Gamification means fusing game mechanisms (e.g. lives, points, boss battles, competition rules, etc.) into an activity. Recently, gamification has been garnering more interest, especially in the educational realm. Khan Academy is famous for implementing game-based principles into its adaptive student curriculum, most notably for their point and badge system. During my time at ETS, many of the research divisions were focused on assimilating game mechanisms in their assessment technology. However, here’s another possible area of incorporating gamification: our lives.
Month: August 2015
History is one of the subjects many people profess to hate most. It’s boring, it’s static, it’s just learning about a bunch of dead white guys, and on and on.
To a certain extent, I agree. History (the way that it is taught to students today) is immensely boring. In school, history is taught primarily through lectures and textbook readings. But if you want to experience the true dynamism (I really did just use that word) that is history, you need to find a motivation to study history. I can easily teach you how to be successful studying history in a school setting, but would that really be worth it if you never gained a lasting appreciation and interest in history? I think not.
Have you ever wondered how some people just seem to soak up information? The secret is that they have accumulated a critical mass of knowledge, which allows them to create enough anchor points (more on anchor points here) to seamlessly integrate the new information into their existing knowledge framework. That’s it. The tough part is developing that initial mass of knowledge.
I’ve gone on and on about how all knowledge is connected. Too often, subjects in schools are taught as if they were isolated, self-contained bodies of knowledge. That is so very false. And there is nothing better to prove this phenomenon than the Wikipedia Game.
I spent the past two months as a System Analyst intern in the Office of Quality at Educational Testing Service. For those of you who don’t know, ETS is the company that performs the academic research and assessment development for tests such as the SAT and AP programs. I’m going to perform a quick post-mortem on my experience there.