Gamified Project-Based Learning: The Best of Both Worlds?
If you have read some of my articles or, better yet, have talked to me recently, you’ll know that gamification and project-based learning are my two favorite learning methods right now. Not just in my education, but in schools and informal educational opportunities — so, you can probably imagine my excitement when reading about Gamified Project Based Learning (GPBL).
Before we get to that cool-ness you should know a little about education gamification and PBL.
Gamification
I am going to guess that you either know what gamification is or you are going “NO! Not more technology in schools!😭”. If you are the latter, then don’t worry we’ll address it. If you do know what gamification is, well read on anyway — I might just teach you something new.
Gamification did not start in today’s age of technology. We can trace it back to an instance in 1896 where a company sold many products, but there was a catch: you had to collect stamps by purchasing from retail partners, and at that point, you could spend these stamps to purchase an item(s) from the catalog (Christians, 2018, p. 10 ).
Today, gamification is seen as slightly more complicated and more digitalized, but the truth is that it can still be something as simple as the first example. You’ll also notice that this started as a business tactic. Reward systems and things of that sort are very popular in marketing today… Yup, that is gamification.
So, if you were at all convinced that gamification was this new thing that would ruin education… it started with business and you have very likely dealt with it before if you have shopped in the last 100 years 💗
Anyway, what is a modern example of gamification? How is it being used in traditional education?
One of my favorite (and one of the most well-known) examples is Duolingo. Yes, the creepy green owl language app.
Duolingo utilizes the Octalysis framework by Yu-kai Chou (Billham, 2021). I would love to write an article about it, but you are welcome to look it up before then (guess I can’t stop you). What you need to know right now is that it explains how to a) capture a person’s attention b) keep them engaged and c) keep them coming back all in eight steps. From that, we can see that gamification is not just happening in the moment you have a game or rewards system, it happens when you catch your audience’s attention. Cool, right?
In the app, we see Doulingo utilizing a few gamification methods:
- Daily lesson streaks
- A point and reward system
- Leaderboards across the community and your friends on Duolingo
- Badges for milestones and achievements
Side note: they also value storytelling in teaching languages… If you are curious to learn the value of storytelling you take a look at the article I wrote about it 😉
These are all things that can be used in formal and informal learning environments. So where does PBL come in?
Project Based Learning
As you might suspect, the idea of “learning by doing” is NOT very new. I mean, correct me if I am wrong, but when we had hunters and gathers I feel there was less explaining and more mimicking and doing.
What you might not know is that “project-based learning” is not the same as doing some one-off project. As PBLWorks puts it
In Project Based Learning, the project is the vehicle for teaching the important knowledge and skills student need to learn. The project contains and frames curriculum and instruction.
You could compare these with a business class that is learning about business plans:
In a class that has a project, students…
- Would be told about (and/or have assigned reading on) business plans for that unit.
- Have a project where they are expected to research an assigned area or topic within the curriculum. The project would be considered an addition to the class.
- Would have teachers to help with understanding the framework of the project itself along with what needs to be done to do the project ‘well’. The teacher would also have the final say on whether the project reflected competency in the topic and to what extent.
- Have a focus on understanding the concept more so than the application of it.
In PBL, students…
- Are driven by a question rather than a topic. “How can we identify a gap in the local market and develop a business plan to address it?”
- Would be given a project with a lot more freedom. In some projects, they have all the freedom for the “When?”, “Where?”, “Why?”, and “How?”. In others, there are some specifications they will need to meet. In either case, they are still making more decisions than in a regular, rubric-based project.
- Have an instructor who helps guide them through developing their project while assessing them based on their understanding via application.
- Find a greater focus on the application of concepts rather than just knowing.
Studies shows that learning by doing is not just easier to recall than reading or lectures, but even better than observing.
Adding it Up: Gamified Project-Based Learning
There are a few ways GPBL might be presented in a formal learning setting. Here are a few:
Gamifying the Project Process
Let’s pretend that we are using PBL to learn about different types of ecosystems. In teams, students will get the chance to design an ecosystem including the climate, the animals, the plants, etc. This will require them to learn more about the types of ecosystems that are defined along with how the plants, weather, and wildlife interact with each other.
By itself, we could consider this PBL. How will we add gamification? Well, maybe we give students points for completion of deliverables. Rather than just looking at if they check the box, the class may get a chance to vote on how much they think it aligns with what they have learned. When these points are tallied together, the class will have a leaderboard showing teams across the teacher’s teams and/or classes.
This is where I point out a flaw in this type of gamification: competitiveness. In the American public school system we already see a lot of competition that can be damaging for the students. This is an argument for another article, but worth doing your research on. What I would like to point out now is that there is already so much competition in the American public school system (not to mention many other school systems around the world).
Intense stress on the competition can lead to demotivating students — communicating that the act of learning itself is something that is ‘win-lose’, and if you lose enough there is no point in trying [to learn]…Anyway, back to examples.
Adding Side-Quests
In a simplified sense, side quests could just be considered extra credit for GPBL. If students are interacting with PBL while designing a sustainable city with their teammates, they would already have some needs that would need to be met. So, it is possible to add bonus quests to the competition. This way, teams have a chance to explore more areas that they are curious about in the topic and are motivated by the point system.
If you want to embrace a competitive environment you could continue with the leaderboard idea and make the ‘points of completion’ (for each segment) a fraction of how the project is judged. The other contributing scores could be a public/classroom vote, rank in sustainability against other teams, etc.
Class Badges
In a gamified classroom, students could earn badges for accomplishments inside and outside of their traditional education. Going off the last sustainable city example, students could earn a badge for completing a certain aspect of the project (e.g. sustainable transportation, energy, waste management, etc.).
Summing it up
When putting these two tactics together, we find a positive effect on the classroom (Huang et al., 2023). With that being said, there is still a lot more research to be done as it is still a fairly new topic within educational research.
