When Education Gets Gamified, Everyone Loses

The “gamification” movement has found its latest champion in an Austin, TX-based “educational tech company” called 26 Gems. Its website certainly embodies the half-baked and giddily optimistic attitude that characterizes much of the movement.

The site, thus far, consists of little more than a manifesto and a text field in which to deposit your email, set against the backdrop of what appears to be a toddler surfing the net on a giant iMac. Meanwhile, its Facebook page seems to be mostly a collection of memes about “going the extra mile” that your mom might share. All of this puts an amusing point on how superficial this movement often is: It amounts to merely hoping for a quick, technocratic fix to very deep and structural issues within the education system. Buy an iPad, and pull up your bootstraps to beat your classmates in a game you didn’t design, or even agree to play. And that's learning.

Gamification, the introduction of game mechanics like badges and leaderboards into non-game scenarios, isn't new. Apps like Foursquare and educational sites like Duolingo encourage users to complete tasks by doling out digital rewards like crowns and lingots. 26 Gems wants to bring these kinds of apps, and their accompanying iPads, iPhones, and iMacs, into schools. In a recent blog post called “Gamification: The Key to Re-Engaging High School Dropouts,” 26 Gems CEO Magali Lopez laid out her manifesto regarding the introduction of tablets, smartphones, and apps that facilitate learning into the classroom.

“The factors that contribute to the dilemma include disengagement, cheating, learned helplessness and dropping out […] The word disengagement and learned helplessness caught my attention. Could gamification possibly be used as a learning technology resource to re-engage ‘dropouts’? Perhaps, there is a chance that we can engage them to try again and have fun while there at it.”

Yes, the secret to getting frustrated, often impoverished and racialized (to my Canadian friends reading: it’s the same up here, maybe worse), dropouts back into school is go shove an iPad in their hands. There is little awareness as to how social and economic factors affect learning outcomes on display: just, the iPad will save us. Unflagging optimism in technocratic solutions to social issues, as well as the belief that the private sector, profit motive and all, can manage society better than a public body, is not unique to 26 Gems and nor is it unique to the gamification movement. It’s endemic to the entire tech industry.

George Packer, writing for the New Yorker in 2013, exposed Silicon Valley’s petulant faux-libertarian denizens for what they are. In the minds of many of the Valley’s key players, according to Packer, the government can do nothing right, and the private tech sector can do very little wrong. The arena of education is no different.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that many in the tech industry, and 26 Gems, is just an amusingly egregious example, feel that iPads, apps, and technocratic methods of control are the way to save America’s public schools. After all, according to Packer, this is what Silicon Valley’s schooling situation looks like:

Private-school attendance has surged, while public schools in poor communities—such as East Palo Alto, which is mostly cut off from the city by Highway 101—have fallen into disrepair and lack basic supplies. In wealthy districts, the public schools have essentially been privatized; they insulate themselves from shortfalls in state funding with money raised by foundations they have set up for themselves.

On top of all that, the introduction of game-style reward mechanics in the classroom is nothing new. Grades, gold stars, stickers, etc., all serve to motivate students to learn. What is truly new, according to 26 Gems, and they may actually be right about this, is the level of individualization that iPads and education apps can bring to the classroom: “Through the use of these hands-on devices the student's learning can be personalized to target skills such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and problem solving. There is multitude of activities that students can engage in creating and enhancing their independent learning via the iPad.”

The old model of the classroom—pre-leaderboards, pre-atmosphere of permanent competition, and pre-iPad… I.e., pre-gamification—was dry, linear and slightly authoritarian. Thankfully, the new gamified model of education is “fun,” dynamic, and eminently, invisibly, authoritarian. Joseph Nye, writing about global power dynamics, described “soft power” as the ability to set “the rules of the game” to benefit a certain set of social values. In the case of gamification, the rules are literally being set to favor competition in an environment that could just as easily teach cooperation.

To be sure, what is potentially concerning about this approach is that many of the problems that 26 Gems and others in the movement see in education seem to be solved simply by training students to fend for themselves. Their education, according to these groups, should be hyper-personalized, competitive, and reward-based. The technological, one might say technocratic, approach of 26 Gems and others in the gamification movement seems appealing on the surface. After a little scrutiny, it seems more likely to prove weirdly authoritarian and potentially a detriment to social solidarity.

Of course, there is still the big question of which school systems, and perhaps which students, can actually afford the price of entry into the brave new world of gamified education: shiny new iPads. Maybe those cordoned-off private schools in Silicon Valley?