A couple of years ago Sarah Brown wrote about gamification strategies and the new wave of activity trackers—many of which have game theory elements built into them, e.g. leaderboards, badges, levels, etc.—and how these elements helped her re-imagine how she approached running.

While there is much talk about how adding these types of elements into classes may help to engage our students, the question, at least in my mind, is how much of this do we really want to add to our classes? Does everything have to be a game? At what point are we dumbing down the educational delivery method in order to make it more fun? And if we do this what message are we sending our students? If it isn’t fun, is it not worth doing?

I think these are large philosophical questions that bare a closer look, at some point, but, even given these questions, I do think there are ways to make parts of our classes more fun. At the D2L Fusion Conference (June 2015) in Orlando I was able to sit in on a session conducted by Vincent King-Spezzo, an instructional designer at Valdosta State University, about gamification. What was interesting about his presentation was the way he implemented game theory in his class. It wasn’t used for learning the “meat” of his course, but as a way for students to earn extra credit points. Continue reading →