. The objective is to make education interesting, helping students learn new things and engagingly gain more information.

Involving games in learning appeals to human nature; we all love to play games, as kids or adults. With the help of technology, it has reached a new level. Games help in situation learning, driving immersive experiences, especially in group learning. Games help promote better collaboration, communication, cooperation, and problem-solving, bringing a competitive spirit amongst students and participants. Some forms of gamification help encourage the imaginative powers of the participants. Gaming elements in learning can also be used to test participants.

Integrating gaming elements in learning could involve reward systems like scoring points or gaining badges, leadership boards, competition, storytelling, feedback, and more.

Uses of Gamification in Learning

Here are some of the top benefits:

• Learning becomes fun and engaging.
• A feeling of ownership sets in students.
• The fear of failure is lessened as it offers scope to students to improve their performance.
• Gamification drives immersive learning. It encourages students to think out of the box and use their grey cells better.
• Gamification has the potential to drive higher concentration levels.
• Since most students today are used to playing games online, gamification makes students comfortable and drives proactive participation.

How Can Gamification be Used in Education?

Gamification can be used in different scenarios in the classroom and outside too. Here are few scenarios:

1. Challenges help students move from one level to another. The challenges or the barriers could be related to a subject or could be behaviour-oriented, moral-related, logic-based, etc.
2. Setting up a competitive spirit in the students – for example, students get awarded for meeting certain criteria or following the teacher's rules. The competition could be set on a student-to-student basis and student-to-teacher basis.
3. Students get scores when they meet academic or non-academic goals. Gamification concepts can be used to give scores to students depending on their participation in class, the format of their answers to questions for assessing academic performance. For non-academic assessment, students can be rated on how punctual they are to the class, their absenteeism record, submitting assignments on time, etc.
4. Gamification can be used to assess problem-solving and critical-thinking skills by putting them into a subject-based game. Students can be presented with multiple situations, data, details and encouraged to make decisions. Based on their decisions, they proceed ahead to another level and get awarded points or get stuck in the level.
5. Students can grade or score their work after setting up their goals and tracking them through gamification.
6. Offering badges to award students based on their performance, while on the face of it, might seem to be childish, but in real life, it does a lot of good to the child's confidence levels. Not just schools, even colleges are adopting such tactics. Western Oklahoma State College awards different kinds of badges to students based on their knowledge of using Dropbox, for example.
7. With the help of gamification, students get immediate feedback and also little rewards. These act as great motivators for students to better their performance.
8. Gamification of homework is another effective use of technology. Students' engagement and curiosity levels are encouraged with embedded gaming elements in homework, giving way to effective learning.

How Does Gamification Improve Learning?

The use of gamification by many from the teaching fraternity has proven that it helps improve student participation and engagement. Many teachers who have used gamification in their classroom have noticed:

• Considerably increased student talk time.
• Increased participation in completing homework assignments.
• Increased attendance of students in the classroom and eagerness to begin the class or start their learning session.
• Enhanced performance and augmented results vis-a-vis traditional teaching methods.

Teachers have noticed that they can successfully teach their students concepts and lessons way faster than traditional methods – in some cases, things that they could teach the students in 14 to 18 months using standard methods could be taught within ten months using gamification.

Conclusion

Various studies have shown that gamification helps create an active learning ecosystem in the classroom, at home, or online. It has been observed that, to a great extent, gaming elements help students move away from the conventional learning model where they learn to succeed or get marks. With such interesting and fun elements, students are keen to learn for their own sake. Sometimes, teachers start a chapter with a game to let the student get fascinated with the topic. If optimally used, such elements promote retention of knowledge in students that could help students be motivated enough to learn the topic, not just for rewards, but with the genuine purpose of gaining knowledge.

Studies have also proved that gamification makes studies less intimidating and stressful. There is joy, fun, and curiosity with gaming elements, making students comfortable and looking forward to the learning session.

Introducing gaming elements in learning can offer numerous benefits like reducing study-related stress, motivating students to learn actively, and helps increase attention span.