Gamification and Education: Then and Now

Gamification they call it...and everyone hopes to be onboard.

It is new and in demand. Generation Z and Generation Alpha view it as their birthright or they will not study :-)

I come from a generation that played outdoors and if it was indoors, it was Scrabble and sometimes Monopoly. One game took hours and another, a whole day and yet, it was perfectly acceptable and never considered a waste of time.

Then Nokia arrived with little brick like gadgets, we called cell phones. It had little stick figures that went up and down and people took great pride in playing those games.

My father, however, declared it a waste of time and I believed it. Yet, Monopoly, saved from the days of the British Raj was never a waste of time and buying Trafalgar Square was considered an achievement :-)

Fast forward to a decade or so later and my niece arrives, the Alpha Generation!

She tends to use a book as a tray and blinks when I tell her a story, declaring it is not real and then waltzes off to play some games, where I become her baby and she, my mother, where dogs fly in the sky and she buys a house and cycles around an hour trying to find it - this to her, is perfect reality.

I am now to be schooled in playing games and I find that I cannot get anything to move in a straight line. Through the week, my phone is filled with links of games that can be downloaded on 'my' phone and over the weekend, the agenda is to play games with her.

She introduces me to AR and VR and I am forced to enter into the world of games, not through corporations that advertise for instructional designers who can script for games, but with persuasion from the Alpha generation...

..whose demand I cannot escape and strangely enough, is a welcome change from Monopoly and Scrabble :-)