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:

• 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?
  
  

Have a go: Share one of your gamification goals in the comments below, and have a go at identifying ways you might define and measure success.

Image: The Computing Scale Co by Kenny Louie

Details of sources cited can be found on the References page.

'In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job's a game!' - Mary Poppins in Mary Poppins, 1964

Points. Badges. Leaderboards. Chances are, even if you’ve only explored gamification a little, you’ve heard about the PBL trinity. And if you’ve seen any criticism of gamification in education, you’ll probably have noticed that it’s usually centered on the argument that game elements aren’t a good idea because they promote extrinsic motivation.

But are points, badges and leaderboards all there really is to gamification? While they can definitely play a role in gamification when applied well, these elements are just a small part of the gamification story.

What we do know for sure is that school students will often spend hours of their spare time persevering with their favourite video games and honing their gaming skills, so if motivating our students is a struggle then looking at game elements is probably worthy of our attention (Lee & Hammer, 2011; Gee, 2007). But if all we take from videogames is their use of PBL, then we’re missing an opportunity to truly motivate students. Meaningful gamification starts with the idea of play, and of understanding the activity you want to gamify so as to discover where game elements will really make sense to build fun, wonder and play into activities (Nicolson, 2012).

So what does ‘playification’ rather than ‘pointsification’ look like? Some examples that capture a sense of fun and play can be seen in the following videos from The Fun Theory, an initiative that seeks to change behaviour in a positive way through play. Granted, these aren’t education examples, and some of these are experiments rather than realistic long-term solutions, but I hope they’ll inspire you to start thinking about how ordinary activities can be made more fun.

Goal: Encourage people to choose the stairs over the escalator. Solution? Make it fun to walk up the stairs.

Goal: Reduce littering. Solution? Give people a little surprise when they throw something in the bin.

Goal: Encourage drivers to stick to the speed limit. Solution? A new spin on penalty and reward.

Have a go: Can you think of any ways you could encourage play and gamify learning without using points or badges? Share your ideas by posting a comment below!

Image: Mary Poppins by Roswitha Siedelberg

Details of sources cited can be found on the References page.

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