Overview

Gamification is now an indispensable part of plethora of learning strategies employed by learning designers to make learning more holistic, enjoyable and memorable. I have seen in the last few years that organizations that are looking for quick wins or are not willing to invest in full-fledged games or those who don’t have enough lead time for developing games have taken advantage of gamification strategy to bolster their training materials.

Gamification Elements

In my previous article on gamification and game-based learning, I mentioned that a good gamification based learning module has the following elements:

• Scoring mechanism/badges/awards
  These reward learners for certain behaviors.
• Levels
  Can be used to present learning in a staggered way, building upon previously presented concepts.
• Leaderboards/Quests
  Allow learners to choose their own path and pace through the learning.

These are some but not all the various types of elements that can be used to gamify a course. An important distinction must be made between a complete game-based experience and a course that has game like elements or in other words has a solid gamification strategy. While game-based learning has a lot going for it in terms of immersive storylines, characters, avatar selection, scores, rewards and so on, the same is not with gamification. Gamification uses some of the elements just mentioned to make the course “feel” better.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at some examples next.

Gamification Examples

Example 1: Visual Menu and Scoring

An interesting way to enhance a course is using visual menu with gamification elements. In this course, we had used the analogy of a mountain trek or mountain climbing whenever the learner completed a section or topic of the course. They receive points for completing each activity within the section. The activities would appear at the end of each section to check whether the learner has mastered the concept. The scores are accumulated across the sections and the final score is displayed at the end. This is an interesting gamification strategy.

Example 2: Gamified Assessments

In this gamification strategy, the requirement was to gamify the post course assessments or the summative assessments. The customer did not want a regular summative assessment that is quickly done with. The customer wanted to create awareness on certain aspects of their processes and products. We recommended gamified assessments at the end of the course to help learners refresh their knowledge. The gamified assessment was designed as a car game with questions appearing at check posts. There were also lives for the entire duration of the game. So, if the learner hits another car or crashes the car, a life is lost.

Upon reaching a checkpost, the learner is posed a question that would test their understanding of a concept. Points are gained upon successfully answering the question.

We also created a leaderboard to increase the excitement among the target audience. As the target audience was spread across geographically, the leaderboard would show which team of a location is leading the race.

This gamification strategy worked well as the learners took more interest in taking the course as well. This is also an example of enterprise gamification that we had tried with good results.

Example 3: Visual Menu for a Technical course on Risk management

The course is about risk management. As the subject matter is little dry, we implemented few gamification elements to make the course interesting.

In this course, we had introduced levels. Each level has a series of scenarios and associated quizzes. Points are accumulated for each correct attempt of the quizzes. There are level indicators as well as a return to home button always displayed at the bottom-left of the page.

Conclusion

Gamification strategy can be used in a variety of ways to enhance your learning or teaching materials and make them interesting and engaging. By using the right gamification strategy, the learning becomes holistic, memorable and helps learners apply the concepts better at their workplace situations.

Suggested Reading:

• Demystifying Gamification vs Game based eLearning
• Game-Based eLearning: Making GBL Effective Through Avatars and Immersive Stories
• How To Use Game-Based eLearning On Mobile Devices Effectively?
• 5 Key Benefits Of Enterprise Gamification