ciples of games to enhance learning
Games are made up of all kinds of small elements. Obvious ones like points and levels and less obvious ones like choices and caretaking. If you take any of these individual ideas and design them into a learning activity that’s not itself a game, many people would call that gamification. The language app, Duolingo uses achievements, points and lives to motivate people to work through learning new words and grammar.
Another way to design principles from games into learning experiences is to make learning activity-based. You could say this is just a kind of gamification – it’s taking something from games and using it outside games. But it’s possibly the core thing that makes games engaging – you’re playing them, you’re doing things. So, designing learning experiences where the learner does things rather than listens or watches is a great way to harness the power of games.
The Transform Deck is a deck of cards I designed to inspire people to create more activity-based learning experiences. Yu-Kai Chou’s Octalysis Framework is full of ideas about what could be adapted for use outside games. Andrzej Marczewski’s gamification elements is another set of ideas. Using game principles is the lightest-touch of the four ways: you’re not actually playing a game.
Find an existing game that fits your learning needs
You could just use an existing game, if you want your learners to actually play rather than just experience the principles. But you need to find the right one. It could be a commercial game not designed specifically for learning. Like Escape the Boom, a simple game you play online and via mobile. Using limited information – one player can see the bomb, the other players the bomb-disposal manual – it explores communication barriers and teamwork.
Or you could use a game designed for learning. Evivve is another online and mobile game where players work together to harvest resources from a sci-fi landscape, to save Earth from disaster. They need to communicate well, make a plan, divide 