The Gamified way of Learning

How has gamification affected your life?

I work for a company that invests in education and media. Some of the investments that we have made infuse a lot of gamification to education. Children learn about different topics through games and discover many things by themselves. I have young kids back home and they have benefited from these apps by learning about the world around them, whether it is about the human body, animals, skyscrapers, space and many more. For myself, one area gamification has benefitted me is in terms of motivation to complete tasks at hand—I track improvement, keep scores and analyze how I'm performing on a regular basis. For example, if I am spending too little time with my kids or eating too unhealthily, I have a gamified scoresheet to help me focus and get back on track.

Can you share with us some examples where gamification have been successful?

Sadly, I think 80 percent of all the gamified apps out there will likely fail if they are still around. That said, I can think of many successful examples where gamification seems to have yielded results. For example, Google had a hard time getting employees to use compliance for travel expense claims. Google then designed a travel expense system resulting in close to 100 percent employee compliance through gamification. Similarly, Dominos wanted to increase their sales revenue. They created an app called Pizza Hero where customers can create their own pizza with that app. This app helped users to build and create their own pizza and express their creativity. By implementing this, they increased their sales revenue by 30 percent, as more customers were motivated to create and enjoy the pizza of their choice. Microsoft wanted to improve the translation capability of windows and created a game for their in-house employees to identify translation errors. 26,000 tasks were completed and over 170 additional errors were reported and employees appreciated the opportunity to contribute while having fun. Even Volkswagen did something similar to Dominos by allowing users to create and design their own perfect car—they called it the people's car project. Through this initiative, they achieved 33 million webpage hits and 119,000 ideas for the project.

Technology and gamification has changed the way people do things, and I believe that now is the time for change to come to the education sector as well. Children may not be as engaged in the classroom as they are outside the classroom. However, when they play games like Tinybop, they spend a lot of time learning about the world around them without adult supervision. If I have a crystal ball, I see a future where everything will become increasingly gamified and those who do not master gamification may be left behind as well-designed gamified offerings always get more traction.