I’m sure you’ve seen one of those posters quoting ” – everything you need to know you likely learned in kindergarden – ”
One of those things is that part of the world works because you have enough coins/stars/stickers. These are part of the token economy that is present in elementary school classrooms. Kids earn coins/credits for doing things for the classroom or for completing personal goals. This seems to fall off through secondary and post secondary education. But then it comes back in adult education with adults working as hard for stickers or coins as they ever did when they were kids, harder now that they have an appreciation for the concept of value. So when I saw this article on the use of tokens to help deal with email, I just had to laugh.
In fact, games can be so addictive that it’s like playing with fire: The trick is not to accidentally overmotivate users.
This spring, Dennis Crowley — a New York software entrepreneur — released “foursquare,” a “location based” social-networking application that tracks any public place you visit (like a bar, restaurant or coffeehouse) and reports it to you friends. Crowley wanted to encourage people to go out a lot, so he added game-like elements: You get “points” for visiting multiple spots in one evening, for example, and badges for roaming far from home. Travel a lot and you’ll be at the top of the weekly leaderboard, with hipster bragging rights. It worked — almost too well. Some people got so obsessed with racking up points that they began checking in dozens of times a day, frantically marking even a brief visit to Starbucks.
“We created a monster here,” Crowley says ruefully, and he’s reprogramming the game incentives to calm people down. Games are powerful; now it’s up to designers to use them for good.
These economies seem to work best when there is a considerable duration for the people involved to collect and then spend the coins. A single university or highschool term doesn’t seem to be enough time to really get people to buy into the system. I’m sure there are many examples where these economies get going and thrive in 12-16 weeks, but they are likely fewer and further between. Some people might argue that grades are the same as credits, but the problem is that the student can’t spend grades, and while there is a leader board, there are no (or few) extra opportunities to catch up if you are behind, nor are there opportunities to manage your risk. I’m sure if an instructor was able to deal with the administrata involved in linking grades to credits and opportunity creation (with bonus marks being a cludge), it could work, but I don’t see that happening any time soon. The easier way to do this might be to stop thinking about courses as descrete units and start really thinking about them as stages in a journey (easier said than done, I know). This might also have the side effect of helping improve knowledge transfer between courses… but that of course is another discussion all together – I’ll just say that if instructors and the system in general doesn’t model the transfer of knowledge between classes/courses… why should students make the effort to do it on their own?
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