What is gamification?
Gamification involves applying game design elements in non-game contexts to motivate participation, engagement, and loyalty.
Originally developed as a business strategy to improve customer engagement and loyalty, gamification has quickly spread to various sectors including education. Gamification in the classroom tries to gamify studying by incorporating game elements like scoring, competition, and rewards into educational activities. The idea is that game elements spark a sense of ambition, focus, and excitement when working toward learning goals, keeping students engaged and motivated.
For example, game elements can be giving points (for tracking progress), viewing learning objectives and milestones as levels (to show advancement), challenges to break up the monotony of studying and to self-test (to stimulate problem-solving), and rewards (to incentivize effort).
Can you gamify studying – and how can it help?
The psychological benefits of gamification
- Game elements engage you emotionally with your studying, which catches your attention more effectively.
- Gamification comes with a variety of interactive elements, which often are inspired by game design and more visually appealing and dynamic than your typical study setting.
- Challenges and rewards are powerful incentives for your brain to engage with the material.
- A game system encourages repeated practice, which is key for retaining information reliably.
- If you use leaderboards or badges, an added sense of playful competition can push you to better performance.
- Designing levels as stages to reach breaks up complex tasks into more manageable chunks.
- The rewards built into game mechanics make your body release endorphins, making you happier, calmer and more focused.
Case studies
This study found that healthcare students who used gamification methods in their studying of statistics had a more positive attitude towards learning difficulty, value, and cognitive competency. The differences in learning outcomes were not significant, however, the perception of the students of the process, their experience with feedback, and their concentration were improved through the game elements.
Other studies and experiments confirm this, with some showing overall improvements with the use of gamification, and others resulting in the biggest improvements in perception, motivation and experience of the participants when studying with gamification elements.
Overall, it looks like the greatest benefit you can expect from applying gamification to your studying is on an emotional level: It can significantly improve your motivation and make studying more fun. Whether you additionally experience memory-enhancing effects and increased focus and understanding is no guarantee, but when you’re stuck in a mental slump, it’s worth a try!
Potential downsides
While gamification has many benefits, it’s important to balance it with traditional learning methods. Overemphasis on gamification might lead to prioritizing game mechanics over deep learning.
As for most study techniques, if setting them up and applying them takes a lot of time and thought, make sure it is worth it to you and actually brings you closer to your goals. You don’t want the focus on game elements to take up too much of your time and energy that you should be spending on learning the actual material.
Gamification ideas for study routines
Level by level: set goals and milestones ⛳️
Break up your study goal into chunks, with every milestone reached corresponding to finishing a level of your study game. They don’t have to linearly increase in difficulty – mixing it up and alternating between easier and more challenging levels works just as well.
Incorporate rewards 🏆
You can match the levels with small rewards – like getting 5 minutes of sun, checking your phone, or treating yourself to a coffee after mastering a difficult one. Not only does this keep you motivated, it also keeps you focused since rewards that otherwise would be distractions are limited to specific times after you’ve reached a goal.
Find opponents in study groups 🤼♀️
School can come with a sense of competition already, and sometimes that results in more pressure than positive motivation. Forming a study group that, for example through a leaderboard, supports each other while engaging in friendly competition, can turn the competitive aspect into a true motivation boost.
Make up scoring systems 🎯
If you are using flashcards or progressing through levels, you can assign difficulty scores or a number of points for mastering specific topics. Got a super high-yield topic down? 20 points! Answered this tricky detail question correctly? 5 points! This encourages repetitive learning until you’ve collected your high score.
Use gamification apps or tools 📱
There is an increasing number of apps that gamify study habits with points and progress tracking. For example, studytogether.com is a gamified study platform where you earn badges and move up the ranks the more you study. Quizlet uses gamification with the flashcard approach.
Sometimes, just using an inside joke with your study group, or simple pen and paper or a whiteboard, is the quickest and easiest way. But, if you want to incorporate gamification into your study routine long-term, trying an app can make you more consistent with it.
Conclusion
Including gamification elements into your study routine can make it more productive and less tedious. Game mechanics activate your brain’s reward system and can boost your motivation and focus in a way that feels positive and playful.
However, make sure you are not getting distracted from your real-life study goals. The best time to apply gamification to your studying is when you are in a motivation slump and really need to step out of the box to get your motivation back.
In these cases, it can be a real, well… game changer.
