Teenagers spend hours on end playing online games and solving problems. This has been tapped by educators to introduce video games that can be applied to education and retention enhancement, says Sameer Sikka
Gamification in learning is fast emerging as an effective technique to engage learners. It uses visual storytelling, feedback, and visual cues to make it measurable and engaging. Essentially, gamification transforms learning experiences by implementing gaming techniques into educational topics.
According to an Australian study, playing online games may boost teenagers’ school results while spending time on social networks such as Facebook could do the opposite. The research, based on the performance of 15-year-old in the globally recognised Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, looked at the relationship between internet usage and educational outcomes.
They concluded that ‘students who play online games almost every day score 15 points above the average in Maths and 17 points above the average in science.’
In this digital era, such interactive modes of education have augmented a learner’s performance and experience, finding its place under the sun. Today, the youth spend hours playing games and problem-solving, and tapping this, researchers and educators recommend this technique as a way to harness video-games’ power for motivation and apply it to the education.
Meeting specified learning outcome, video games as a learning tool operates with a level of engagement that can be translated to an educational context towards the goals of facilitating learning. The adoption of this method has created immersive learning experiences for varied training needs like professional skills enhancement, soft skill enhancement, compliance, and behaviour change programs.
What it does
The techniques strive to leverage people’s natural desires for socialising, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, or closure. Educators have built strategies that include use of rewards for players who accomplish desired tasks or competition to engage players. Types of rewards include achievement badges, completion of levels, filling the progress bar, points, or using virtual currency to entice the user.
Making the learner’s achievements and rewards visible to other players are ways to encourage players and compete, with an ultimately goal to help them excel in the particular task or skill.
Benefits
Enhances learning experience: The learner can experience a fun factor when the level of engagement is high. A good gamification strategy will have higher levels of engagement leading to better retention and recall.
Instant feedback and greater accountability: One of the greatest advantages of interactive modes of learning is that it provides instant feedback. learners know what they know or what they should know. For effective learning, a constant cycle of feedback and assessment is imperative. This game based learning technique facilitates better learner engagement; consequently contribute to better retention and recall.
Better learning environment: Gamification in education provides an effective, informal learning environment, and helps learners practice and face real life challenges and situation in a safe and controlled environment. This inculcates a more engaged and enriched learning experience that enables better knowledge retention.
Driving behavioural change: Rewards, badges, points and leader-boards motivate and encourage learners. However, these are merely surface level benefits. Gamification can prompt strong behavioural change especially when combined with the scientific principles of repeated retrieval, spaced repetition and constant feedback and assessment.
Applicable for most learning needs — hard skills and soft skills: Gamification can be used to fulfill most learning needs including soft kills, customer support, awareness creation, product sales, and compliance.
Experience
Through progress indicators, learning becomes visible. On account of all these aspects that impact the learner, such interactive tools for education can create a significant performance gain and learning experience for student.
With the advent of technology, there has been a paradigm shift in the educational space. We live in a digitised world, where we expect everything to be interactive and instant.
According to a study by Microsoft, the human attention span is merely eight seconds. This is why we need such prolific and robust learning modes to enhance the recall and retention.
With the numerous advantages of game-based learning over traditional techniques, it is imperative to revise the ways of delivering learning and formulates learning strategies that are in tune with the modern day leaner.
let’s deconstruct the fun in any good game — what makes it enjoyableIJ It is the built-in challenge, sense of achievement, pitting our strength against real or virtual competitors, as well as the underlying, subconscious learning process. When we are actively engaged with a game, our minds experience the pleasure of grappling with and coming to understand a new system. When learning is woven into a game, educators create value for the earners by providing an engaging memorable journey for the learner, and helping subconscious internalisation of learning.
This can be a game-changer in enhancing learning in an environment, grappling with information explosion, and continuously depleting attention spans. Games are powerful as learning tools, because they help in transplanting the learner in a world, leaving behind is rational, self, which has immense barriers to change. When immersed in a game, educators can potentially link directly and suggest positive learning signals to the learner’s subconscious.
Harnessing the power of well-designed games to achieve specific learning goals, can result in highly motivated learners who avidly engage with and practice applying problem-solving skill.
Mobile games will be the fastest growing sub-segment of India’s video games consumer market through 2018, with a projected CAGR of 19.7 per cent. Online games revenue will also continue to grow, from $40mn in 2013 to $79mn in 2018, a CAGR of 14.3 per cent. Console games revenue in India was $161mn in 2013, and will reach $305mn in 2018, a CAGR of 13.6 per cent. The implications of delivering game experiences for education and training are enormous. In the US, nearly 170 million people played computer and video games in 2008, spending a record $11.7 billion.
(The writer is co-founder and ClO iAugmentor labs Pvt ltd)