When planning the first exciting steps into gamifying education, it can be easy to overlook one of the most important factors: success measures.
Having a clear idea of how you’ll define and measure success is not only important for ensuring effectiveness and making incremental improvement, but it will also help you confirm that the gamification elements you choose are tightly tied to your goals. The right time to plan the measurement phase of your gamification project is before you start. Of course, the definition of success and the way to best measure outcomes is very different from one case to the next, but the following steps might help you get started.
1. Define the problems you are trying to solve or the improvements you’d like to see.
2. Ensure you have an existing measurement for each ‘starting point’ for these problems, whether it be quantitative or qualitative.
3. Attach a goal to each problem or desired improvement. Be realistic, especially when starting out!
4. Determine how you’ll measure success in each of these areas.
5. Attach a reasonable timeframe to each goal, and make a commitment to report on the outcomes.
A great way to plan your measurement phase is to do some brainstorming and ask yourself lots of questions. A mind-mapping tool, like Bubbl.us or XMind, can be really useful for this exercise. Here are just a few questions you might want to consider:
Having a clear idea of how you’ll define and measure success is not only important for ensuring effectiveness and making incremental improvement, but it will also help you confirm that the gamification elements you choose are tightly tied to your goals. The right time to plan the measurement phase of your gamification project is before you start. Of course, the definition of success and the way to best measure outcomes is very different from one case to the next, but the following steps might help you get started.
1. Define the problems you are trying to solve or the improvements you’d like to see.
2. Ensure you have an existing measurement for each ‘starting point’ for these problems, whether it be quantitative or qualitative.
3. Attach a goal to each problem or desired improvement. Be realistic, especially when starting out!
4. Determine how you’ll measure success in each of these areas.
5. Attach a reasonable timeframe to each goal, and make a commitment to report on the outcomes.
A great way to plan your measurement phase is to do some brainstorming and ask yourself lots of questions. A mind-mapping tool, like Bubbl.us or XMind, can be really useful for this exercise. Here are just a few questions you might want to consider:
- Will I use quantitative or qualitative data, and how will I collect the data?
- Would a student survey be useful?
- How can I measure engagement?
- Is it important to know whether students enjoyed the activity? How do I measure fun?
- How could I measure collaboration? How do I distinguish it from competition?
- What is more important: perseverance at a an activity, or completing it in a set timeframe?
- Does gamification allow for new ways of measuring whether learners grasp key concepts?
- How will I know that the challenge level was set correctly?
- In an adaptive system, how can I account for varying experiences?
Image: The Computing Scale Co by Kenny Louie
Details of sources cited can be found on the References page.