Vinod Khosla, writing on TechCrunch in his continuing series on how algorithms are going to replace everything, believes that there are two trends in the future confluence of the internet and the web: decentralization and gamification. His arguments regarding decentralization are accurate (if a tad unoriginal at this point considering the overarching development of the internet), but his views on gamification deserve a closer look. He starts reasonable enough:
[...] I firmly believe that we should embrace [gamification] and harness its best parts to drive the education of our children who grow up with online and mobile games.
But then we reach this sentence later in the essay:
And with points and stars and badges and the like both [types of students: the A and D students] are likely to want to spend more time participating, and will be more motivated when they do participate compared to today’s average classroom.
Vinod Khosla is wrong. Dangerously wrong.
I want to start by saying that Khosla is certainly no small figure in the Silicon Valley community, and really, his track record of success is something to laud. I also want to note that some of my closest friends from college are working on mobile games that teach arithmetic skills. I think the work that they are doing is really interesting, worthwhile and useful.
Yet, there is a tremendous difference between having a game on a parent’s iPhone or Android and changing the entire U.S. education system to encourage the acquisition of arbitrary “points and stars and badges.” It’s funny, but this approach has been tried for years in U.S. school districts, without success. Those who want to read about it from an ardent critic can turn to the work of Alfie Kohn who rightly points out the incredible harm that this approach has on the development of children.
There is an incredible danger in the quantification of education. Teacher accountability, student test taking, GPAs, points, rankings, percentiles. The current trend is already moving toward gamification, except it isn’t really fun. And that is just the problem with games as learning: they can’t really convince the unmotivated to learn, can they? Sure, learning algebra by playing a mobile game may be better than reading a textbook, but no student is going to choose Math Blaster over Halo. And no math game can be fun when you are required to get a certain score in order to pass (I certainly hated Mavis Beacon when I was little, and that had already been gamified. And that was in 1995).
Dumping these sorts of entertainment toys into the toxic atmosphere that is American public schools is not going to solve our education problems. In fact, it may even make them worse. But that probably never occurred to Khosla, who like many ed tech pundits, is not and never has been a teacher.
At a time when creativity and originality are requisite skills for career success, why are we focused on developing technologies that take the creativity out of education? Perhaps I get so angry and passionate about this because I just barely managed to get through public school before the current regime of test taking. As I have discussed previously on this blog, it was the incredibly flexibility of my early teachers in elementary school that allowed me the opportunity to explore computers at a young age. Today, I am a product manager and majored in Mathematical and Computational Science with other interests in 3D animation, photography, writing and art. No gamification needed. To use Khosla’s example of A and D students: A students don’t need games and games won’t help D students.
Khosla does make a valid point regarding breaking up the lock-step approach of education progression. He sees games as a potential avenue for changing that model, but then again, nearly every technology developed for education has personalized learning as one of its major motivations. This personalization is going to change the way people learn and completely alter the role of the teacher in the classroom, but its success is still dependent on a willing and passionate student to get the most value. Games are just a subset of this trend.
If start-ups in education want to make a difference, focus on enjoyment, not fun. Games are fun: you can turn off your mind and lose a few hours shooting vampires or building human civilizations across the ages. Enjoyment comes from accomplishment and developing something original, realizing that you have the ability to challenge and change your world. To put it in concrete terms – don’t play games, make them. But that requires a level of confidence in children that American prisons public schools just have not been able to possess.
Khosla provides some interesting ideas, but we have to be vigilant of thinking that there is an immediate technical solution to a problem of human psychology and human society. Maria Montessori believed that students, when given an open canvas on which to learn, will learn masterpieces. That philosophy helped to create the Google founders, and it is exactly the kind of attitude the United States needs to educate students for the 21st century economy.
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Oh thank-you so much, Danny. I was so disturbed by Khosla’s post, and you said all that I was thinking about and *more*. And I am especially relieved you mentioned Montessori at the end… it is an example of what a completely UNgamified educational system can look like: with no report cards, grades, tests, etc. most Montesorri schools (and I am thinking of the higher grades in particular, not just the pre-school programs) focus on the pure pleasure of learning and growth. Humans are designed to care about *thriving* and any system that encourages this is going to have a far better chance than one based on artificial extrinsic rewards which — as you pointed out — are already well-known to do grave damage to intrinsic motivation.
Why some of the smartest people we know are so willing to overlook *science* when it comes to education both amazes and depresses me.
Again, thank-you. (Side note: my daughter is in her final year of college earning her teaching credential. She has just begun her public school student teaching assignment, and — as a Montesorri-schooled kid — she is horrified by what she sees happening in the elementary school programs. Even more depressing, she told me that out of nearly four years of university in an education major, the amount of time they spent studying research of motivation? One lesson, 45 minutes.)
I agree with you that there are some substantial flaws in Khola’s argument as you’ve presented it, but I think you’re throwing out the baby with the gamification here.
As I understand it, there are two notions of “gamification”. The first is “games as a motivational structure” (i.e. points and stars and badges), and I agree with you that this concept is foolish. As you already said, it’s been tried before; and as you also already said, the students who need the help are least likely to respond to it.
But there’s a second gloss of “gamification”, namely “games as a learning structure”, which is very much a separate thing. It’s a pretty well-established fact that people respond well to games; why would we not try to encode the information that we want kids to learn within games rather than within textbooks and lectures? Or consider debate: very much a game in the classical sense, and a very effective tool for learning. This doesn’t solve the problem of “how do we motivate unmotivated students” (though it could very well make some headway), but it does work towards the goal of “let’s make education more effective and more engaging”.
And who says you can’t learn effectively from “non-educational” games? I would first point out that I had WAY more fun playing Math Blaster as a kid than I’ve ever had playing Halo (though maybe that says more about me than about your argument). But Halo is an unfair example; it’s definitely on the mindless end of the game spectrum. What about Minecraft (architecture)? What about Homeworld (three-dimensional spatial thinking)? What about Lego Mindstorms robot sumo wrestling (engineering, iterative design, graphical programming)? What about Cooking Mama (cross-cultural culinary studies)? What about Settlers of Catan (resource management, trade strategy, alliance building)? What about Mafia (like I even need to tell you)?
(Notice, by the way, that I’m leaving out games that are interesting studies of culture, but with gameplay that isn’t learning-oriented. Guitar Hero, Eternal Sonata, and Brütal Legend are all examples that leap to mind, and that’s just music. These are games where the “fun” is tangential to the “learning”, but they manage to coexist.)
Mind you, I’m not claiming that our public education system should be built on popular games; that would be silly. But the above games, all combined with a skilled teacher directing students towards interesting challenges, are all very capable of teaching kids real and valuable skills. (Arguably, skills much more valuable than some of the ones we currently teach.) And as we better understand what game elements encourage effective learning, we can learn how to engineer better ones specifically for education.
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All this aside, I do agree with your final point: education should be about learning how to create, not about “having fun”. But you can create for the sake of the creative act, or you can create for the sake of playing/winning a game; it seems to me that both of those are valid learning strategies, the latter being even more relevant towards the end goal of success in a capitalist society.
Hey Danny, great post. I couldn’t agree more — attempts to quantify education almost always seem to pull it further from what it should actually be doing (inspiring curiosity & a desire and appreciation for knowledge, and thirst for further experiences).
I haven’t seen any evidence to convince me that applying tradtional gamification techniques to education is a good idea. I recently heard about a program @ ASU that sounds promising and leverages some game mechanics (NOT badges, stars, etc) in a pretty effective way. They use the idea of “proficiencies” to establish both accomplishments in courses and prerequisites for other courses. The idea is that it allows for delinearized curricula that can be different for each student (nice!) and structures requirements for courses more logically: based on the skills and knowledge you’ve exhibited instead of the classes you’ve been present for.
I think it’s a really cool idea and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it: herbergerinstitute.asu.edu/degrees/digital_culture/curriculum.php.