

Gamification: The Key to Re-Engaging High School Dropouts - luisedtr
http://26gems.io/blog/gamification-the-key-to-re-engaging-high-school-dropouts/

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bildung
Gamification can play a role in a program for dropouts, but it by no means is
suitable as the sole treatment: It just patches over the underlying
problems[1], among others lack of robust archivement motivation in combination
with lack of learning competence. To worsen things, working class students
(who have a higher probability of being a dropout) also attribute bad
performance in school with lack of talent rather than lack of effort more
often than middle class students. A treatment in a school context that has
been shown to be both sustainable and effective is continuous feedback on the
_relative improvement_ in archivements of the specific student (school marks
comparing the individual performance to the class usually make the percieved
talent-mark correlation worse as the high-performing students often didn't
need much effort to get their marks). Luckily this is one of the seldom cases
where a treatment has stronger effects on the students with learning problems
compared to the high performers, too (thats usually a big problem in
pedagogy).

[1] Leaving out the the sociological context. I really doubt "boredom" was a
real reason, boredom sounds too much like self assessment.

edit: typos

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Broken_Hippo
I think there is a bit of merit to this - part of the problem of schools
(which i've read about off and on for years) is the expectation that students
sit there and absorb lectures without any actual interaction with the
information they are supposedly learning. I find this would be a decent bit of
solution if it were used in conjunction with other changes. But considering in
some places they make a fairly grand issue about whether or not students
should learn cursive writing (Indiana has had this) and there are people that
think education should go back to "reading, writing, and 'rithmatic", I doubt
schools are going to consider this approach, let alone others that try to
solve a number of issues with people dropping out of high school.

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MakeUsersWant
The article laments a disconnect between learning and work force skills. On
the other hand, they claim a high school diploma makes $260k difference in
life time earnings.

So what value does a high school diploma provide? What's the reason for the
$260k increase?

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gingerlime
Gamification is great, but from personal experience I find it only works when
I'm already engaged. e.g. I'm interested in what's going on HN and the karma
points help motivate me to contribute, or get a sense of whether my comments
are valuable to the community etc. Same with StackOverflow etc.

Gamification won't convince me to do something I'm not already interested in
doing, and to some extent, even things I would _like_ to do (e.g. learn a new
language), but which are hard - gamification helps, but won't be enough to
keep me learning.

That's just my personal observation. I do not know if it applies to others.

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erikb
Many people believe Gamification is the key to the problem of motivation. But
only in a few cases it could be applied successfully up till today. Posting
the same post 5 years ago might have resulted in a lot of positive discussion
and feedback, but nowadays people are already a little disappointed of how
Gamification performs in general. It's still a good argument but it shouldn't
be the only one and it should have some examples from successful applications
by the author.

The same goes for the software that 26gems plans to implement. Gamification
should not be its main selling point, but it can be an awesome finishing.

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mathattack
I agree - we are only now coming to where we understand gamification enough. I
do believe that gamification is very important for some of the rote, but
necessary, aspects of educations. It's not a cure-all, but perhaps it's good
for drilling basic math, building vocabulary, and learning grammar.

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PeterisP
The TV tells us that we have millions of college-educated people who are eager
and engaged but still can't find a sustainable job.

Do high-school dropouts really have a chance in such a competition if they
need gamification to become re-engaged?

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vdaniuk
As soon as high-school dropouts learn marketable skills that do not require
credentials or formal education, sure they have a chance. Some of those skills
are: coding, design, copywriting, UX/UI design, etc.

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PeterisP
Wait, wait - learning any of those skills can surely be done, but it naturally
requires motivation, time and engagement.

That's the whole point - if we're expecting employers to use gamification to
engage them after hiring, then can we expect them (the majority of them, not
the best of them) to learn nontrivial marketable skills on their own before
getting that job?

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vdaniuk
Well, programming and coding education is already gamified (codeschool,
treehouse) so if gamification works for that target audience it will work at
the education stage, too.

