Infographic: About the Gamification of Education

A great game player has all the good characters that schools desire to see from their students. What elements of gaming can we harness for educational purposes? This is an excellent infographic putting together key information about gamifying learning. You will find a short history of gamified learning. The summary from MIT’s paper “Moving Learning Games Forward” highlights all the gaming functions that can be integrated into education(with examples). The full whitepaper can be download here. A very important point made by MIT “The Education Arcade” is quoted here:

One might assume that the purpose of games in education is to keep kids engaged (i.e. to bribe them to learn), or at best, to teach them wholly new 21st century skills. What is missing is the insight that play and exploration have always been the way we construct new ideas and concepts, and that building such a scaffold of interconnected ideas has always been the source of our deepest knowledge and wisdom. This approach to learning does not just apply to generic cognitive skills such as problem solving, but also applies to traditional academic disciplines such as math, science, and history. Successful practitioners in these areas have always engaged in playful and inspired ways of thinking and learning that look nothing like the rote memorization and repetition we call “school.”

Thanks for this work from Knewton.

Tagged as: game-based learning, gamification of education, gamify learning, gaming