We are eager to base our teaching on active knowledge making, and we want to see our students designing and presenting the knowledge by themselves, but usually we confront the same problem – a lack of motivation. Do they want to be active learners like we want them to be? Not always. Here comes the method of Gamification to help us. Gamification means the use of game design and mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. Yu-Kai Chou, a leading gamification expert, defines gamification as:

“The craft of deriving all the fun and addicting elements found in games and applying them to real-world or productive activities”

Gamification in education works because it engages learners and allows them to leverage several of the natural human desires: socializing, learning, mastery, achievement, and status.

In my opinion, it is a great way to incentive student to work and invest time and energy on researching, learning and creating artifacts.

The example of gamification that I like the most is competition – to include a kind of tournament in the learning process. In the course I developed, student groups took part in a national tournament of digital projects. They could view the other group's artifacts through the tournament's page in Facebook and in the end they presented their outcome and the process they made in front of volunteer judges. Because this course is for young children (age 9-11) each groups was awarded in a different way and still they were so excited about each victory. Beyond that, the competition made them much more committed to their projects and more connected to their teams.

E-learning makes it easier to gamify the learning process by using a variety of apps and the social media. The challenge is to use gamification in way that will encourage the learners to think and take part in designing the knowledge and not just use quizzes and games with one answer to each question.

To read more about this concept and get more ideas, visit http://yukaichou.com blog