We love games! One of the best memories of my undergrad was winning a Kahoot game in a lecture of 350+ people. I thought back to that moment when we were talking about gamification of education and remembered that at one point, I knew I had a chance to win the whole thing and I also knew that bonus points are awarded for answering the questions as fast as possible. I answered without looking at the options knowing that I needed those bonus points to put myself over the top to win the game, got lucky and took my victory lap. I thought about how it didn’t matter to me that I got the question right, which was obviously the point of the quiz: to test my knowledge. Instead, I only cared about winning the game (don’t blame me though, there was a full-size Kit-Kat on the line). Regardless, I thought about the reasons we include games for educational purposes. If it’s just to keep students engaged than there’s no issue here, but it’s worth much more than that. Gamification is designed to enhance the learning of students while keeping them engaged and I think that’s an important distinction that we need to be cognizant of. If the students aren’t learning anything, then playing games is worthless time-wasting.
With all that being said, I will concede that I do like the idea of using gamified learning, of course with the reservation that it should always be ingrained in material that is relevant to the class. For instance, I’m an English teacher and I would use quiz apps like Kahoot, Quizzizz or flash card apps like quizlet for something like vocabulary. One way around the personal instance I described of just answering without looking is to avoid multiple choice questions or picking apps that don’t use time considerations for points. Especially in situations using vocabulary, open responses are important so that spelling becomes a factor for students as well.
