education

Gamification World Congress 2014

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20140526 094318 34998058 Gamification World Congress 2014

Wow, what an amazing couple of days.

Last week was Gamification World Congress 2014, the biggest Gamification event in Europe and I think in the world with over 600 people. They all came together over 3 days to celebrate the best Gamification has to offer in 3 days packed full of talks  (seriously 9 am until 8:30pm with over 30 talks on the second day!) and workshops.

On day one, 60 delegates attended 4 workshops, run by Sergio Jiménez, Mario Herger, Alberto Tornero and me.

The workshops were great fun, I think everyone enjoyed most of the content they got to see and work with. My own had some highs and lows – which I am going to build on to create my next one (details soon I hope). Read More ...

Why am I interested in Gamification?

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1389645 14492518 Why am I interested in Gamification

This is a question many ask me – including myself!

The answer is complicated I suppose, but worth mentioning here.

Many feel that gamification is nothing more than an invention of consultants hell bent on making money from corporations who want to control their employees. In some instances this may even be true!

The fact is, I got involved because of a love of games that goes back over thirty years. I have always loved games, playing them , creating them and learning from them. One of my earliest memories of gaming was my father creating me a maths games. It was very simple, on an early Spectrum. All it did was ask you maths questions and you had to answer. It would congratulate you and I seem to remember there was some graphic representation of your success. Read More ...

An Interview with Karl Kapp

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Week Two 002 445x273 An Interview with Karl Kapp

To continue the interview theme for another week, I present my interview with Karl Kapp. Karl is an eLearning expert, author, researcher and all round fountain of information and understanding!

Can you sum up what you do in a single sentence?

I teach, study, research, write, and educate others about the convergence of learning, technology and pedagogy with a focus on games and gamification.

How did you get involved with learning and helping people understand it better?

I discovered the field of instructional design my first year out of college.  I was working for a company that happened to be an instructional design firm. Working for them changed my life, when I found out what the field was about and how it impacted people through carefully designed learning interventions, I wanted to be a part of it. When I found out about this field, I changed my graduate program of study from Educational Counseling to Instructional Technology and I haven’t looked back. I think the ability to impact learners through instruction is compelling and to do it with methods like games and gamification is even more exciting. Read More ...

Harry Potter and the Gamification of School

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1326285 97973871 Harry Potter and the Gamification of School

When I was a kid a school (long before Harry Potter had been thought of – and gamification for that matter…), teaching methods generally sucked. A teach stood at the front of the class, dictated out ancient notes and you had to write them down in your exercise book. If you didn’t pay attention or did something the teacher did not like, you got a board rubber thrown at your head. There was no intrinsic enjoyment to be had from the learning process; it was all drained by the way we were taught. This was not unique to my school years; it had been this way for decades. Read More ...

Gamification gone bad

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1269461 colored puzzle Gamification gone bad

To move on I want to look at how you can easily get Gamification very wrong. When it goes bad, it goes really bad. What you think makes something entertaining and engaging can actually have the exact opposite effect. This is especially true with online learning materials, or e-learning.

Just because you add pretty graphics and you’ve added some animations doesn’t mean you’ve created a good gamified piece of e-learning. If what you’ve added actually makes it harder to complete the e-learning module then you failed. Read More ...