Caution! Gamification in use

It looks like the trend to apply new learning strategies in the classroom is on the rise. Almost every company uses gamification for different purposes such as human resources management, customer loyalty, etc., and in the educational field, we are not far behind. In this area, gamification may become an open door to multiple resources when well-designed.

A great variety of online learning systems use gamification, and the internet is full of gamified learning experiences. The biggest problem, as it usually happens in these cases, is that when information invades us, so does disinformation. Regarding classrooms, gamification starts with the inclusion of some playful elements which will have a fundamental role in the main objective of the game: motivation. However, and this is important, applying playful elements does not mean "playing".

Although the use of these game elements in non-playful contexts might somehow seems to be fun and easy to do, its implementation in an educational environment might suffer from being reduced to scoreboards. Simple as it may sound, game designers should make their way to mastery in order to avoid the risk of failure. Furthermore, and, despite many training courses on gamification being framed beyond the "active methodologies" label, the high variety of possibilities its implementation offers makes almost impossible for it to be classified as a methodology.

To sum up, gamification results to be a system with such a complex structure that every element should be well-connected to be effective and we should bear that in mind when applying it to education. Also, gamification activities do not follow an exact structure. On the contrary, each example is normally designed for a concrete occasion. Therefore, instructors might only select the elements of a game that make it useful for the context in which it is going to be used. In this regard, and after witnessing two fantastic examples that some classmates performed in our Master classes, I would say that we are talking about very complicated processes here: the creation and adaptation of a game to a specific didactic unit, audience and level. So much so, that I find it very difficult to use it in a class with an average duration of about 50 minutes.

In conclusion, it appears it should be easy to make mistakes in the process of adapting games and to get the opposite outcome to the one expected. For that reason, we as teachers need to be very careful with the use of certain techniques, and, as well as be aware that a continuous process of training should be a must for us.

That's what this game is about.