Gamification
16 articles on Gamification.
How the gamification of learning can benefit
Do you know what gamification is? As a specialist term, many people will not have come across it before, but the vast majority of us will have encountered it, some perhaps without even realising.
Enhancing Safety Through Play: The Gamification of Health and Safety Training.
Regardless of an organisation’s size and sector, health and safety training is an essential activity. Providing staff with greater expertise and knowledge is arguably more important for those involved in higher risk industries. As an employer, it is your responsibility to provide information, instruction and training wherever possible to ensure the workforce remains free from harm. Traditional training methods such as classroom-based teaching are not particularly well suited to organisations that need to prioritise health and safety. Members of staff often struggle for motivation, while the business itself must find the time and resources to implement employee training More and more businesses, therefore, are looking at different training approaches, such as gamification. While some employers may consider workplace fun to be counterintuitive when culturing a safe environment, gamification combines the need for training with more interesting and engaging learning materials. When it comes to health and safety training, most organisations will formulate a plan that relates to the skills and knowledge needed to avoid accident and injury. This can involve looking at previous instances of workplace injury, near misses, or cases of ill health to learn lessons and gain greater insight into the risks that exist. When this process is
Spaced Repetition and gamification: Useful tools in health and safety training
Health and safety training is essential for all companies involved in high-hazard industries, but how effective is it? Problems can arise when trying to choose the right techniques to impart different kinds of knowledge.
The Essence of Play: Utilizing Gamification in Business
We all love to play. We like to win, we need to achieve, and to move forward. These are simple, fundamental human emotions. Simple, but also powerful. We know that gamification plays a huge part in digital learning and in engaging and enthusing employees. We know it to be a powerful tool in learning and development. Gamification is a key element to Wranx, driving users forward through rewards, badges and leaderboards, encouraging competition between peers and teams. It’s a simple idea but incredibly effective, and certainly not just the latest fad. When we make work fun, we get better work. We can increase engagement and motivation in employees and also use gamification as a valuable tool when engaging with customers or clients. There are a wide variety of ways to implement it in the workplace, with an equally broad range of desired outcomes. Not all gamification methods are digital, though. In 2016, City University London, (in conjunction with the NHS and Focus Games Ltd) developed a board game for nurses called The Drug Round Game. The game was devised with staff members’ input, and its face-to-face nature allowed users to share best practice, experiences and knowledge – something not always
Video gamers have the skills to pay the bills
Gamers are part of a large and diverse community. They come in all shapes and sizes, (as well as both sexes). People who enjoy playing video games live perfectly normal lives, with the same hopes, dreams and aspirations as everyone else. They’re quite different from the stereotypical vision we have of someone who enjoys playing video games. We all have that vision. The lonely gamer, sitting in his room (for some reason, it’s always a he in our stereotype), with the curtains drawn, toiling away through the levels. He lives in the dark, so has no need for day or night. Occasionally, for a break, he’ll listen to some loud and heavy music, usually metal, before immersing himself back in the virtual world on the screen. His skin is pale from lack of exposure to sunlight, he lives on fast food, rarely leaves the house, and is happy to lead a solitary and sedentary life. In fact, video gamers may actually have an edge on the rest of us, particularly when it comes to learning. Recent studies tell us that gaming can help increase brain function and problem solving skills. Further benefits can include an improvement to spatial reasoning,
Gamification in education – what’s in it for students?
We all know about gamification, it has been around for some time now. The world of Learning and Development knows gamification well. They’re like old friends in a mutually beneficial relationship. As familiar to each other as a comfortable pair of slippers. Gaming technology is built into our every day, as we see, for instance, in the many Health and Wellbeing apps we use. We know that gamification can enthuse and inspire better performance in employees, can make training personalised and therefore more reactive. We know it is adaptive and motivational. As a force for change, it has many positive attributes from which we can all benefit. There could also be benefit in bringing gamification into the academic setting. Teachers, at first, may see gamification as frivolous, or even childish, a waste of time. And it is true that in the formal setting of academia, it is a relatively new development. But schools and colleges are constantly seeking new ways of boosting student engagement and motivation. The delivery of knowledge and ideas needs all the help it can get, and heads, teachers and governing bodies should feel happy to embrace new thought, new directions and developments, particularly if it helps
“Don’t worry, it’s only a game”: It’s more fun to compete
We all know one. We’ve all got one. They’re everywhere. A family member or friend, so obsessed with their lifelong passion, their all encompassing love of a particular sport. They eat, sleep, and breathe it. It guides their every waking thought, and shapes every opinion they have. And so, they take every bad result, every harsh refereeing decision, each undesirable outcome as a personal affront. We know these people well. We also know that the mere mention of the phrase “Don’t worry, it’s only a game” to them, is likely to result in a tight lipped, purple faced, furious reply that “you just don’t get it”, or “you just don’t understand”. They could be right. Maybe not everyone does ‘get’ it, or maybe some do more than others. The competitive instinct can change everything. There is a received and perceived notion that, for instance, girls are better at reading than boys, but a recent French study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, looked at how the introduction of a competitive element could change learning, and subsequently lead to that notion being challenged. With the gamifying of a simple school exercise, significant results came to light. Eighty children were
Driving employee engagement through gamified training: Next level or game over?
So. You’re an organisation, a company. You have employees, and they need training. You’ve invested in the training, and rolled it out across the workforce. Did all your employees enjoy the training? Did they gain from it? Did they learn? Did they all fully engage with the training, or the trainer? Would you even know if the answer to any, or all, of those questions was no? And if it was, what would you change? Although we’ve all known about gamification for a while, newer technologies, design principles and frameworks help us to make the process more scalable and more reactive, giving the opportunity for greater feedback, through more comprehensive use of data. Ever since those heady and exciting days of the early 1970s spent playing Pong, with its catchy one note soundtrack, to today’s Call Of Duty, game designers have used every known piece of data on how users work, how they think and react, locked into their systems, and as a consequence, have been able to use that data to help users improve. Data gives analysis, and analysis is key to giving us answers to some of the questions listed above. Gamified learning can dramatically improve employee engagement.
Gamification: how it can engage and motivate your employees
Bringing the promise of more engaged and motivated employees, gamification sounds like the answer to every organisation’s training problems. However, it is natural to be sceptical of any concept that could potentially revolutionise the way your members of staff acquire knowledge and apply new information at work. Then again, it has been around for quite some time now and shows no signs of slowing down unlike other management fads. In fact, a couple of years ago it was predicted that 40 per cent of Global 1000 organisations would use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform their business operations by 2015. In the opinion of Gabe Zichermann, author of The Gamification Revolution and founder of Dopamine, a consultancy concerned with gamified campaigns for employees and consumers, this training technique’s increasing adoption comes as no great surprise. “When you reward consumers for engaging in fun, easy activities, they engage more often and more deeply,” he notes. But how exactly can gamification engage and motivate your employees? How gamification works “People may be motivated by getting a gift card, but what really drives them is recognition [as well as] status, access power and stuff,” says Zichermann. Unfortunately, a common feature of
How gamification can collaborate with workplace incentive programs
Along with a weekly wage or monthly salary, your employer may also have some sort of incentive program in place to keep you happy and motivated at work. But while several members of staff appreciate getting a free gift or monetary bonus every now and again, the vast majority of incentive programs are rather boring and repetitive. This is especially true if you have worked at one company for many years and continued to receive positive appraisals throughout this time, only to receive an arbitrary “incentive” as a reward. A lot of the time, each and every employee will receive the same thing too, which isn’t tailored to your contribution, achievement, or how long you have been a loyal member of staff. Thankfully, there is an alternative. You might associate gamification as a way to increase engagement with staff training, but it can also be used as an alternative to traditional incentive programs. Instead of handing out tangible presents that aren’t scalable according to the individual’s performance and can end up costing a great deal of money, gamification provides participants with unique aims and bespoke rewards. In the opinion of Gabe Zichermann, author of The Gamification Revolution, the majority of
Why gamification is a vital tool in e-learning
Owing to the fact technology is now an integral part of society and something we couldn’t possibly do without, it is no real surprise to see that e-learning has become more and more important from an educational and training perspective. For school pupils, university students, and full-time employees, the ability to acquire new information via computer software and smartphone applications has transformed their respective learning experiences. But as a concept so intrinsically linked to technology, e-learning must move with the times and continually adjust its offering. By standing still, e-learning could soon receive the same exiled treatment as the traditional teaching methods that preceded it. Thankfully, e-learning is moving forward in a progressive way, as things like smartphone applications are now essential teaching tools for several students. However, one development in particular has not only assisted e-learning in its quest to be at the forefront of modern-day teaching, but also laid claim as a vital and indispensable tool. A closer look at gamification Generally speaking, gamification refers to the use of game mechanics to “gamify” content, such as teaching materials. In turn, this incentivises and engages students or employees by encouraging them to learn more and provides rewards for certain
What Wikipedia can’t tell you about gamification
Be honest, how many times have you conducted a search on Google for a piece of information about someone or something and ended up on Wikipedia? This multilingual, free-content encyclopaedia provides answers to an untold amount of questions thanks to its openly editable nature. But while this enables anyone to improve their understanding about a certain subject, it also increases the chance of inaccuracy and error. Despite the fact most Wikipedia articles contain plenty of references at the bottom of the page, others aren’t always verified and you have to assume what you are reading is correct. Thankfully, Wikipedia’s gamification page is full of valuable content backed up by substantial references. In addition to categorising gamification, it also goes on to explore techniques, applications, and even criticism of the theory. However, even though it explains what gamification is and how it can be used, Wikipedia doesn’t exactly furnish much actionable advice for businesses interested in implementing this revolutionary technique. So, with this in mind, here is what Wikipedia can’t tell you about gamification. Why gamification works As you’re no doubt aware, gamification works because it provides rewards and injects fun into everyday tasks. What’s more, it capitalises on our natural
Reading about it is the easy part
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