Gamification is
the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage
users in solving problems and increase users' self contributions.
Gamification has been studied and applied
in several domains, with some of the main purposes being to engage, teach in
classrooms, entertain, measure, and to improve the perceived ease of use of
information systems. A review of research on gamification shows that a majority
of studies on gamification find positive effects from gamification. Gamification
inspires students to develop competencies and skills as they focus on the activities
of the game. And the game mechanics encourage students to compete against
themselves, looking to reach a personal best or to satisfy their own learning
goals. By participating in these types of activities, students acquire
information and hone abilities while achieving interim goals that provide a
clear sense of progress, rather than simply focusing on completing the course.
Game mechanics reinforce the fact that failure indicates that more work is
needed to master the skill or knowledge at hand.
According to Tom
Chatfield, In terms of education, perhaps most obviously of all, we can
transform how we engage people. We can offer people the grand continuity of
experience and personal investment. We can break things down into highly
calibrated small tasks. We can use calculated randomness. We can reward effort
consistently as everything fields together. And we can use the kind of group
behaviorsthat we see evolving when people are at play together, these really
quite unprecedentedly complexcooperative mechanisms. He provides a video game
called EverQuest(Killing dragons) as an example to support the importance of
Gamification. This is a player-developed,self-enforcing, voluntary currency,
and it's incredibly sophisticated player behavior. Also he emphasized that
‘engagement’ can be transformed by the psychological and the neurological
lessons we can learn from watching people that are playing games. But it's also
about collective engagement and about the unprecedented laboratory for
observing what makes people tick and work and play and engage on a grand scale
in games.
To use games in
an L2 class, we need to consider 3 elements: commercial and educational games,
to play or to design, and integration. Classroom activities using commercial
games might include analysis of the game play experience targeting specific
vocabulary, language functions, or cultural themes. For example, learners could
be directed to keep a game journal in which they are asked to record relevant
information such as characters, setting, language, and/ or reflect on their
in-game choices. This experience then serves as background knowledge for other
classroom activities such as speaking tasks or writing assignments. By creating
goals, narratives, and content, learners must engage in the language at a level
beyond that of playing the game Integration can include, for example, the use
of game content as pre-writing content for a writing task or as an impetus for
a classroom debate. In addition, a design task might take the place of a more
traditional writing task, following the same multi-draft process to teaching
writing skills and strategies.
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