Generally, I’m not really big on gamification. I do try to keep an open mind though. Recently, I experienced something that reinforces my “open mind” policy. Whilst driving back from Virginia, I was reminded why.

Usually, “gamification”, at least in education, involves turning everything into a game. I still don’t believe that any one strategy or method will be the “silver bullet” of education. Rather, using a variety of strategies is what really good teachers do. Edutopia has a nice write up of gamification. Notice that one one teacher “completely gamified his sixth grade classroom”.

My youngest daughter has graduated from the University of Virginia. I’m really proud of her. She’s grown a ton in four years and is a smart, intelligent caring adult. Next up, she will be heading off to Berkeley. In the meantime, I was off to collect her and her things. This meant a road trip.

I fired up Waze. Waze is the “world’s largest community based navigation app”. I usually use this for a couple of reasons:

  1. The app provides alerts to upcoming traffic slow downs.
  2. The app provides alerts to law enforcement professions.
  3. The app gives some positive feedback to participating.

However, when I opened up the app, I was given an error message. “The routing server” couldn’t be contacted. Bummer. I fired up another service, got my route and started off. (Interestingly, I know the way to Virginia by now. The GPS service is mostly a comfort level or habit.) Yet, I kept trying Waze periodically. Eventually, Waze figured out a route and I kept Waze as the front most app.

This same set of circumstances played out again on my return from Virginia. Once again, Waze couldn’t find a route. I opened another GPS app and started off. But, I refreshed Waze every once in a while until it found a route.

For some reason, the positive feedback from the app was enough to get me to return to the app even though it failed in the beginning and another app worked perfectly fine.

This reminds me of being in the classroom. At one point, I taught in a lock up facility. The kids were locked up for a variety of reasons. Most of them were between 14 and 18 years old. These were mostly kids from the streets. Kids that had a hard life. One of the other teachers had a whole passel of stickers. Cheap, cartoonish, elementary style stickers. I kind of laughed. I asked what the stickers were for. The teacher responded “the kids”. Really, cartoonish stickers for kids from the streets? Stickers for kids who were older than 14 and had committed crimes? Yep. A few days later, I bought my first bunch of stickers.

I’ve written about badges in Moodle. How sometimes I found myself doing something extra to get a badge. This is how I think that gamification can actually work. It may not work for everyone, but creating positive feedback can be powerful.

For some students, gamification can truly make a difference. For some, they just won’t care much. It’s not a silver bullet, but it may be an extremely useful strategy.