6 ms·

Skillshare, Codecademy and the gamification of education

50 points by didgeoridoo 15y ago

davemel37 15y ago
I think the author is forgetting where eggs come from. (hint: Chickens) Games work because they mimic life. (By life I mean, you, your emotions, the circumstances you encounter and how you handle those circumstances.) Essentially this whole post is a semantic piece interchanging the words "emotions" with "gamification" Everything about life is driven by gamification (read:emotions) already, and everything about games is triggering emotions. forcing people to make decisions using logic, experience, and driven by their emotional needs. In other words, we like games because it is life, except there is such a thing as do-overs.
aik 15y ago
I'm not convinced that a society run on supercharged external motivators is any better off. I'm actually thinking the opposite is true, which is why the trend of gamifying education scares me. It's a temporary and imperfect bandaid for a much deeper issue. The blogger quotes Dan Pink, "job satisfaction is driven mainly by autonomy, mastery, and purpose." -- however I believe Dan Pink's findings are contrary to the blogger's points. "Mastery" is generally attained and sought for when one is intrinsically motivated. This is because extrinsic motivations are much less likely to lead to mastery as mastery is often not the goal in games, but rather the successful completion of the goal of the game. For example, grades in school prove some level of proficiency in something, however grades are often very loosely connected to proficiency in the discipline. E.g. If someone tells me they received an A in calculus, I have absolutely no inclination to then trust they are proficient in calculus. If someone tells me they majored in Computer Science I have no inclination to then trust they are skilled computer scientists or engineers. Alternatively, if someone tells me sincerely that one of their passions in life (ie. "purpose") is to build computer programs, or play with numbers, and they have something to show for it (which they must if it truly is a passion), then I am instantly inclined to trust that they have some competency and deserve some respect. So this being the case, gamifying may lead to people learning at some level, however forming such a dependency I think could be dangerous. Once the game is removed, ie. once the primary purpose of taking action is removed, what do people have left? The discipline itself (without the game) may have absolutely no intrinsic value to the person, so what good is it to the person anymore?
- mgallivan 15y ago
  The only way to be introduced to a discipline is extrinsically. It's impossible to wake up and enjoy Computing Science - one must have had an introduction to it in some form. The idea behind the "gamification" of education is not to trick people into mastering a discipline. It's to introduce them to it.
  - aik 15y ago
    I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. If I do I'm not sure if I agree. A love for computers and all they're capable of isn't born inside a game that gives you points for building [insert program]. A love for programming goes deeper -- it's linked to an internal curiosity and drive to create things and the knowledge that you have the capability to create nearly whatever you have the capacity to think of. Secondly, the blogger isn't arguing for games to introduce people to new disciplines, but rather to let games drive their entire learning career.
    - mgallivan 15y ago
      I wasn't so much concerned with the blogger's views (which I disagree with as well), as I was with your fear of the trend of gamification. How come a love of computing can't be born inside a game consisting of building programs for points? I was introduced to programming because I wanted to make video games. I didn't want to program - I just wanted the satisfaction of a completed game. My love of programming came over time as I experimented. This is, of course, very subjective but whenever I think about any of my hobbies I recall always being led to them because of some outside factor. It was only after I began practicing them that I learned to enjoy them for what they were.
      - aik 15y ago
        Oh I see -- I think we're interpreting 'external motivator' differently. You coming to the decision on your own that you wanted to create a game is not to me an example of being externally motivated to begin programming. That's an example of you discovering the world and coming to the decision that you liked what you saw in video games. Another person might experience the same video game and be indifferent to it. An external motivator would be someone telling you that if you create a game you will get some irrelevant award, and so you go ahead and create a game. The next time you have the idea to create the game, and the award isn't there, you'll be less inclined to do it.
jonbittner 15y ago
Great post. I guess the classic argument is something like: "People need to learn to think outside the box to navigate life, so gamification doesn't prepare people for life" etc. But I agree that gameification and getting things done while "being stupid" is underrated, especially when what is being learned is a core skill. That completion-oriented learning is effective seems hard to dispute. Somehow it currently gets lost once we leave primary school.
- aik 15y ago
  I don't think it gets lost, it just loses it's value. In my company we have "games" all over (also known as extrinsic motivators or artificial targets). For example, in the consulting world we're chasing higher billability, ie. the more hours I log as billable a quarter, the happier people will be. If I log under a certain amount, people become angry. What a fun game, right!? Not exactly. The fact that I'm pushed to play games rather than pushed to do something I actually value is demoralizing and off target. If my goal was rather to ensure the client is happy (within reason), ensure that I'm producing great stuff, and overall skilled at my discipline, I can guarantee the outcome would be much better.
  - didgeoridoo 15y ago
    This is a great point, but I don't think we're talking about the same thing when we use the word "game". There is a counter-intuitive difference between a sales contest and a weekend spent playing Modern Warfare. One has a real monetary value attached, and the other doesn't. Yet we'd STILL rather engage in the activity that has no real reward attached. To me, that is the sign of a well-designed "game".
  - jonbittner 15y ago
    Ripping off clients definitely sucks as a "game" - I'm more interested in the achievement / reward structure associated with learning, and the sense of completing a finite task, which like finishing a level in a game. Turning things that have moral components (like doing good work versus meeting a target) into a game has been shown to cause problems...specifically, I recall reading about a study about a day care center charging people if they were late to pick up their kids. Charging for lateness actually increased the average late of lateness by de-moralizing the obligation to arrive on time to the day care center (sorry for the lack of reference). It's not that I think gamification makes everything better, it's that creating a well-controlled enviroment with some rewarding goals makes learning specifically more focused and fun.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
pascalr 15y ago
Awesome post! I've recently started gamifying life. It's amazing how much just a little change of perspective can make you more happy. What would you do with the character that is yourself if you were playing it in a game?
- bostonvaulter2 15y ago
  What are some examples of things you gamified? Is it more repetitive things like exercising or more creative things?
_delirium 15y ago
Isn't the education system already pretty full of a pretty large range of game-like and competition-like scoring and motivational devices? We've got completion-based ones, ranking-based ones, competition-based ones, the works. Degrees, points on assignments, percentage scores, exam grades, GPAs, percentile ranks, science olympiads, etc. They were even made literally into games starting in the 1970s, with the edutainment-software movement. I can see tweaking these scores, removing some, introducing others, but the idea seems pretty standard. Overall, though, I'm not sure the secret to education is that we just haven't invented a better scoring system to feed you Skinner-box-esque reward pellets whenever you do every incremental good thing. In fact we're already pretty decent at that. We're less good at convincing people why they should care beyond that. It's very easy to convince students that they should care about their grade and the badge (degree), but much harder to cultivate any sense of actual interest. There's also some research that extrinsic rewards tend to reduce intrinsic motivation: once you start doing something for the brief high of getting the "ping!", it becomes much harder to bring yourself to do it later if the reward is removed, even if it's something you originally enjoyed; which means I think we have to be very careful in gamifying/badgifying/achievementifying things. It's a bit different debate, but Chris Hecker has a good talk about that where he worries that modern videogames are focusing too much on the "achievement unlocked!" aspect of gaming, at the expense of deeper and more actually engaging game mechanics: http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F And if that's true in videogames, I would also worry about it irl.
- didgeoridoo 15y ago
  >...modern videogames are focusing too much on the "achievement unlocked!" aspect of gaming, at the expense of deeper and more actually engaging game mechanics I absolutely agree. "Badges" and the like are a half-assed (quarter-assed?) way of going about gamification. But some game mechanics simply act like heroin on the brain. World of Warcraft and Ultima Online had this effect on me in past years. I can't put my finger on it precisely (hence the ambiguity in the post), but I can't shake the feeling that there is something special about the incentive designs of WoW and UO that we can leverage to improve engagement in education and in the working world.
davemel37 15y ago
You forgot Math Munchers, Oregon Trail and Dora the Explorer.
zamfi 15y ago
I like this post, even though I feel pretty strongly that the gamification of everything, and education especially, is net negative. aik has it right elsewhere in this thread that Dan Pink's findings are contrary to this blog post's points. Dan Pink's most interesting finding in my mind is that applying extrinsic financial motivation has positive effects on methodical, repetitive work, but a strongly negative effect on creative, out-of-the-box work. I'd be shocked if gamification had a different effect, though of course I have nothing empirical to offer. I expect that gamification works for repetitive tasks like playing WoW, but is not that effective for actually learning something, even if it does push you through Codecademy's tasks. We have an educational system that repeatedly de-emphasizes intrinsic motivation. How much of school is driven by what you want to learn and what you are interested in? I didn't take my first elective until junior year of high school. Given that most Americans (and most inhabitants of OECD countries) spend the first 12 years of their conscious life in a gamified environment, as _delirium points out, is it so surprising that the "underachievers'" intrinsic motivation is weak, and that the author finds gamification powerful and useful? I don't want to sound conspiracy theory-ish, but I think we've been quite effectively trained to respond to exactly this kind of stimulus.
akurilin 15y ago
On a slightly unrelated note, is there anything like Codecademy for musical instruments / music theory?
- MichaelJW 15y ago
  Rock Band 3.
foolinator 15y ago
ANY free education, regardless of a comparison of today's system, is great. MIT and Stanford's courseware - AMAZING. The courses are THE SAME courses as CS courses. Now, there's no excuse not to learn it, and a lot of people in 3rd world countries ARE learning it. The classroom is going to drastically change very soon. We're entering a great time for eduction.

50 points by didgeoridoo 15y ago

I think the author is forgetting where eggs come from. (hint: Chickens) Games work because they mimic life. (By life I mean, you, your emotions, the circumstances you encounter and how you handle those circumstances.) Essentially this whole post is a semantic piece interchanging the words "emotions" with "gamification" Everything about life is driven by gamification (read:emotions) already, and everything about games is triggering emotions. forcing people to make decisions using logic, experience, and driven by their emotional needs. In other words, we like games because it is life, except there is such a thing as do-overs.

aik 15y ago

I'm not convinced that a society run on supercharged external motivators is any better off. I'm actually thinking the opposite is true, which is why the trend of gamifying education scares me. It's a temporary and imperfect bandaid for a much deeper issue. The blogger quotes Dan Pink, "job satisfaction is driven mainly by autonomy, mastery, and purpose." -- however I believe Dan Pink's findings are contrary to the blogger's points. "Mastery" is generally attained and sought for when one is intrinsically motivated. This is because extrinsic motivations are much less likely to lead to mastery as mastery is often not the goal in games, but rather the successful completion of the goal of the game. For example, grades in school prove some level of proficiency in something, however grades are often very loosely connected to proficiency in the discipline. E.g. If someone tells me they received an A in calculus, I have absolutely no inclination to then trust they are proficient in calculus. If someone tells me they majored in Computer Science I have no inclination to then trust they are skilled computer scientists or engineers. Alternatively, if someone tells me sincerely that one of their passions in life (ie. "purpose") is to build computer programs, or play with numbers, and they have something to show for it (which they must if it truly is a passion), then I am instantly inclined to trust that they have some competency and deserve some respect. So this being the case, gamifying may lead to people learning at some level, however forming such a dependency I think could be dangerous. Once the game is removed, ie. once the primary purpose of taking action is removed, what do people have left? The discipline itself (without the game) may have absolutely no intrinsic value to the person, so what good is it to the person anymore?

mgallivan 15y ago
The only way to be introduced to a discipline is extrinsically. It's impossible to wake up and enjoy Computing Science - one must have had an introduction to it in some form. The idea behind the "gamification" of education is not to trick people into mastering a discipline. It's to introduce them to it.
- aik 15y ago
  I'm not sure if I understand what you mean. If I do I'm not sure if I agree. A love for computers and all they're capable of isn't born inside a game that gives you points for building [insert program]. A love for programming goes deeper -- it's linked to an internal curiosity and drive to create things and the knowledge that you have the capability to create nearly whatever you have the capacity to think of. Secondly, the blogger isn't arguing for games to introduce people to new disciplines, but rather to let games drive their entire learning career.
  - mgallivan 15y ago
    I wasn't so much concerned with the blogger's views (which I disagree with as well), as I was with your fear of the trend of gamification. How come a love of computing can't be born inside a game consisting of building programs for points? I was introduced to programming because I wanted to make video games. I didn't want to program - I just wanted the satisfaction of a completed game. My love of programming came over time as I experimented. This is, of course, very subjective but whenever I think about any of my hobbies I recall always being led to them because of some outside factor. It was only after I began practicing them that I learned to enjoy them for what they were.
    - aik 15y ago
      Oh I see -- I think we're interpreting 'external motivator' differently. You coming to the decision on your own that you wanted to create a game is not to me an example of being externally motivated to begin programming. That's an example of you discovering the world and coming to the decision that you liked what you saw in video games. Another person might experience the same video game and be indifferent to it. An external motivator would be someone telling you that if you create a game you will get some irrelevant award, and so you go ahead and create a game. The next time you have the idea to create the game, and the award isn't there, you'll be less inclined to do it.

jonbittner 15y ago

Great post. I guess the classic argument is something like: "People need to learn to think outside the box to navigate life, so gamification doesn't prepare people for life" etc. But I agree that gameification and getting things done while "being stupid" is underrated, especially when what is being learned is a core skill. That completion-oriented learning is effective seems hard to dispute. Somehow it currently gets lost once we leave primary school.

aik 15y ago
I don't think it gets lost, it just loses it's value. In my company we have "games" all over (also known as extrinsic motivators or artificial targets). For example, in the consulting world we're chasing higher billability, ie. the more hours I log as billable a quarter, the happier people will be. If I log under a certain amount, people become angry. What a fun game, right!? Not exactly. The fact that I'm pushed to play games rather than pushed to do something I actually value is demoralizing and off target. If my goal was rather to ensure the client is happy (within reason), ensure that I'm producing great stuff, and overall skilled at my discipline, I can guarantee the outcome would be much better.
- didgeoridoo 15y ago
  This is a great point, but I don't think we're talking about the same thing when we use the word "game". There is a counter-intuitive difference between a sales contest and a weekend spent playing Modern Warfare. One has a real monetary value attached, and the other doesn't. Yet we'd STILL rather engage in the activity that has no real reward attached. To me, that is the sign of a well-designed "game".
- jonbittner 15y ago
  Ripping off clients definitely sucks as a "game" - I'm more interested in the achievement / reward structure associated with learning, and the sense of completing a finite task, which like finishing a level in a game. Turning things that have moral components (like doing good work versus meeting a target) into a game has been shown to cause problems...specifically, I recall reading about a study about a day care center charging people if they were late to pick up their kids. Charging for lateness actually increased the average late of lateness by de-moralizing the obligation to arrive on time to the day care center (sorry for the lack of reference). It's not that I think gamification makes everything better, it's that creating a well-controlled enviroment with some rewarding goals makes learning specifically more focused and fun.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

pascalr 15y ago

Awesome post! I've recently started gamifying life. It's amazing how much just a little change of perspective can make you more happy. What would you do with the character that is yourself if you were playing it in a game?

bostonvaulter2 15y ago
What are some examples of things you gamified? Is it more repetitive things like exercising or more creative things?

_delirium 15y ago

Isn't the education system already pretty full of a pretty large range of game-like and competition-like scoring and motivational devices? We've got completion-based ones, ranking-based ones, competition-based ones, the works. Degrees, points on assignments, percentage scores, exam grades, GPAs, percentile ranks, science olympiads, etc. They were even made literally into games starting in the 1970s, with the edutainment-software movement. I can see tweaking these scores, removing some, introducing others, but the idea seems pretty standard. Overall, though, I'm not sure the secret to education is that we just haven't invented a better scoring system to feed you Skinner-box-esque reward pellets whenever you do every incremental good thing. In fact we're already pretty decent at that. We're less good at convincing people why they should care beyond that. It's very easy to convince students that they should care about their grade and the badge (degree), but much harder to cultivate any sense of actual interest. There's also some research that extrinsic rewards tend to reduce intrinsic motivation: once you start doing something for the brief high of getting the "ping!", it becomes much harder to bring yourself to do it later if the reward is removed, even if it's something you originally enjoyed; which means I think we have to be very careful in gamifying/badgifying/achievementifying things. It's a bit different debate, but Chris Hecker has a good talk about that where he worries that modern videogames are focusing too much on the "achievement unlocked!" aspect of gaming, at the expense of deeper and more actually engaging game mechanics: http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F And if that's true in videogames, I would also worry about it irl.

didgeoridoo 15y ago
>...modern videogames are focusing too much on the "achievement unlocked!" aspect of gaming, at the expense of deeper and more actually engaging game mechanics I absolutely agree. "Badges" and the like are a half-assed (quarter-assed?) way of going about gamification. But some game mechanics simply act like heroin on the brain. World of Warcraft and Ultima Online had this effect on me in past years. I can't put my finger on it precisely (hence the ambiguity in the post), but I can't shake the feeling that there is something special about the incentive designs of WoW and UO that we can leverage to improve engagement in education and in the working world.

davemel37 15y ago

You forgot Math Munchers, Oregon Trail and Dora the Explorer.

zamfi 15y ago

I like this post, even though I feel pretty strongly that the gamification of everything, and education especially, is net negative. aik has it right elsewhere in this thread that Dan Pink's findings are contrary to this blog post's points. Dan Pink's most interesting finding in my mind is that applying extrinsic financial motivation has positive effects on methodical, repetitive work, but a strongly negative effect on creative, out-of-the-box work. I'd be shocked if gamification had a different effect, though of course I have nothing empirical to offer. I expect that gamification works for repetitive tasks like playing WoW, but is not that effective for actually learning something, even if it does push you through Codecademy's tasks. We have an educational system that repeatedly de-emphasizes intrinsic motivation. How much of school is driven by what you want to learn and what you are interested in? I didn't take my first elective until junior year of high school. Given that most Americans (and most inhabitants of OECD countries) spend the first 12 years of their conscious life in a gamified environment, as _delirium points out, is it so surprising that the "underachievers'" intrinsic motivation is weak, and that the author finds gamification powerful and useful? I don't want to sound conspiracy theory-ish, but I think we've been quite effectively trained to respond to exactly this kind of stimulus.

akurilin 15y ago

On a slightly unrelated note, is there anything like Codecademy for musical instruments / music theory?

MichaelJW 15y ago
Rock Band 3.

foolinator 15y ago

ANY free education, regardless of a comparison of today's system, is great. MIT and Stanford's courseware - AMAZING. The courses are THE SAME courses as CS courses. Now, there's no excuse not to learn it, and a lot of people in 3rd world countries ARE learning it. The classroom is going to drastically change very soon. We're entering a great time for eduction.