Gamification in education: fashion of the moment or a new learning frontier?

Why do games capture the attention of children? Why do ludic (play-related) activities involve children and motivate them? Why are video games so attractive? What effects can learning based on games have on the student? Are studying and entertainment mutually exclusive? These are questions that various scholars, particularly in the English speaking world, have been asking in recent years: whether or not it is good to apply the logic of games and video games to the academic environment.

The scientific community has generally agreed to define this new area of research as “gamification”, a neologism first used by the English programmer Nick Pelling in 2002, which has risen in popularity since 2010 when it was adopted by the American professor and famous game designer, Jesse Schell, during a conference in Las Vegas. As a consequence, scholars including James Paul Gee have concentrated on the principles of learning through video games and their repercussions in the field of education. Elizabeth Corcoran founded Lucere, an organisation dedicated to helping educators to find and use the most appropriate technology to inspire students, while Romina Nesti, a researcher from Florence University, is concentrating instead on the ludic universe and its relationship with education – as an advocate as well as lecturer in the recent MOOC “Gamification in education: new ways to learn!”.

First used in the field of marketing in order to encourage the purchase of a product, today it is the focus of research and experimentation to improve forms of learning and to adapt it to scholastic contexts. For Sebastian Deterding, founder and current director of the Gamification Research Network and researcher at the Northeastern University of Boston, gamification is the use of game design elements in nongame contexts. Gamification can be defined as the use of game design in non-ludic contexts which could be, amongst others, in didactics and school learning environments.

The Italian pedagogue Aldo Visalberghi used the term “ludiforme” to indicate activities and objectives external to games, the final objective of which is not inside the game itself and does not conclude with the game. According to Romina Nesti, gamification is a set of processes and practices through which the use of dynamics, mechanisms and ludic strategies tries to motivate, activate and involve someone in acting in an non-ludic context. Gamification, therefore, is not a game, but exists thanks to it. Another authoritative definition is that of Karl Kapp, professor of didactic technology at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, according to whom gamification is the use of ludic game mechanics, from game and thought aesthetics in order to motivate people’s actions, and to promote learning and problem solving. Gamification is and could become an interesting didactic instrument because it bases its action on the motivational dimension and the love of learning.

The knowledge that underlies the different forms of gamification can be traced back to the theories of behaviorism; most of the simple forms of gamification are based on the paradigm of stimulus-response, a stimulus which reinforces the behaviour of a subject through giving pleasure. Other connections, however, can be recognised in Dewey’s learning by doing, in active didactics, in Bruner’s learning how to learn, in constructivism, above all in the piagettiano one (the symbolic game of the pre-operational stage), up to George Siemens’ connectivism. But references to “games”, as a powerful stimulus to learning and child development, can also be found in Tommaso Campanella who talks about the importance of games and learning by playing, in Bruner, Vygotsky, Winnicot, Fröbel (the gardens of childhood and games), and in Idit Harel (playful learning in MaMaMa media), to name but a few. But game theory, as the Swiss scholar Norberto Bottani affirmed, has been misunderstood by schools because the step necessitating the abandonment of the authoritative, standardised and disciplinary didactic conception of learning has not been taken in order to embrace a ludic and personalised conception.

Recent research carried out by the academic community has been directed at defining the connection between gamification (which has been widely applied in the field of marketing) and school children’s learning, and how to transfer enjoyment, pleasure, engagement, motivation and participation, which are at the heart of gamification and game-based learning, to the school and didactic world – an

area which various scholars are exploring by trying to define analogies and affinities between the two worlds (the ludic and the academic), defining the dynamics (the aspects regarding the construction of processes, desires and needs which users feel the need to satisfy), the mechanics (concepts which can increase interest, encouraging participation and commitment: concern, in conclusion, staying in the field of behaviour, the system of rewards) and the components (the instruments: prizes, challenges, badges, teams, and so on).

There are, however, many experimentations ongoing in the English speaking school world, not only by scholars but also by teachers such as Justin Ballou, a high school teacher in the Boston area who began using gamification in his own classes when trying to understand how to motivate his students: the idea is to make assigned tasks more fun, engaging and gratifying, and the lessons more interesting and captivating compared with the traditional passive model of learning.

In Italy, the term gamification has not yet become part of didactics, nor is it present in ministerial documents, or in schools, or as part of the initial and in-service training of teaching staff. At present, in our didactic and educational panorama, this new methodology appears to be a completely new frontier, even though interesting scenes and horizons are looming on the horizon not only for our own “Bel Paese” of Italy, but also for others to discover. It will be interesting to see how the use of games in education develops in the coming years – not only in Italy but also in schools, of all types, worldwide.