What if I say the games can improve your kid’s intellectual ability, problem-solving skills, and critical thinking? Curious on that?
Games maketh life.
Gamification is the term coined for applying elements of gaming to numerous non-gaming platforms to increase productivity and capability. Gamification has had a long and enriching past ever since it was born in 2002. It has gained more fame and is now being used as a useful tool in many businesses, industries, educational institutes, etc. Progress bars in LinkedIn for profile completion, rewards in Starbucks for regular purchases, and gifting a fragment of a puzzle for buying chocolate bars are a few real-life scenarios of gamification used in our day-to-day lives.
Coming back to education, gamification still needs more exploration in the Indian educational system. The objective of gamification in learning and development is to encourage both enjoyment and engagement through the learning experience by capturing the attention of learners and motivating them to continue learning. We can have both video gaming, nonvideo gaming, or a hybrid model to form teachers’ own gamified strategy to help students learn their topics. Even so, they can have different gaming plans based on the interests of students.
Learning or Gaming?
Elevating the mindset of students, especially adolescents, from conventional classroom learning to a fun-filled learning gala will undoubtedly fill a niche in the growing educational system. The crux of gamification in schools is to connect classic games to school subjects. The brain processes stories more easily than facts. For this reason, storytelling is a fantastic way of delivering new information to students. Gamification greatly benefits from using this strategy, as games often include story-telling elements such as background, characters, plot twists, and more. There is nothing more powerful than learning something through our emotions. Emotions make the learning process more effective as they facilitate the effective encoding and retrieval of information. Gamifications capture individuals' attention faster by creating an emotional bridge between the contents and the student. It also aids the brain in storing things in long-term memory. Imagine a biology lecture with a plethora of phylum classifications transformed into a fantasy story of Amazon Forest, where some organisms murmur their classification into your ears, some have it painted on them, some may be shrieking at you, and their names projected on a big screen surely would bind the students to the matter in no time.
Understand that gamification is not about video games and stories; it can be providing options to give badges for attaining each milestone, giving points for achieving non-academic goals, acquiring level-ups to feel like they are making progress to compete healthily with others thereby staying motivated in the learning process, like in a Duolingo app, or it can be any creative idea that would engross human brains in the subject. In fact, this would stimulate the creative tastes of an individual as well. This type of learning takes educational content and converts it into a game that students can easily relate to.
Yet there are some risky elements.
Gamification is considered successful as it revolves around the theory of human psychology that winning at games always keeps people engaged and happy. Hence, when it comes to education, choosing the right mechanism and metric plays a vital role. Poorly built game plans could lead to unhealthy competitions and distractions from the main topic, which would eventually result in a hazardous learning environment. This could even alter the mindsets of students in a negative way, which is even more risky. Games can also become notoriously addictive, like we see nowadays with mobile games and online gambling.
Building a solid game strategy that would benefit the students both academically and psychologically is the catch here. Skill, expertise, and input from the technology trainers and clinical psychologists should be precisely blended to produce a gaming design as right as rain. The curriculum has to be reframed, intensive training and brainstorming sessions have to be conducted for the teachers. A holistic approach is required to yield the best results from gamification.
The ball is in our court.
It is undeniable that the education system in India needs renovation. Why can’t this be one of the boulders in reconstruction? Note that gamification is not just a buzzword; there are universities like CUSAT in Kerala conducting workshops and projects on gamification and its scope. Its possibilities are successfully utilized by unicorns like Nike, Google, HP, and many more. With advances in research on gamification in education over the past few years, many countries have tailored the gamification design properties to match individual students’ needs, characteristics, and preferences.
Gamification has untapped potential in Indian education, and when backed by the concerned authorities and implemented systematically, it will be an exemplary breakthrough for the students. Not only the academic lectures, but we can also educate them on social awareness, basic rights, duties, and laws, the fundamentals of running a business, investments and savings, sex education, environmental protection, healthy living, etc. Let’s make use of technology in a constructive way by creating a rapturous generation rather than a futile peer group engulfed by gadgets and games. Technology is all marvelous if the approach is justly comprehended and implemented.
References:
https://elearningindustry.com/
http://dspace.cusat.ac.in/jspui/bitstream/123456789/16217/1/gramification.pdf
Photo credits:
https://www.shutterstock.com/
Category:Technology
