Perspectives on Gamification, part 2

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

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Author’s Note: this post is late because my kids are only in school three days this week. My personal reading and writing time become their time when that happens.

Last week’s post tried to sketch out a connection between classroom technology of today and the education technology push of the last two decades. The history of education technology and similar automated learning systems is far older — something that I alluded to in my discussion of A New Culture of Learning. Reformers and advocates of the 2000s and 2010s were techno-optimists. They felt like the internet and kids having computers in the classroom would be spur engagement and creativity because that’s what they saw happening with Web 2.0. It wasn’t enough to adopt the tech. In this brave new world, schools also needed to change the way they taught, the way they structured curriculum, and what kinds of outputs they expected from students. The focus could no longer be “mechanistic,” as Thomas and Brown labeled it, or “industrial” as Sal Khan called it. No, schools needed to shrug off their factory production roots1 and embrace learning for the 21st century.

Learning in the 21st century (what many imagined the 21st century to be back in the 2010s at least) was about play and imagination, not memorization and five paragraph essays. Learning would be collective and collaborative instead of individual and solitary. Most of all, access to all this tech would level the playing field and enable rich and poor kids alike to have the same educational resources. Therefore, we were told, they would experience the same educational successes. The technology gap was an issue of equity. Want to improve the dropout rates? Get poor Black and Hispanic households broadband internet. And you know what? They weren’t entirely wrong. Expanding broadband access probably did modestly improve scores on state exams.

Anyway, the point of last week was to serve as a reminder of two things. First, there was a large and concerted push to reorient education around the capabilities of digital technologies and schools did in fact respond to these pressures. Second, this push for technology included a push to reorient how schools envisioned learning around creativity, collaboration, exploration, and play. The point of today’s post is to talk about how even though we got the first thing, we did not get the second one. Instead of being fertile ground for creativity and play, technology rich classrooms became more like the industrial model that ed tech reformers said they were trying to overthrow.

What did we get from ed tech?

Before I dive into it, though, let’s remember our eponymous concept: Scholastic Alchemy. The premise of Scholastic Alchemy centers on the seemingly continual failure of education reform initiatives. These could be the small-scale reforms of a single teacher in her classroom or large-scale reforms of national education policy. They could be formal laws and rules and procedures, or they could be social and cultural and economic pressures. Whatever it may be, it resembles, to me at least, the work of alchemists of old who sought to turn commonplace minerals into gold or precious stones. Alchemists were not “right” in the sense that succeeded in their goals — no lead was turned to gold — but they were early empiricists and their observations about the properties of minerals and stones laid the foundation for chemistry. Scholastic Alchemy is much the same. We’re told a story about how something is supposed to work and we believe it. We make changes to schools based on these stories and the expected results never happen. Educational lead never becomes educational gold but sometimes these changes have other effects that echo on in our schools. Keep that in mind as we look at what happened to this idea of play and creativity that was supposed to be centered by education technology.

Indeed, the whole reason I’m writing this multi-part look at gamification is because there have been some recently published articles complaining about tech and gamification in schools. In the Wall Street Journal, Shalini Ramachandran wrote about parents who are shocked to find that their kids have been watching as many as 13,000 YouTube videos in a three-month period on school issued devices.

While the 13,000 number may be a bit of a high outlier and most of that was not school content but entertainment the student accessed on school devices, the access provided by tech is part of the problem. Sal Khan was right. We did use video to reinvent education, just not exactly in the way he imagined. You can see his playbook at work, though:

Do note the mentions of gaming and gamification. In an article for The Atlantic, Will Oremus is shocked to find out that his son’s math homework “is essentially just Pokémon.”

Oremus observes, however, that his son spends less than 30 seconds in a ten-minute session actually doing any math. Gamification, though, includes some of those same potentially addictive features Ramachandran reported on above.

This is the New Culture of Learning at work, folks! This is the “collective sense of belonging based on shared interests” that Thomas and Brown write about. This is the hanging out, messing around, geeking out filtered through what is essentially a gambling interface. What Thomas and Brown and Sal Kahn, and others didn’t count on was that kids would substitute their own goals and use these digital tools for things other than school learning. Nor did these techno-optimists understand that tech companies were just as, if not more interested in monopolizing students’ time and engagement for their own ends, rather than providing the kind of open and exploratory play that reformers envisioned.

From play to gamification to survelliance

Back in the late 2000s, there was a famous course at Stanford University. Emerging out of the newly established Pervasive Technology Lab (later renamed the Behavior Design Lab), the course tasked students with building their own Facebook apps. The point of the course was to implement behavioral design principles in the design of the applications to maximize some kind of user engagement metric. It might be time using the app. It might be the number of likes and shares. It could be the number of interactions via comments. Whatever the metric was, the people at the Pervasive Technology Lab had this kind of engagement down to a science.

Stanford’s proximity and historical connections to Silicon Valley industries meant that behavior design quickly became among the most important aspects of designing the digital technologies that came to define the next two decades. These concepts spawned popular books like Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to build habit-forming products. They also spawned critical commentary and eventually lawsuits that found these companies negligent for the impacts their products had on people. Many noticed that the designs of social media and video streaming apps mirrored the addictive designs of slot machines and casinos. This was, as you might imagine, by design. Even today people argue that the dopamine rush caused by gamification is evidence of their efficacy as learning tools. That’s right. The mechanism of addiction is evidence of their effectiveness.

Whatever gamification may have been envisioned by, say, The Gates Foundation back in 2011 was not the gamification that we got.

For advocates back then, gamification was a way to both engage students and to build quality learning science into the design of learning software. Back in 2011, one of the recipients of money from the Gates Foundation’s Next Generation Learning Challenge was a startup out of Atlanta called OpenStudy2. They used a peer-to-peer setup that allowed students to share study materials and resources with each other. Open Study introduced gamified elements in order to spur participation. These included the ability to award “medals” to especially helpful peers, earn achievements through participating, and the ability to subscribe to specific peers and become “fans”. These reflect an emerging consensus around gamification in education (and elsewhere). See, for example, this 2011 interview with Nathan Maton of Gameful, a social site for gamers.3 He argues that “serious games,” games that are meant to teach you something, to be educational, all have a few components that schools could adopt.

Feedback. Personalization. Productive Struggle. Arguably, we did get these things in schools. Learning management systems do provide instant feedback loops to both students and teachers. Gamified systems adjust the pace of content delivery and difficulty to meet the needs of each individual student. Many of these systems are designed to be just hard enough to be a fun challenge but not so hard as to be discouraging. Yet, we also get the problems outlined by Ramachandran and Oremus.

Today, we see our gamified systems showing up in places like the media-darling Alpha School. Michael Perhshan hit the nail on the head here when he pointed out that Alpha is explicitly minimizing academics and leaning into gamified test prep for its two-hours of daily classroom learning.

and

This is the ultimate incarnation of gamification. These learning systems give feedback, personalize instruction for each student, and modulate difficulty to help students achieve mastery. Alpha has hired a bevy of learning scientists to further build out their systems. Here’s how one learning scientist who works at Alpha described their approach in a recent post.

We know from other reporting, though, that this kind of proctoring and observation is not limited to assessments (see here, too).

Systems like the ones at Alpha are also being rolled out to schools and classrooms nationwide though it is generating parental backlash.

It’s Scholastic Alchemy

What started out as an idealistic and optimistic take on education’s future (albeit a take with little sense of history) became something else entirely. Just like with human capital theory, a move toward learning as exploration and play was short-circuited by forces that advocates didn’t foresee. Some common threads, such as personalized learning and products that give feedback and respond to student needs in real time, show us how the products themselves needed to be designed to surveil students. Not only that, but kids needed to kept engaged. Addictive designs, like those already being built into social media and video streaming platforms, were available to graft onto learning products under the guise of gamification. Instead of a blossoming of digital play and creativity at schools under the new culture of learning, embracing the digital revolution meant embracing a version of education wherein kids are glued to screens, subjected to dopaminergic manipulation in order to endear them to the learning management system and audio and video recorded by school devices at school and at home to ensure compliance with learning systems. Interestingly enough, the kids skirt the rules, game the system, and find ways around these systems, even if it means they’re watching tens of thousands of random YouTube videos instead of “paying attention” in what passes for class these days.

What I want to suggest today but save for next week’s post, is that this kind of agency — gaming the system — is actually a bright spot and shows us that kids are learning something important from gamification. They are, in effect, imposing play on the system whether the system wants to play or not.

Thanks for reading!

1

It’s highly debatable that schools were really mimicking factory production or that compulsory mass education was an attempt to prepare children as future factory workers. While schools did often seek to model themselves in ways business demanded, that didn’t entail a single way of structuring schools. Reforms for a business-like efficiency were often less about the kids’ education and more about the management of a large bureaucracy. See here, here, and here.

2

OpenStudy was acquired by the AI tutoring company Brainly in 2016.

3

Gameful ceased operating at some point and their website was pulled down in 2025. There are, however, new Gameful companies operating as a learning management system (gameful.me) and another (gameful.io) that seems to provide gamified corporate training. I am not sure if they are related.