How gamification can help your business play on sustainability's team Editor’s note: This article is extracted from the book How Gamification Can Help Your Business Engage in Sustainability (Dō Sustainability, February 2013) by Paula Owen. GreenBiz readers can use code GBiz10 at www.dosustainability.com to receive 10 percent off any DōShort. Behavior change interventions have so far had limited success in motivating wider society into taking positive environmental actions. Despite constant bombardment of messages regarding ice caps melting, sea levels rising, polar bears drowning, exceptional droughts, 100-year storm occurrences becoming more frequent, resource depletion and habitat destruction, it is surprising that a majority of the population still do nothing more than put the recycling out once a week and buy fair trade bananas from their local supermarket. Enter gamification. Although gamification is still a new concept, it has been adopted by some forward thinkers in the sustainability space and tested through a range of applications.
Neoludica Just launched a game+badges demonstration project launches (I'm Serious.net) This morning, WCET (a membership cooperative of postsecondary education institutions, agencies and associations) launched the beta of their game+badges program, called Who's Got Class. As I've previously written, badges for learning are gaining attention on many fronts. In higher education, interest is growing particularly around benefits that badge systems might provide for student engagement and student retention. Additionally, education innovators are exploring the use of badges as drivers for certification programs and other competency-based learning settings. (For a primer on badges for learning, you might be interested in this webcast I co-presented in March with John Bower of uBoost.) With all these questions whirling around, WCET leadership felt a calling to explore the world of badges and games for learning by hosting this "sandbox" project. Participation in Who's Got Class is by invitation only.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog Top 10 Education Gamification Examples that will Change our Future New to Gamification? Check out my post What is Gamification & my Gamification Framework: Octalysis Education Gamification in Action. There’s a lot of potential in the field of Education Gamification. If you ask children, “What is work?” Clearly there should be a way to help kids learn from what they do best – play. No longer viewed as a mundane process for presenting information while testing for retention and understanding, the modern educational challenge involves tasks of engaging students, stimulating their interests, retaining their attention, and maintaining a positive attitude in a nurturing environment. Key to these goals is the effort to maintain a rich communications environment that encourages feedback and reinforcement, not only between the instructor/teacher and students, but also between the students themselves. Education Gamification Example #1 – DuoLingo:Learn a language while translating the Web Each student gets an avatar which can be visibly displayed in ClassDojo.
Dev-Team Gamification Co - The Leading Source for Gamification News & Info Brainy Gamer The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualized it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started. --Christopher Nolan Here's what we think we know about genre: it limits creativity. It binds artists to tried-and-true formulas and encourages derivative work. A creator must be free to follow her muse, unhindered by prescriptive rules. Genres are agents of ideological closure; they limit the meaning-potential of a given text. Artists aren't the only victims. Some artists try hard to avoid genre influences on their work. So it's worth asking: what artist worth his salt would self-impose such constraints? My name is John Ford, and I make Westerns. Lots of gifted artists have been drawn to genre because of its formulaic nature, and many of our greatest artistic treasures are clear expressions of genre inspiration. Film Noir? That's where video games come in. So why should we care about genre?
Bright Blue Day » Gamification: A sprinkling of fun The use of game mechanics to motivate people is nothing new. But combine them with the new world of ubiquitous computing, smartphones, accelerometers, GPS, cameras and inexpensive sensors, and our whole lives can be turned into a game. Does this so called Gamification present an opportunity for brands and business to deliver social good, or hide a more sinister intent to use our sense of fun to manipulate behaviour for purely commercial gain? Wikipedia defines gamification as “the application of game mechanics in everyday applications and situations to boost engagement, fun and good behaviors.” There is certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that gamifying your life could help you learn new skills, connect with others, and become fitter, happier and healthier. The New Scientist wrote that Yu-Chen Chang of National Taiwan University in Taipei gave kindergarten children a sensor-enabled and gamified toothbrush.
Thingiverse. Digital designs for physical objects What Games Have to Teach Us About Teaching and Learning: Game Design as a Model for Course and Curricular Development | Currents in Electronic Literacy Kimon Keramidas If you are at all interested in the idea of games as a part of education and learning then you have probably come across James Gee’s What Do Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Gee’s book is an important text because he is able to quantify the way people learn and apply what they learn in video games. This is compelling material for the many teachers in search of new pedagogical methods that harness the recent increase in popularity of video games. He makes a convincing argument that video games have the capacity to help us reexamine how we learn, but he doesn’t tell us how to make games that students will want to play and will also learn from. The question for educators, then, is how exactly to take advantage of the benefits Gee has made apparent in this book. So, where does that leave the possibilities for video games in the classroom, and in what ways can we take advantage of Gee’s findings? Games and Learning Environments: Definitions 1) Rules.
Can gaming teach us to live more sustainable lives? | Guardian Sustainable Business The sustainability sector is cottoning on to the fact that games are incredibly powerful tool to educate and engage the wider world in the issues that are so dear to its heart. Gaming is already being implemented in the health and fitness, medical research and finance sectors. A recent report by the global research company Gartner suggests that gaming with purpose increases user interaction, helps with behavioural change, and stimulates innovative thinking and the generation of new ideas. At its heart, 'gamification' is the simple concept of taking the ideas behind good games design and games mechanics and applying them to non-gaming environments. In particular they are looking to gamification to increase that holy triumvirate of: staff productivity; customer loyalty and, of course, bottom-line profitability. So how has it played out so far? Back in the UK there are already innovative, ready-made solutions to help companies introduce gamification into their employee engagement.
World Map of Social Networks January 2017: a new edition of my World Map of Social Networks, showing the most popular social networking sites by country, according to Alexa & SimilarWeb traffic data (caveat: it’s hard to understand the impact of Google+ because it is part of Google domain traffic). There are a lot of news since last January: Facebook is still the leading social network in 119 out of 149 countries analyzed, but it was stopped in 9 territories by Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte and Linkedin. It’s interesting to see that in some countries, like Botwana, Mozambique, Namibia, Iran e Indonesia, Instagram wins and that some African territories prefer LinkedIn. Overall LinkedIn conquers 9 countries, Instagram 7, meanwhile VKontakte and Odnoklassniki (part of the same group Mail.ru) grow up in Russian territories. In China QZone still dominates the Asian landscape with 632 million users and Japan is the only country where Twitter is the leader. But what’s going on behind the first place? inShare1,047 inShare1,047