Why is Gamify Learning more efficient?

Last week, we covered what was a brief and useful introduction to Gamify Learning as a concept to approach education. It’s time today to be more specific about the model of game-based learning that enables kids to be more efficient with this approach.

Learning, in most dictionaries, is the “acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, practice, or study”. It is an experience the kids are going through which leads to e-learning outcomes.

Why are these learning outcomes from games more efficient and more qualitative than traditional ones?

There are a couple of reasons to explain this.

One key aspect of game-based learning is the input game developers can control and program. Instructions and topics are decided beforehand as well as the mechanics of the games. All these parameters help kids learn more efficiently during the digital game-based learning process.

If a game designer specifically wants to help kids act and be less introvert, the mechanism of the game will push the kids to be more proactive and take decisions on their owns. Those judgements will decide the evolution of the game, and have an effect over the general behaviour of the kids during the process. The data registered within the game then (actions and behaviours of the kids depending on each other) are going to provide feedbacks that will make the whole experience interactive and down the line more efficient.

Now when we talk about efficiency in learning, we go back to what we defined at the beginning of this article. Learning is the acquisition of knowledge and skills. It means that kids try, attempts, fails sometimes, and it takes a certain amount of time and experiences in order to acquire the knowledge or the skills.

Game-based learning is a sort of recursive loop, where kids read instructions of the game, start making judgements in order to move forward within the game with specific mechanisms decided by game designers which will lead to behaviours. And the process repeats itself until it knows that the learning has been acquired.

But one of the common thing people believe is that the learning outcomes happen during the process of playing the games, but that’s not entirely true. They tend to occur outside of the game when the kids are reflecting and debriefing the experiences they’ve been through. But a certain amount of experiences within the game can help teachers and supervisors know that the learning has been done or not thanks to the gamification.

If you feel like reading more about this topic and had fun learning it, then have a look at this paper from which we were inspired: http://www.majapivec.com/files/recursive%20loops%20of%20gbl.pdf

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If there’s one question you would ask us about Gamify Learning: what would that question be? Leave us one at [email protected].