Gamification For Learning

Yesterday's post on the gamification of an open government data portal was very interesting. I discovered that the term gamification is also used in connection with training/learning. Gaming concepts are also used to make learning fun and increase student engagement.

I have some experience using games for learning. During my MS in Finance program, one of my professors used a kind of simulation game to teach us corporate finance concepts. He wrote a computer program to simulate what would occur if the student's target values (for P/E ratio and so on) were put into practice. For my personal benefit, I used a stock simulation game to experiment with the stock market (example: https://www.stocktrak.com/).

I really do believe simulation games are very helpful. I was surprised to read in the following research paper that there is emerging research work arguing that gamification is not effective (the paper did not support this conclusion, however).

Paper: Exploring the impact of gamification on student engagement and involvement with e-learning systems
By: Imed Bouchrika, Nouzha Harrati, Vanissa Wanick & Gary Wills
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10494820.2019.1623267

Maybe more attention needs to be paid to the design of game-based tools and applications. Simulation games or simulations are useful for decision-making.

I recently updated the decision-making section of my LinkedIn research profile. Here is what it looks like now: