According to the Oxford dictionary, the definition of Gamification is: “The application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.”
The application of Gamification in the educational context can increase motivational learning in students. Some Gamified educational apps and programs that have successfully transitioned into effective and popular options for learners are Play Brighter, Ribbon Hero, and Duolingo. All three have successfully managed to be integrated into everyday life schooling and as activities.
Play Brighter is a tool to help students learn whilst having fun at the same time in a classroom setting or at home with homework. The program allows teachers to create their own questions and or choose from 15,000 premade questions that can all perfectly line up with the student’s lessons and curriculum. Play Brighter allows the teacher to set ‘missions’ challenging students in specific topics and subtopics. With the combination of ‘missions’ and anime style visuals Play Brighter is a fun and entertaining way for students to engage in learning.
Success leads to reward: when successfully completed a ‘mission’ students will be rewarded with an in-game currency which they can spend on customizing their avatar which accompanies the student throughout the challenges.
Released in 2011, Ribbon Hero is an add-on game that provides the users to become well versed in the ways of Microsoft Office. Users are provided with different challenges that will focus on 4 specific programs such as Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. The challenges and tasks will focus on text manipulation, artistic presentation, page design and layout amongst many others. Allowing Students and users to become familiarised with Microsoft Office as it is considered a basic demand of employers.
Ribbon Hero allows users to achieve points by completing tasks in the application with the option to earn double points by applying what the student has learned on the actual Microsoft Office programs.
Language learning is split into small skills that feel like mini-games, you lose lives when you incorrectly answer a question teaching the student patients and discipline at the same time. The main goal is to learn the languages but every time you successfully complete a task you can gain points the more points provides you with a greater understanding of where you rank in regards to learning the language.
My Experiences and opinions:
Personally I have experience Duolingo and Ribbon Hero first hand. I was introduced to Duolingo in my Gamified Media class at university and conveniently I was interested in learning my mum’s native tongue polish, naturally, my interest conveniently peaked. In the beginning, I found it very rewarding gaining points when completing the language learning tasks, but at the same time, it was very easy to lose interest when difficulties increased which lead to mistakes being made and lives lost. Duolingo also struggles to be informative and lacks conversational structures that may apply to real world conversations leading me to believe that the actual game is fine but definitly could be improved to allowed constant engagement. Ribbon Hero, I used in 2012 in high school to improve my Microsoft office skills. Personally, I felt that this gamified application could be really effective with younger learners as it has a fantasy like story line that continues as the user completes the tasks. Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah (2013, p100) addresses that “Despite attempts to use gamification in schools, it remains challenging to fully engage students in classroom-based activities.” I believe this is true, I believe that there is still a struggle with completely engaging students with gamified media for education. When something like learning a language seems endless with not very many alternating methods of learning I feel interest can easily be lost as it feels endless whereas a game like Ribbon Hero definitely feels like there is an ending which in my opinion motivates me more. I look forward to experiencing PlayBrighter and hopefully hearing positive things.
Referencing:
Gamification (April 26 2019) Youtube video, added by Art Oliver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=funDwaRAmAE
accessed Friday April 26 2019
Nah, F.F.H., Telaprolu, V.R., Rallapalli, S. and Venkata, P.R., 2013, July. Gamification of education using computer games. In International Conference on Human Interface and the Management of Information (pp. 99-107). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
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