How Can Gamification Increase Student Engagement and Interest in Education?

Global examples of Gamified education that learners love

Games have the ability to impact and influence people through simple, yet elaborate details that game designers have developed over time. Many have noticed this powerful way of influencing user behavior and implemented similar mechanics to do the same in their own ways.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is a user experience design strategy that involves leveraging game mechanics, elements, and processes to increase user motivation and engagement in digital experiences. Gamification leverages engagement tactics that popular games utilize and incorporate them into non-gaming applications to create a better experience for users. If you’ve ever received karma by using Reddit or maintained streaks on Snapchat, you’ve experienced gamification tactics that you may have never realized. Simple features like leaderboards, points, or rewards are all popular gamification techniques that have been normalized and adopted in many popular applications, especially in modern education and educational technology. In short, gamification aims to create a better, more engaging, and more enjoyable experience for users.

It’s also worth noting that gamification is not the same as educational games. Popular educational games like Tynker are extremely effective at entertaining and educating simultaneously, but they are not the same as gamified educational apps. Educational games are serving educational experiences through virtual game environments, while gamification is adding gaming mechanics to applications that aren’t games.

How can gamification be implemented?

Gamification stretches beyond rewards and leaderboards. Though they are very effective techniques, there are many other aspects of gamification that can spark engagement from users and create an experience that they genuinely love. 

• Achievements: Digital items such as badges, trophies, and medals can serve as marks of personal progress for students. Especially when awarded when a certain milestone is hit can encourage users to engage with your product more.

• Social: Humans were made to be social, it’s just in our psychology. Creating space for social interaction or competition can help users make one another’s experience even better. For example, friend systems can help users use the product in harmony with one another, and leaderboards can rank a user’s progress against others.

• Progress: Visualizing progress is important whether you’re implementing gamification or not. Visual elements of progression like progress bars, streak system, and even historical statistics of past user activity can be used to show users how far they’ve come and encourage them to keep making further progress.

• Walling: Walling can further encourage user progress by blocking off certain features until further progress is made. Instead of forcing users to pay for these features (paywalling), you can require users to complete challenges, finish lessons, or even continue setting up their account.

• Resources: Classic systems that include points, gems, or coins are very versatile when implemented correctly. It can make way for digital currency systems from within the platform and create a digital economy from within your platform. Marketplaces can be birthed out of these digital economies, allowing users to use their resources to purchase assets to improve and customize their own experience.

• Levels: Similar to progress, levels allow users to unlock more challenges, assignments, and rewards as they continue to make more progress. Having levels to your product allows users to complete more and more levels as they continue to use and build on top of previous knowledge and experience.

• Leverage: Leverage relates to a limited resource that users can have, with popular examples being “lives left” or the amount of time you have to complete a challenge. Having this leverage can be used to create a higher-pressure situation to boost adrenaline and focus, and rewards can be set up to allow users to gain more of this limited resource.

• Goals: It’s important to make sure users know what they’re doing and what they should aim to achieve. Goals can be implemented into your product by clearly setting objectives and challenges for users to complete in a gamified way. For example, hitting a 5-day streak or completing 15 educational lessons in a week.

• Micro-interactions: Micro-interactions are events that help subconsciously train users what is good and bad behavior. Positive micro-interactions usually take the shape of animations, sound effects, and words of affirmation, and are triggered by successful actions to visually reward users for good behavior. Negative micro-interactions can do the opposite by discouraging bad behavior. Perhaps when a user loses a level or induces inappropriate behavior, acute sound effects, bold red colors, and warning messages can notify users about the fault in their behavior and provide feedback on what to do better.

What are some examples of good gamification in Edtech?

With education technology being a prominent implementer of gamification tactics, there are plenty of great examples to look at when it comes to successful gamification use cases.

Khan Academy is an educational nonprofit creating educational K-12 content for over 70M students worldwide (as of 2018). Founded in 2008, Khan Academy is also one of the earliest pioneers of educational technology, as well as a notable example of good gamification. Whenever users watch a video, complete an exercise or hit a milestone, they earn energy points which are used to measure effort, not mastery or ability. Alongside these points, students can earn badges as they continue to make progress and hit milestones. There are 5 levels of badges that students can achieve, each with varying difficulty/rarity: Meteorite, Moon, Earth, Sun, Black Hole. Though not necessarily a “reward”, students can choose their own custom avatar that will mutate and evolve as they move further in their educational journey. These achievements help instill a constant adventure of progression in kids, pushing them to seek out rarer and harder achievements to add to their portfolio.

Khan Academy has used points and badges (L), avatars (M), and streaks, as well as progress meters and skills trees (R) to bring gaming elements into learning.

Duolingo is one of the most popular language-learning applications in the world, with 8.2M daily active users (as of 2020) and 120M learners worldwide. With an entire suite of gamification features, refined brand and product design, and their infamous mascot Duo, Duolingo is a leader in the realm of gamified experiences. Duolingo has daily streaks for you to maintain, daily streak goals to aim for, and various badge achievements that you can earn by hitting milestones in your learning progress. They offer an experience point system to measure your overall progress and use of Duolingo, as well as gems that you can earn for proficiency and hitting goals. Those gems can be spent in their shop, where you can purchase boosters and abilities to improve your Duolingo experience and do things such as save your streaks. In Duolingo, you’re held accountable with their heart system, with you losing a heart every time you get an answer wrong, and allowing you to re-purchase them through gems. Duolingo also limits certain features through walling - their Stories and Audio Lessons features can only be accessed after a certain amount of progress is made, which encourages further user engagement. And of course, Duolingo is known for their micro-interactions, with dopamine-boosting animations of their mascot Duo all over the app, and many celebration animations and sound effects to celebrate your victories. Duolingo has the one of the most gamified apps on the market, but it’s done in a way where language learning isn’t just easy - it’s fun.

Duolingo uses progress monitoring, a virtual host (the owl Duo), streaks, experience points (XP), badges and goals to make language learning into a popular game.

Brainly is a peer-to-peer online learning platform for students, parents, and teachers with gamification being a core priority to power their platform. Headquartered in Poland, Brainly serves over 350M users per month (as of 2020). Brainly takes gamification features to the next level, making it a core part of how they power their platform with user-generated content. Since Brainly is essentially a question-and-answer forum, they need users to be both givers and receivers. Brainly points lie at the core of their gamification systems, which are given out to users who answer questions and contribute back to the community. If their answer is the best, they can be marked as the “brainliest” and receive extra brainly points, which incentivizes high-quality answers. When users want to post a question, they must spend their Brainly points to actually do it. The more Brainly points spent on your question, the faster it gets answered. Many achievements are awarded for those who contribute heavily back to the community by answering questions, and it’s taken to the next level with their challenges system. Brainly offers lists of challenges for you to complete where you’re challenged to answer a certain amount of questions in a certain time period to win extra Brainly points and receive award badges. Alongside all of this, Brainly also holds a nice social friends system, as well as a leaderboard system to rank the best answerers in certain subjects. Brainly has beautifully morphed all of their gamification features to incentivize and democratize community contribution to everyone, allowing all students to share their knowledge with those who need it.

Brainly uses points, rankings and leaderboards to incentivize community members to support one another with high quality answers.

Kahoot is a social, game-based learning platform and a classroom favorite for millions of students and teachers around the world. In fact, as of January 2021, over 5 billion people have used Kahoot since 2013. Since Kahoot was built to be a quick, accessible classroom activity, they don’t have an account system, which automatically negates many gamification feature options. Due to this, Kahoot has relied heavily on micro-interactions, and they’ve done it right. With their extremely simple, yet playful UI, playing a Kahoot game is a memory that many of us recent students will remember forever. Kahoot has a classic loading song, as well as memorable sound effects such as their starting and ending cymbal sound effects. Multiple-choice answers are big and bold, being represented only by shapes, and constant reminders of your leaderboard rank pushes every student to try their very best to work their way to the top. At the end, the celebration ending screen generously appreciates the students who made the podium with confetting, animated leaderboards, fireworks, and big badges for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places.

Kahoot! uses points, timers and a colorful interface to make quizzes feel like a game show, and a virtual podium to provide badges based on Olympic medals.

Leetcode is one of the most popular online programming platforms to learn how to ace technical coding interviews. With over 1800 expertly-created questions to learn how to answer, many of which are used in real technical interviews, Leetcode is a go-to option for interview training. Since Leetcode is predicated on challenging users to answer tough questions, the platform enforces aspects of gamification to encourage answering questions and also contributing back to the community through answering questions on their forum. Through completing daily streaks, competing in their contests, and answering technical questions on the community forum, you can earn Leetcoins, which can be cashed in at the Leetcode Store. Instead of items to customize the Leetcode experience, you can use Leetcoins to purchase Leetcode merchandise like t-shirts, notebooks, and keychains.

Leetcode uses streaks, coins, badges and real-world rewards like those redeemed in a virtual arcade to gamify technical interview prep.

Quizizz is an Indian gamified learning platform, encouraging student engagement in the classroom similarly to Kahoot!. Reported to have 65M active users in December 2020, they’re an extremely popular classroom activity for classrooms in India. Quizizz has a similar flow and feel to Kahoot! with a teacher-class dynamic, group question-and-answer, and competitions to make it on the podium, but they also incorporate a bit of a calmer feel. The music and sound effects are toned down and satisfying, transitions are smooth instead of poppy, and the interface adopts a default dark theme. Quizizz also incorporates many more elements of gamification. Though they also don’t track accounts, students are able to build up streaks of correct questions throughout the quiz, and can unlock power-ups to activate throughout the competition such as point combos, time freezes to answer questions, and streak savers.

Quizizz uses points, progress meters, power-ups, streaks and a colorful, but dark and calm, interface to make learning and quizzing fun and gamified.

Why does gamification work?

Gamification works because it focuses on three things: 

1. Influencing our core functional emotions. Games can make us feel happy, sad, frustrated, satisfied, curious, and every once in a while, extreme bliss. We love games because we can grow an attachment to them, and that attachment is only formed when we can connect with it on an emotional level.

2. Triggering our natural human instincts. The way that games are produced, designed, and laid out can impact how we react when certain obstacles and adventures are presented to us. We’re pushed to explore when there is uncertainty, persevere when there is hardship, and fully focus and immerse ourselves into completing various challenges.

3. Subconsciously training us to become better. With micro-interactions and negative interactions, games can subtly teach us what is good and bad behavior within the simulation. Celebrating wins and emphasizing failures through graphics, sound effects, and colors can influence the way we see certain actions. Fun animations with victorious sound effects and bright, vibrant colors can celebrate our wins and encourage us to continue along that path. Negative sound effects and darker colors can make us dread failure, and incentivize us to not take bad actions in the future.

Beyond these three principles, there is a deeper reason to why gamification works: flow theory. 

Flow theory states that humans can experience a state of a flow: a moment in time where you can experience concentration, interest, and enjoyment simultaneously. Brought to fruition by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s, flow theory has shown to be a prominent concept in learning experience design, and it was clearly outlined in this study conducted by Scott W. Vann and Andrew A. Tawfik.

Flow state exists in between two states of mind: boredom and anxiety. To keep someone in a state of flow, you must ensure their experience isn’t too easy to make them uninterested, while also making sure the experience isn’t too challenging that could frustrate them.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory posits that when the difficulty of a task aligns with the high end of the skill level of the participants, it creates a ‘flow’ state between boredom and anxiety.

The space in-between boredom and anxiety is called the flow channel. In a user journey, the flow channel can be maintained by mapping the challenges at hand to be relative to the user’s assumed abilities. A user’s knowledge and skills are lower in the beginning, but they will improve over time. The challenges and interactions that the user will face should stay proportional to their abilities, and continue to get harder to keep the user in the flow channel and maintain a state of flow.

Mixing gamification with flow theory is not an easy task. Shifting users into a flow state and maintaining the balance is the peak of user engagement and a feat of user experience design.

How can Gamification be implemented correctly and incorrectly?

Being aware of why gamification works, we can boil down what a gamification experience consists of and ask ourselves questions to validate that it is implemented correctly:

• Clear goals and immediate feedback. Does the user know what is right and wrong? Is our platform giving feedback to them making clear what their primary goal is?

• Equilibrium between the level of challenge and personal skill. Is the level of challenge that the user is facing proportional to their level of skill to complete it?

• Sense of control. Does the user understand the value in completing the tasks at hand? Does the user feel that it’s worth it to invest their time and effort and complete those tasks?

• Merging of action and awareness. Is the user aware enough to understand the situation that they are in? Do they understand what actions to take?

• Focused concentration. Is the user in a good environment to immersively focus on the task at hand? Is the environment optimal for encapsulating the user into a flow state?

• Loss of self-consciousness. Is the user losing track of time being immersed in a flow state?

• Self-rewarding experience. Does the user find the outcome of the experience rewarding? Are they incentivized to engage in it again?

Though there are ways in which gamification works, there are many more ways gamification doesn’t work. There have been many products that have failed to increase user engagement through gamification, some by notable companies. Here’s how you can prevent not falling into the same trap:

• Ensure your gamification features tie in well with your product value. Gamification features often fall short when they don’t tie in well with the core reason for engagement. For example, Lyft had raised a lot of confusion when they released their achievement system with badges and streaks. Lyft’s achievement system didn’t succeed because it didn’t properly tie into the reason why people used the service - car ridesharing was a need-based service, not an activity people do in their free time.

• Don’t have too many gamification features. Having too many gamification features can also be a weakness in itself. The real value of the underlying platform can get lost in a messy gamification user experience, and it can become overwhelming for the user. Apps like Duolingo can afford to implement a long range of gamification features because of its implementation, and with such a wide variety of actions a user can take, each gamified feature that exists on the app is calculated.

• Don’t incite unwanted user behavior. If there’s no clear vision for what gamifying an experience can achieve, you may end up distracting your users and leading them down paths they shouldn’t go down. Achievement, point, and reward systems can make students treat your platform more like a game than an educational experience if done in overkill. A well-gamified experience is not helpful if it’s not engaging students in the way you need.

Gamification needs to highlight the core mission of the platform, and enhance the user experience to help students engage with it better. Not having a proper implementation strategy with gamification features can lead to no educational impact being made and incite user behavior that you didn’t expect or want.

At the end of the day, gamification is an enhancement, not a solution. Education has been and still must be powered by the powerful educators and educational content that we have at our disposal. Gamification cannot educate the next-generation of students by itself, but it can change the way that students around the world view education and create a more engaging and fun way to learn.