Digital Natives and Gamification

 A hot topic I hear being discussed gamification - everyone wants learning to be more engaging via gamification. How can we engage learners and make it interactive? I think this topic of gamification will continue to grow because of how Digital Natives/Gen Z interact with the internet. 

I think back to when I taught middle school, and students were required to partake in extensive standardized testing a couple of times a year. They were simply worn out by the end of it. An idea we had, that unfortunately never was more than a few conversations, was to add in some sort of game element to this testing. They wouldn't know if they had a question right or wrong, but just receive a kind of *ping* or *good job!* or watched their car work through all of the questions. Anything to create a dopamine hit that worked on short attention spans to encourage them to keep going. I wonder how student's scores might improve, or morale might be better on these intensive exercises they are required to do. 

In his article Digital Natives Digital Immigrants, Marc Prensky describes creating a game titled The Monkey Wrench. Learners engaged with short clips and had to use the software to solve problems. He encourages educators to step away from strict "This is what you will learn" and embrace the freedom for learners to explore the content on their own. This resonates with my current projects at work, and I'd like to experiment with pushing the boundaries further for our learners. The challenge will be to encourage Digital Immigrants to step outside their comfort zone to see the possibilities.