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.

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.

—

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.

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.)

One reason that you see such a performance difference between the Android Emulator and the iOS Simulator can be gleaned from their respective names. Thing may have changed since I last looked, but the iOS simulator is little more than a custom window frame around a MacOS application. OK, well, there’s a little more than that going on. But when you run an app under the simulator, you’re running an x86 binary that targets the Mac’s hardware. It can tell you that your UI works, and that your event handlers fire properly, but it won’t uncover any hardware-specific issues. In fact, it might lead you astray.

The Android emulator, on the other hand, is actually emulating a whole Android system, ARM processor and everything. That’s going to be much slower, but it has the possibility of being more accurate. It might raise a class of problems that the iOS simulator can’t possibly find. Of course, if it runs so slowly that you can’t use it, it’s not really helping you at all.

As an example of ‘the tools’: the Android emulator vs. iOS and WP7.x emulator. You can run an OpenGL app you’re developing in the iDevice emulator or the WP7.x emulator and it’s silky smooth and responsive. On Android – forget it! There’s no point using the emulator because it’s (let’s be frank) a pig.

I ran the demo OpenGL skeleton project that Xcode generates on a Dell 10v single-core hackintosh – silky smooth. Running something similar on the WP7 emulator on a dual-core AMD machine – similar results – very responsive and smooth.

Enter the Android emulator: similar OpenGL animation project – about 2 to 5 frames per second, with flickering thrown in for good measure. And this was on a 2.8GHz Core i7 with an nVidia GTX 460 graphics card!

I’ll produce a YouTube demo (although I no longer have the Dell Mini 10v – did the hackintosh thing purely for experimental purposes).

It’s as though Google’s core business is ads and “ad delivery”, and everything else is kind of ‘experimental’ and alpha/beta.

Factually right or wrong, I think Andrew Munn is a hero for bringing attention to the Android lag issue. This issue is rarely discussed and is always overshadowed and marginalized by Google marketing campaigns and ALDs (“Android Lag Deniers”). At least Andrew Munn took a swing at it, and offered a solution.

Google (or any company for that matter) would benefit from having people like Andrew Munn – people who are willing to examine a problem and offer solutions instead of refuting the speculation and theories people naturally arrive at and failing to acknowledge that there is a problem (other than suggesting: “faster CPUs with more cores will fix it!” – see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9S5EO7CLjo#t=2m00s).

This issue goes all the way back to March 2010: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914

Microsoft tackled it head on and succeeded: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yynn6C-P88

Bite the bullet on this one Google – it’s time for action, not talk! Android users and developers deserve better!!!

I was perusing your blog and stumpled upon this little gem. It’s old but I want to share something as well since I can’t sleep. I did not go to an outstanding ivy-league college, I was not pre-law or pre-med, and I most certainly didn’t graduate magna cum laude. In fact, I worked incredibly hard to barely get by. I want to say, I have a job. A hard job that requires me to suck up my pride. But a job, nonetheless. I watch people come and go because they feel, like all of us feel, they deserve more. So, I will be walking around in freezing cold Minnesota, banging on doors, and doing what I need to do to make commission. Not salary, not hourly. I will get said no to 5 out of 6 times. I will get to talk to 1 out of 8 yes’. I will make 1 sale out of 3 appointments. I will make more in a week than some sympathy needing 4.0 honors student will make in a year. I racked up quite a few participation trophies in my time but they gathered dust. Magna cum laude used to mean you were smart not you participated in being smart.