The Utility of Gamification in Learning

by Justin Skycak on February 22, 2024

Gamification, integrating game-like elements into learning environments, proves effective in increasing student learning, engagement, and enjoyment.

This post is part of the book The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning (Working Draft, Jan 2024). Suggested citation: Skycak, J., advised by Roberts, J. (2024). The Utility of Gamification in Learning. In The Math Academy Way: Using the Power of Science to Supercharge Student Learning (Working Draft, Jan 2024). https://justinmath.com/the-utility-of-gamification-in-learning/

A common theme across many of the cognitive learning strategies described in this document has been that they produce more learning by increasing cognitive activation, which students find less enjoyable because it’s more mentally taxing. Furthering the inconvenience, students often mistakenly interpret extra cognitive effort as an indication that they are not learning as well, when in fact the opposite is true.

Thankfully, the strategy of gamification behaves differently. Numerous studies have shown that when game-like elements (such as points and leaderboards) are integrated into student learning environments in ways that are

aligned with the goals of a course, the motivations of the students, and the context of the educational setting, and
robust to "hacking" or "gaming the system" (i.e. behaviors that attempt to bypass learning by exploiting loopholes in the rules of the game),

students typically not only learn more and engage more with the content, but also enjoy it more (Bai, Hew, & Huang, 2020; Looyestyn et al., 2017; Lei et al., 2022).

This applies not only to young students, but also to university-level students and even postgraduate students in technically-challenging courses. As the authors of a gamification study at Delft University of Technology describe (Iosup & Epema, 2014):

"Over the past three years, we have applied gamification to undergraduate and graduate courses in a leading technical university in the Netherlands and in Europe. Ours is one of the first long-running attempts to show that gamification can be used to teach technically challenging courses.

The two gamification-based courses, the first-year B.Sc. course Computer Organization and an M.Sc.-level course on the emerging technology of Cloud Computing, have been cumulatively followed by over 450 students and passed by over 75% of them, at the first attempt.

We find that gamification is correlated with an increase in the percentage of passing students, and in the participation in voluntary activities and challenging assignments. Gamification seems to also foster interaction in the classroom and trigger students to pay more attention to the design of the course. We also observe very positive student assessments and volunteered testimonials, and a Teacher of the Year award."

Clearly, gamification is a potent strategy for maintaining student motivation and helping students feel good about hard work. (Any readers with experience in high-performance athletics will know the wonders that a bit of gamification can do for maintaining morale while working hard at practice – usually in the form of tracking personal progress or engaging in friendly competition with teammates.)

Furthermore, gamification also functions as a lever by which to incentivize high-quality work. This is especially vital in adaptive learning systems, which speed up or slow down based on student performance, meaning that a student’s learning efficiency depends highly on the quality of their work:

a student who performs well can make a lot of progress in a course by doing a relatively small amount of work, while
a student who performs poorly will have to do significantly more work to make the same amount of progress.

In effect, for a student to make educational progress in an adaptive learning system, they have to put forth a sufficient amount of high-quality work.

References

Bai, S., Hew, K. F., & Huang, B. (2020). Does gamification improve student learning outcome? Evidence from a meta-analysis and synthesis of qualitative data in educational contexts. Educational Research Review, 30, 100322.

Iosup, A., & Epema, D. (2014). An experience report on using gamification in technical higher education. In Proceedings of the 45th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education (pp. 27-32).

Lei, H., Wang, C., Chiu, M. M., & Chen, S. (2022). Do educational games affect students’ achievement emotions? Evidence from a meta‐analysis. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 38(4), 946-959.

Looyestyn, J., Kernot, J., Boshoff, K., Ryan, J., Edney, S., & Maher, C. (2017). Does gamification increase engagement with online programs? A systematic review. PloS one, 12(3), e0173403.