Duolingo, Kahoot! and the Redemption of Gamified Education
What the dominance of language-learning app Duolingo and gamified quiz platform Kahoot! says about game mechanics in education
When the language-learning app Duolingo went public on the NASDAQ exchange on July 28th of this year, it served as a bit of Rorschach test for Edtech market observers.
Transcend Network saw it as a triumph of the strategy of combining language learning and testing. Fast Company focused on Duolingo’s character-based approach to learning.
Edsurge reporters saw the event as an example of the pandemic-fueled growth of the Edtech sector, while the Pittsburgh Business Times hailed the company as hometown heroes, showcasing the strength of the Pittsburgh startup scene.
Techcrunch, a longtime Duolingo watcher, honed in on Duolingo founder Luis Von Ahn’s fascinating computer science background, while Wall Street observers, true to form, focused on the gross profit margin.
For me, the big story about Duolingo is this:
Duolingo finally puts to rest all doubt about the educational and commercial value of ‘gamification’ (injecting game mechanics into non-game settings).
1985-2010: Games and Education
I started graduate school to study games and education in 2008, two years before the term “gamification’ was coined, inspired by the incredible acceleration of game technology and the ubiquity of gaming in the lives of the students I tutored and taught.
When I told people what I was studying, they would all have the same question:
“Educational Games. You mean like Oregon Trail?”
Frankly, I couldn’t blame them; Oregon Trail, from 1985, 23 years earlier, was still the most famous educational game, and along with others of the era, like Reader Rabbit (1983), Where in the World is Carmen San Diego (1985), Number Munchers (1986), and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (1987), had simply come to define the field.
Being stuck in time is not great in any industry, but in gaming, it was deadly.
The educational games listed above were a far cry from the generation of games of 2008: Top games that year included World of Warcraft, Halo 3, Super Smash Bros Brawl, Grand Theft Auto IV and Call of Duty: World at War, Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution. (One notable exception of that era was Nintendo’s 2006 release Brain Age, a wide-selling handheld game that presaged brain training services like Lumosity and Elevate.)
Something else important happened in 2008; Apple launched the App Store, spawning a Cambrian revolution of hundreds of thousands of games that could be literally downloaded into the pockets of high schoolers. On Facebook, Zynga games were gaining traction in that year; by late 2009, Farmville would have over 20 million monthly users.
A study by Pew Research in 2008 put it succinctly:
Almost all teens play games.
Video gaming is pervasive in the lives of American teens—young teens and older teens, girls and boys, and teens from across the socioeconomic spectrum. Opportunities for gaming are everywhere, and teens are playing video games frequently…
Fully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games.
99% of boys and 94% of girls play video games.
50% of teens played games “yesterday.”
Teens were quickly coming to the conclusion that, as Atlantic culture Spencer Kornhaber put it in a recent article:
“If the point of life was simply to enjoy the moment that you’re in, we’d all be playing video games constantly. The likes of Minecraft and Zelda turn the drag of time into a silvery chute you drop into and emerge from after hours in a state of flow. No other activity, it becomes clearer every year, can compete in delivering kicks per second…”
Between the 1980’s and the 2010’s, the relationship between games and education could be summed up in a few hackneyed talking points, repeated over and over again:
Kids sure do seem to love games…
…but educational games tend to suck.
In fact, they are really just ‘edutainment’ (or even “chocolate-covered broccoli”)
Therefore, even though games are literally taking over kids’ lives…
… let’s not bother with educational games, because they won’t be fun.
There was a new generation of academics desperately trying to bridge the gap between gaming, theory and education: Jane McGonigal, Jan Plass, Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen from NYU, Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire from Wisconsin/UCI, Henry Jenkins from USC, Jesper Juul and Sebastian Deterding in Europe, ASU linguist James Paul Gee, among others, and game visionaries like Jesse Schell, Raph Koster and Filament Games’ Dan White.
I spent my graduate school years with my nose deeply buried in articles and books by this brilliant group of designers and scholars. But for all the theory, there were simply very few games breaking through to qualify as both ‘educational’ and ‘popular’ (even on a school level).
Good games are really hard to make. Game companies only make games that will compete in a roiling market, often with large budgets, large teams, hundreds of hours of play-testing and tons of burnout. Academic departments, with their rotating cast of graduate students, simply don’t have the resources.
In that era, one of the most revered and cited academic game projects in academia was Harvard Graduate School of Education’s River City, which looked like this in 2008:
Let’s just say, it ain’t Mario.
To be fair, some popular commercial off-the-shelf games like Portal 2, Little Big Planet, Minecraft, Simcity and Sid Meier’s Civilization were being cited or repurposed as ‘educational games’ by talented educators.
Meanwhile, a “Games for Change” movement and a “Serious Games” movement emerged in this period, leading to complex and interesting game projects like Papers Please, Darfur is Dying, Remission or That Dragon, Cancer.
But despite all the good intentions, the distance between the games kids chose to play on their consoles and phones and anything ‘educational’ stubbornly remained.
It was in this context that the term “Gamification” was coined, and quickly became one of the most polarizing concepts in the industry and a case study in the Gartner Hype Cycle.
Remind me what Gamification is Again…?
When ‘Gamification’ made it onto the short list of Oxford Dictionary’s “words of the year” in 2011, this was its definition:
“the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.”
The ‘typical game elements’ in this description tend to include:
Points
Badges
Levels and Status
Leaderboards
Quests/Goals
Skill Trees
Virtual Currencies
Avatars and Characters
Competitive activities
Timed activities
Progress Indicators
Story/Narrative Elements
The association of gamification with ‘online marketing techniques’ is telling; the Starbucks app is famous for using game elements, like points, rewards and levels, to build customer loyalty. Airlines and department stores have used status rewards and levels like “gold”, “diamond” and “platinum” for years. Even something as simple as a ‘buy 10, get one free’ card from your local frozen yogurt store is taking advantage of an entire field of gamification research about how motivation increases when users near a goal threshold.
For my money, ‘gamification’, at heart, is a realization that some of the psychological factors that made games so compelling were actually not endemic to games at all.
Game designers have long known that people of any age:
Appreciate a flow of immediate, informative feedback about our behaviors and long to know that we are improving (AKA ‘leveling up’)
Understand complex systems more easily when they have a clear, visual and repeatable structure (like a skill tree, map, or quest/goal structure)
Love to ‘acquire’ and show off rare or valuable things (currency, items, accessories) and will work hard to do so. We work even harder when the reward is within reach
Are often excited to compete with our past selves and sometimes against others, especially against others who we perceive to be at a similar level
Care about status and like to show off our skills and achievements to one another, especially when we have worked hard on them
Get hooked by good stories and remember them easily
Like to move, react, and act physically
2010-2014: Gamification and The Peak of Inflated Expectations
The first Google search for the term “gamification” was in July 2010, and later that year, “The ‘Gamification’ of Education” was published in Forbes by education journalist Elizabeth Corcoran (one year out from founding Edsurge).
GSummit, the first Gamification conference, was held in San Francisco in 2011, and was followed by the publication of “Gamification By Design” by Gabe Zichermann and Chris Cunningham; Zichermann has done multiple TEDx talks on gamification and claims to have coined the term. There was even a popular Gamification MOOC on Coursera, combining two major education buzzwords of the era.
Software and SaaS companies started taking notice of the trend. Linkedin added a progress meter to its profile creator. Slack Overflow and Reddit created virtual currencies representing to the status of each user. Avatars, levels, leaderboards, and badges were integrated into a wide variety of consumer-facing systems, and companies like Bunchball promised “enterprise-level gamification” for business customers.
Enter The Gamified Education Companies
Duolingo was conceived in 2009 and launched in beta in late 2011.
Under the hood was all manner of serious AI, from natural language processing to A/B testing, and the Pittsburgh hub was a testament to the company’s academic roots at Carnegie Mellon.
But the user interface was pure gamification; from the very beginning, it provided users with levels, experience points, badges, public leaderboards, daily goals, progress indicators, skill trees and user avatars, as well as an adorable green mascot.
It wasn’t alone. A slew of educational game and gamified education companies were spawned:
Prodigy (founded in 2011), a popular fantasy-based math app that allows learners to complete math problems and mini-games in a gaming world.
ClassDojo (2011) brought avatar characters into class communication.
Minecraft (2011), by software company Mojang was designed as pure game, but has been used in educational contexts almost since its inception.
Dragonbox Learning (2012), which converted algebra into a series of brilliantly conceived math games.
Nearpod (2012), which provides a set of game templates that teachers can use to ‘gamify’ classroom activities.
Credly (2012) and Accredible (2013) allowed educational institutions to create and grant shareable badges for a wide variety of learning behaviors.
Kahoot! (2013), a Norwegian company which allowed teachers to turn any classroom quiz into real-time scored, timed competitive activities.
Freckle (2013), a gamified application for Math and English Language Arts that included characters, coins and mini-games.
Classcraft (2013), a full gamification suite, with its World Of Warcraft inspired characters and badges.
Other major education players added game mechanics to their existing systems:
Quizlet (2005) added gamelike study modes during this period.
Dreambox Learning (2006), an early entrant into the gamified education space, continued to double down on its game and story elements during this period.
Khan Academy (2008) incorporated a gamified structure, including a virtual currency (energy points), badges and skill trees.
2014-2015: Gamification in The Trough of Disillusionment
By 2014, the games and education die was now cast. There were two competing camps:
The Game Purists who believed in the deep, transformative power of games themselves and wanted education and schooling to be more creative and game-like:
The Gamification Gurus, that believed in layering psychological game mechanics onto any activity you wanted people to do more of, including both traditional education.
The dichotomy is well synopsized by the University of Waterloo’s Center for Teaching and Learning:
Gamification of Learning: “applies game elements or a game framework to existing learning activities.”
Game-Based Learning: involves “designing learning activities so that game characteristics and game principles inhere within the learning activities themselves.”
For the Game Purists, the idea that slapping badges and levels onto virtual worksheets or other unappealing activities was insulting to games and to those who had spent years studying them. Gamification was parody, akin to the ridiculous advice of Principal Skinner on the Simpsons*:
Skinner: Oh, licking envelopes can be fun! All you have to do is make a game of it.
Bart: What kind of game?
Skinner: Well, for example, you could see how many you can lick in an hour, and then try to break that record.
Bart: Sounds like a pretty crappy game to me.
*Skinner, by the way, is named for B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist whose reinforcement theories underly many of gamification’s core assumptions.
For the Gamification Gurus, it made little sense to spend so much money, time and energy making educational games that would inevitably be unable to compete with entertainment franchises, especially when you could guide behavior with simple psychological techniques.
Led by these academics and others, by 2014, there was a serious backlash to gamification, and those who were skeptical from the beginning were starting to win out. Gartner (yes, the Gartner of the Hype Cycle), after predicting in 2013 that 70% of the world's top 2000 companies would be using gamification in some form by 2014, followed up in 2014 with the prediction that 80% of gamification applications will fail to deliver “because of poor design.”
Here’s Georgia Tech professor and game theorist Ian Bogost in a 2015 blog post:
Gamification is bullshit.
I’m not being flip or glib or provocative. I’m speaking philosophically.
More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway…
Gamification is reassuring. It gives Vice Presidents and Brand Managers comfort: they’re doing everything right, and they can do even better by adding “a games strategy” to their existing products, slathering on “gaminess” like aioli on ciabatta at the consultant’s indulgent sales lunch.
2015-2021: Gamification Reaches The Plateau of Productivity
And here we come full circle back to the present.
The gamification wars are mostly over and the term seems to have been restored to its original intent: Gamification is a psychological technique to drive behavior change. It’s a set of user interface elements that have become increasingly ubiquitous. It’s a way to use game mechanics without having to build immersive, expensive games.
Duolingo
Duolingo has become the most downloaded education app in the world and the most popular learning platform, with 500 million registered users and 40 million active monthly users.
Duolingo has also invested in (and been subjected to) multiple efficacy studies (here, here, here) to showcase the effectiveness of the app, which seem to show positive, if mixed results.
The huge influx of money from the recent IPO, along with its recently announced extension into math (structured topics with clear skill levels, like math, language and music, lend themselves nicely to gamification and educational gaming), assures that it will continue to be a major force in education technology for years to come.
Kahoot!
Kahoot!, bought Dragonbox Learning in 2019 and completed its acquisition of major K-12 platform Clever this week, and started listing on the Oslo Stock Exchange in May. According to its press releases, “in the last year alone, over 250 million games were played with more than 1.5 billion participating players across 200 countries.”
Other projects continue to bring game-based learning and gamification into classrooms and learning settings:
The recent Martin Luther King march inside Fortnite event, sponsored by Time Magazine, is a great modern example of how educators continue to bring commercial games into educational settings.
Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2014 and now runs large-scale Minecraft education initiatives throughout the country, many in collaboration with afterschool or summer technical camps.
Credly bought Pearson’s Acclaim badge system in 2018, partnered with Degreed this year, and has issued over 40 million badges.
Accredible works with over 10,000 organizations to provide badges and sharable credentials, from education providers like McGraw Hill, Skillsoft and Rosetta Stone to companies like Google and Slack to universities like Harvard, Oxford and Berkeley.
New educational gaming companies like Toca Boca, Originator (Endless Alphabet), Sago Mini World, Eyeread (Squiggle Park), Freecloud Design (Stack the States) and others are filling the app store with educational game experiences for younger children.
A whole generation of coding apps and games like CodeSignal, Codecombat, Codewars and many others are changing technical education, especially for young people.
Unfortunately Augmented/Virtual Reality systems like Facebook’s Oculus have so far invested mostly in “educational experiences”; my guess is that the lack of game elements in these immersive simulations (there are no levels, goals, badges, characters, etc.) will likely doom them to niche popularity. That said, we are still in the early days of Educational AR/VR, with adult AR/VR training companies like TransfrVR, Mursion and OssoVR are on the forefront.
Adding It All Up
For those who weren’t paying much attention during the “Game-Based Learning vs. Gamification” era, the whole debate may seem silly and retrograde.
Why can’t we have both?
Of course it makes sense to use what the psychological techniques from gaming to try to encourage students to perform learning activities. Why shouldn’t a teacher use a Kahoot! quiz or a Nearpod gaming template to make quizzes and homework more fun and rewarding?
And of course it’s also a good idea to try to make the most excited, compelling educational games we can to improve our students’ motivation and learning efficacy. We may not yet have seen the “Fortnite” or “Overwatch” of educational games quite yet, but it’s a great North Star for those who care about learning.
For my money, gamification is one of the most transformative psychological insights in education in the past decade.
Don’t agree? Have other thoughts about games and education? Examples I’ve missed? Would love to hear from you in the comments!
Thank you for writing this..very insightful!
This was great! I am interested in broadening the definition of what COULD be learned from educational games. Especially in the context of the pandemic, emerging research is showing that games, and the social connections that they brought, provided much-needed social support that was otherwise lacking. Experiences like Roblox are also pushing the boundary of what counts as educational. All of this stems really from my emerging understanding of what counts as "learning". Of course, this could be repurposed to call any game educational too, like you point out haha. But, I do think there is value in broadening the definition.
Regarding Duolingo, I have a provocative question. Do people care whether they are learning? Or is it simply more important to have streaks and share them with friends, or even with yourself simply to know you can pick something up and stick with it? In other words, what is the goal of a Duolingo user, and are they being truthful about it with themselves? Is Duolingo even educational or is it just a game? ("just" is not used disparagingly here.)