It’s pretty often we hear about “gamifying” learning… Taking aspects typically related to gaming such as prizes, leaderboards, immediate feedback, and mastery learning, and apply them to learning contexts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gamifying works in a lot of use cases to varying degrees of success, but a common apprehension is that sometimes gamification can feel forced or superficial. This is a common result of trying to shoehorn something like recalling declarative knowledge into the context of a game simply for gamification’s sake. Sure, you may have put a leaderboard up to show who has the best declarative knowledge, but have you really captured the imagination of your audience, and made them feel as if they have agency and choice in the way in which they progress? Likely not. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the other hand, there are projects like Minecraft Education. It’s one of the first truly successful projects I’ve come across in which a successful gaming franchise (to say the least) has adapted its engine and taken the time to create meaningful lessons in the context of the game itself. Minecraft’s original game thesis – an open-world sandbox where exploration and construction are two of the main activities in the game – lends itself perfectly to education topic adoption, and its 8-bit style graphics mean even the frustratingly slow Google Chromebook can run it almost seamlessly. I could see this platform as being ripe for open-source lesson creation, or extensions or other mods that could be offered by the commercial platform to further round out the product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m not sure how I feel about more and more learning becoming “gamified” since it distracts students further from the intrinsic rewards of learning. Will we eventually reach a point where no young student truly engages with a learning opportunity unless accessed through a gamified program?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In any case, please take a look at just how robust this resource has become, and consider looking into implementing it into your classroom. Even my high schoolers love this!<\/p>\n\n\n\n