Gamification

What I learned when exploring gamification

“Play is our brain’s favourite way of learning.” – Diane Ackerman

There is no doubt that we learn best through play. In fact, it’s vital for our development; from infancy, we play with our fingers, toes, rays of sunlight…. with our parents, siblings, friends.

We learn language and social skills as well as a massive amount of information about ourselves, our environment and others before going to school.

At pre-school, learning continues through playing.

And then, for some obscure reason, at ‘real school’ we put the youngsters in desks and the teacher stands in front of them and shows them stuff. Of course, there is time on the mat, group time, and tasks to be completed.

Oddly, play-time, our most effective learning tool, is limited – and often, even discarded. Why is this?

Playing for keeps

Play can be associated with many things: playing alone, playing in a group, playing sport, playing cards, role playing… To me, playing is about enjoyment. Any activity that you enjoy doing can be seen as play. Being totally engrossed in an activity could be seen as play.

Hero in my Hood produces fun activities for kids. Many activities are given to children to keep them occupied and out of the way of a busy adult. We aim to make ours enjoyable, and to cover a variety of learning areas while teaching facts and sharing information.

At an education seminar recently, we came across the term gamification, and immediately felt quite good about ourselves as we had already included fun, game-like stuff into our learning materials. Gamification is way more than that.

Lessons for life

A game includes an end goal, an activity or two, a set of rules or parameters and a reward. Competition or winning is often part of the game.

Gamification takes those elements and applies them to pretty well anything, in any environment. At school, coloured stickers are collected for good work and converted into a gold star when you have a certain number of them – this is gamification.

It is a way of rewarding good work. So too are the loyalty points you get from your local supermarket, airline, pharmacy and so on.

Yes, rewards are great, but are they fun? What is seen as fun for one person may well be boring for another. For some the reward is enjoyment. For others it might be seeing their name at the top of a leader board. Social interactions or the feeling of being included may be all the reward another needs.

Learning by default

We all learn differently: through watching/seeing (visual), through hearing/listening (audio), but most of us learn through doing. Doing is often the most effective way of learning. One cannot learn to ride a bike by just watching someone show you how; you need to do it yourself.

Often when we are doing something that we enjoy, we don’t even realise that we are learning. This is the perfect learning environment.

In our story activity books, the child becomes one of the characters by drawing themselves on the hero album page (inclusion). The activities are completed by the child and the story moves on. The activities reinforce the facts learned on that page. The ultimate aim is to get to the end of the story, completing all of the activities along the way, and learning facts about the chosen topic.

We have not included a competition element in these books and the children can work at their own pace. Hopefully they will have fun doing so.

We have also produced a Western Cape Activity set in which we have included a Snakes and Ladders game – showing the actual snakes found on the Table Mountain range in Cape Town. The aim being to get to the end first – competition is included in this game.