“This Game Sucks”: How to Improve the Gamification of Education (EDUCAUSE Review

Sarah "Intellagirl" Smith-Robbins (sabsmith@indiana.edu) is Director of Emerging Technologies and a faculty member at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. With this issue of EDUCAUSE Review, she begins a one-year term as Editor of the New Horizons department. Comments on this article can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page. "Focusing on the ways that entertainment technology engages us can result in methods that we can transfer to any learning situation." Gamification. Maybe you've heard of it. Education has been a system of status and points since the dawn of the Industrial Age. What Is a Game? The first step is to understand exactly what a game is. A goal: Every game has a win condition: the combination of events and accomplishments that players need to achieve in order to end the game. True gamification requires that all three characteristics be present. Is Higher Education Already a Game? Last is the issue of collaboration and competition. Notes

Can Playing Video Games Help With Dyslexia? By Linda Poon, NPR Most parents prefer that their children pick up a book rather than a game controller. But for kids with dyslexia, action video games may be just what the doctor ordered. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities, affecting an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population. So programs should emphasize training the brain’s attention system, they say, something that video games do. When people with dyslexia had to shift their attention between sight and sound, their reaction was delayed. “It’s not just shifting attention from one location to another, but we should also be training shifting attention from sound to visual stimuli and vice versa.” “It’s not just shifting attention from one location to another, but we should also be training shifting attention from sound to visual stimuli and vice versa,” Harrar, who is dyslexic herself, tells Shots. The study was published Feb. 13 in Current Biology, Copyright 2014 NPR. Related

ClassBadges Is A Free Way To Gamify Your Classroom Looking to find a new, simple, and free way to gamify your classroom? There a new web tool out that you should probably know about. It’s called ClassBadges and it’s a free online tool where teachers can award badges for student accomplishments. Teachers can set up an account and award the badges whenever they wish. Pretty straightforward. Request an invite to create an account (it looks like right now, they’re working on handling a higher capacity of users), and once you do, you’ll be able to create a class list. You’re able to choose what badges are awarded (and they’re customizable!) See Also: The 50 Best Videos For Teachers Interested In Gamification

How to teach punctuation You might also try putting a period at the end of a “thought.” And what about semi-colons and colons? Well…maybe those are for exceptionally long breaths and thoughts? 1Attack the Old BeliefI’ll stop short of saying telling students “Forget everything you learned before about punctuation,” but I think a good starting place is finding out what students already know.