Tag Archives: gamification

The Gamification of Education

We often think that gamification is a new idea but we forget, we’ve been turning exams and tests into games for a long long time. Here’s a really good infographic on the subject from Knewton and Column Five Media    

Behaviourism and Games

Recently I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Learning Theory and Game Design.  Clearly there are game mechanics that exploit particular learning traits and I thought it would be interesting to identify them. Researchers have long studied the way in which individuals learn.  Over the years, academics have proposed a number of theories to describe […]

What Games are Good For?

In spite of my criticisms of many educational games, I believe passionately in the potential of games to inspire learning. I don’t think that games are a panacea but they do have many characteristics that can make a profoundly positive impact on our lives.  The real educational value for gaming lies in four key areas: […]

Art and Play

One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is a website that will help primary school children (5-11s) with their art work. The audience for the resource is quite complicated because teachers are likely to be the standard bearers for it – they’ll be the ones that direct children to it (at least […]

Plaything to Game

In an earlier post I wonder “What is a game?‘  It looked at the characteristics you can use to define a game. This week for a project I’m working on, I’ve been thinking about how you turn a normal activity into a game, the process of gamification.  Jane McGonical is one of the most passionate […]

What is a game?

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been doing some thinking about the nature of games for the BBC.  With gamification the new hot idea and with it the attempt to apply game mechanics to just about every industry both online and real world, it felt like a good time to revisit the core concept of […]

Where games meet learning

In earlier posts, I’ve looked at the research evidence for and against the learning potential for games and how play in general relates to learning.  This post looks at the overlap between games and learning.  Although many people become quite aerated about definitions, for the sake of today’s note, I’m simply using ‘games’ to mean […]