History of Gamification in Education

Knewton.com has an infographic summarizing the history of gamification in education.  As someone who started school in the mid-1980's, many of the events on the timeline overlap with my own history as both a student and a gamer.  In elementary school, I was slower than most of my peers when learning to read, so my parents got a copy of Reader Rabbit, which first came out in 1986.  The game gave me the opportunity to practice the foundational skills reading requires and helped me to eventually become a confident and enthusiastic reader.

Math Blaster, released in 1987, was another event familiar to me.  I had a lot of trouble memorizing math facts, such as the multiplication tables, and, as a result, was not able to develop the automaticity many of my peers had in math.  Math Blasters gave me a way to practice that was way more fun than flash cards and helped me to eventually become a top math student.

As I got older, I started playing Carmen Sandiego, which was first released in 1985.  While the game focused on history and geography, it helped ignite my enthusiasm for trivia (the more esoteric, the better!) that lead me to participate in Knowledge Masters (a high school trivia competition) and win a little money in College Bowl trivia events.  These days, the first games I reach for on my phone are QuizUp and TriviaCrack.

SimCity (1989) is one of the first games I remember using in school in a way that truly connected to the curriculum.  Throughout my elementary and middle school years, we'd take trips to the computer lab to pay games like Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, and Odell Lake, but they were treated as breaks from the curriculum.  In a middle school social studies class, we had a unit on what makes a city work and, as a part of that, we had to play SimCity and deliver a presentation on why people should move to the city we'd created.  The game became not something extra or a place to practice facts, but an opportunity to use higher-order skills and thinking.  In addition, the project required us to play the game in a group, marking the first time a game was something truly cooperative for me, rather than something to be played independently.  This project provided a powerful experience for me on what games in education can be.  As I start thinking about my game model, I'll be keeping this experience in mind and looking for ways I can bring the same kind of higher-order thinking into the project.

The next item from the timeline that I remember vividly is 2004's World of Warcraft (WoW).  I started playing while in college, shortly after it came out.  It didn't take long for me to end up in a guild where I got to know some of the other members.  As a result of those personal connections, I found myself re-doing quests or dungeons I'd done before (in some cases, many times) in order to do them with a friend from the guild.  At a certain point, I started to lose interest in many aspects of the game itself, but found the social connections still made logging in something I looked forward to.  While it may not be feasible for me to use an MMO on the scale of World of Warcraft for my own game model, my experience in WoW speaks to the importance of the social aspects of a game.  As I work on my own game model, I need to consider ways that students could rely on each other and work cooperatively within the game, to promote the same kinds of connections that I found in my WoW guild.