Lecture

Gamification: Enhancing Learning Experience with Game Mechanics

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

Description

This lecture explores the concept of gamification, which involves applying gaming mechanics in non-game environments to enhance processes and learning experiences. It delves into elements like badges, leaderboards, points, progression, levels, instant feedback, social status, social interaction, challenge, and narrative. The dark side of gamification is also discussed, highlighting negative effects such as loss of performance and the impact of leaderboard design. Various game design elements and their effects on learners are analyzed, providing insights to guide instructors and specialists in avoiding detrimental effects in educational contexts.

Official source

Related concepts (23)

Game design

Game design is the process of creating and shaping the mechanics, systems, and rules of a game. Games can be created for entertainment, education, exercise, or experimental purposes. Increasingly, elements and principles of game design are also applied to other interactions, in the form of gamification.

Game mechanics

In tabletop games and video games, game mechanics are the rules or ludemes that govern and guide the player's actions, as well as the game's response to them. A rule is an instruction on how to play, a ludeme is an element of play like the L-shaped move of the knight in chess. A game's mechanics thus effectively specify how the game will work for the people who play it. There are no accepted definitions of game mechanics.

Game balance

Game balance is a branch of game design with the intention of improving gameplay and user experience by balancing difficulty and fairness. Game balance consists of adjusting rewards, challenges, and/or elements of a game to create the intended player experience. Game balance is generally understood as introducing a level of fairness for the players. This includes adjusting difficulty, win-loss conditions, game states, economy balancing, and so on to work in tandem with each other. The concept of game balance depends on the game genre.

Learning

Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants. Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences. The changes induced by learning often last a lifetime, and it is hard to distinguish learned material that seems to be "lost" from that which cannot be retrieved.

Experiential learning

Experiential learning (ExL) is the process of learning through experience, and is more narrowly defined as "learning through reflection on doing". Hands-on learning can be a form of experiential learning, but does not necessarily involve students reflecting on their product. Experiential learning is distinct from rote or didactic learning, in which the learner plays a comparatively passive role. It is related to, but not synonymous with, other forms of active learning such as action learning, adventure learning, free-choice learning, cooperative learning, service-learning, and situated learning.

Related lectures (12)

Gamification in Education: A Literature Review

Presents a literature review on gamification in education, exploring its evolution, potential benefits, and negative effects on learners.

Gamification and Serious Games: Understanding the Difference

Clarifies the difference between gamification and serious games, exploring their characteristics and game components.

Learning Sciences Concepts

Explores cognitive load, metacognition, learning environments, and inductive reasoning, with examples of exam questions and the city of Godthåb.

Spatial Configuration and Teaching

Explores the impact of spatial configuration on teaching interactions in classrooms, analyzing seating arrangements and teacher movements.

Gamification Presentation