Krisflyer, Coffee Bean, Scouts – What is the common factor?

No doubt, it’s the reward system! So what does reward system do?

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It drives engagement!

Engagement is the key in any activity. Games are best at it but how do we apply this to education?

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METAGAME DESIGN is the answer!

Metagame Design for Education: Applying game design techniques to the world outside of games (and games too). Hence, we can ‘borrow ideas from the world of interactive games, we can motivate even reluctant learners to practice complex skills and achieve much more than they would through traditional means’ by layering rewards systems onto existing activities.

Not only in games, but metagames are everywhere and we encounter them in our daily lives – e.g. in scouts you earn badges and ranks, at coffee bean for every cup of coffee you purchase you can earn stamps for free redemption of drink at a later time, krisflyer frequent flyer points and etc.

So for teaching and learning, let’s look at blogging as an example. Instead of encouraging students to participate actively in classroom blog projects using just mere rubrics that most of them time considers components such as comments, blog stats, post frequency, etc, we can look into rewarding students at every stage/level in blogging. An example is cited below:-

1. Post Updates -> Receive free gifts
2. Get feedback from peers -> Get rewarded with points
3. Provide feedback on peers’ blogs -> Earn points to proceed to next level/stage

So the above runs in a loop and encourages constant engagement which will keep the students going to keep attaining higher levels just like what they (or we) do in games!

Of course in terms of points and gifts they could come in varieties just like what we have in Farmville and Cafe World 🙂

Reference: http://www.slideshare.net/amyjokim/metagame-design-3383058