Education and Gamification

[richmond62]

"Why are the challenges produced as cards and not more gamified?
A deliberate choice was made to not turn this into a series of games. So many learning materials online do this that there is a danger that children think Computer Science is only about games."

https://www.bebras.uk/index.php?action=content&id=41

[richmond62]

LinkedIn keeps bothering me as "an educational expert" (Cripes: if only they knew) about GAMIFICATION, which seems to have become quite an obsession.

What is interesting about the gamification obsession is that none of the people pushing it have any educational qualifications or teaching experience.

What I have found (and when you read this you will think, "But that's obvious") is that a plain-vanilla, boring-as-buggery fill-in-the-gaps test handed out to children results in a dull thud.

But, tart exactly the same content up into an xTalk stack where each card delivers one of the items in your boring-as-buggery fill-in-the-gaps test with colourful pictures and a spot of drag-and-drop, and you have 100% attention from the children to the extent that after the 90 minute session I'm having to physically tear them from the chairs so the next lot can come in.

[richmond62]

Interestingly enough, my 2 sons ploughed their way through a whole set of really extremely innovative Dorling-Kindersley CDs in the late 1990s: but they died a death quite a while before CDs did.

My children loved them.

And DK seem to have back-pedalled to books and worksheets:

https://www.dk.com/us/

https://www.dk.com/uk/

They have gone from this:
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my-first-amazing-world-explorer_1.jpg (119.01 KiB) Viewed 683 times

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to this:
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Screenshot 2024-11-23 at 19.24.34.png (101.29 KiB) Viewed 683 times

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Of course it would be comparatively easy to clone the first one in OXT.

[richmond62]

This website might be a good place to start if you want to see what 'Gamification' (or 'Edutainment') meant in the 1990s:

https://www.myabandonware.com/

[overclockedmind]

This website might be a good place to start if you want to see what 'Gamification' (or 'Edutainment') meant in the 1990s:

https://www.myabandonware.com/

I was kinda "there" (maybe more with an earlier slant as we had Apple II hardware in elementary school,) but MECC's software (the Munchers games,) Oregon Trail, and at home on "bad" rental weekends, Mario is Missing, and Mario's Time Machine. We treasured those computer games in the Apple II days, and even after, as until near graduation from high school, the Internet wasn't accessible to us, so that was our reward for having all of our work done. And yet, it was also used to teach.

I kind of guessed that the Internet had done away with this phenomenon. Now I'll wager that it's only intensified it!