Gamification in edcuation - a real life example

I am living in Spain since September and trying to give my best to learn Spanish, no matter if outside the university or within the classes.

Being just 4 people in class, we all have to participate but at the end it doesn’t matter what your answer is, they are no points for right answers. But in my last session things changed… Being 2 Germans and 2 Italians we split in two groups and everything we did turned out to be a Competition.

We played 3 games…

The first two have been related to “por/para” and each group had to create questions for the others. Every correct answer was worth a point and resulted in thinking more about answers and questions, simply to beat the others.

This kind of incentive resulted in a Leaderboard in which unfortunately the Italians have been leading.

But in the final game we still had the chance to turn it around. Every time one of the team members had to go to the board, received a sentence including the usage of “por/para” as well as past tenses, had to draw it while the other was trying to figure out the words, forms and order.

Due to being in a competition, trying to win the challenge with receiving the last missing points everybody was focused on the point and tried to be as fast and precise as possible.

Linking this real life experience to business we can see at http://www.duolingo.com how to use gamification in the education business. Loosing hearts for giving incorrect answers, practice against the clock and move up the “duolingo leaderboard” while learning Spanish at the same time…

By the way the German team won the game at the end but all of us gamified their Spanish J

Enterprise Gamification Design (5)

Step 5: Manage, Monitor and Measure

Managing, monitoring and measuring are essential elements in order to run a program. Indeed, gamification is and has to be run like that. The players motivation has to be monitored at the same time as the mission needs to be managed in order to achieve the goals aimed thanks to specific mechanics that have to be measured continuously.

However these three crucial elements are not alone. We also have to mention that in any enterprise, there are several ethical and legal issues that we have to take into consideration because they have a direct impact on gamification. Nowadays we often hear about users' privacy and users' protection. The same rules apply for workers. Though they can change from a country to another from a legal point of view. Any project undertaken in any company requires a certain level of ethic. Therefore, ethic in gamification becomes another crucial element of any project. Gamification is not a tool to manipulate worker, it is only used to motivate and engage workers.

Thus gamification can be identified as a process wherein the worker is considered as a player and wherein the goal of the process is to the player to feel positive emotions such as trust, fun and delight.

Enterprise Gamification Design (4)

STEP 4: APPLY MECHANICS

Now that everything is clear, it is the time to develop games mechanics. So, let’s see which mechanics are the best for enterprise software.

Points

They are the center of all mechanics, all the users’ actions are recorded as points. They have their own meaning in different platforms, for example, the points in Nike+app are miles that you have run in a specific period of time.

Badges

When the users are performing really well on the platform, getting virtual achievements in the process is the motivation behind. That is the way to engage the users to spend more time in the website, giving them badges if they complete a task or complete n task in a row.

Leaderboards

Now that they are spending more time on the website, it’s time to let them compete against other users or friends. This is one of the most powerful gamification mechanics, making users invite their friends to the platform and play with them.

Challenges

Users want to work to achieve something great and something bigger than themselves. For instance, the University of Washington’s center for game science worked together with the Biochemistry department and the result is Foldit. It allows users to play and complete various protein structures that will help researches to find different cures for several viruses around the world.

You can see here this innovative application in action.