Education Meets 'World Of Warcraft'

Yisrael Shapiro

Teachers on college campuses across the country are using gaming techniques to turn classrooms into interactive experiences. Here, Yisrael Shapiro, a freelance writer and recent graduate of the Medill School of Journalism Master’s program at Northwestern University, investigates their methods — and whether they work.

Lee Sheldon, co-director of the game design program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (No. 370), starts each semester by telling his class the same thing: “Congratulations, you have an F.” While the students wrap their heads around their predicament, he quickly adds, “But you can level up.”

Sheldon writes and designs video games, but right now he’s most famous for how he teaches his students: like they’re playing a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. He divides the class into small groups called “guilds,” which complete quests such as taking tests and making presentations to earn points and then advance to a new level. At the end of the course, he determines the grade by points and skill level. Ever since he turned education into a game, he says, “the average letter grade in the class went from a C to a B, and attendance is almost perfect.”

Click here for more about America’s Top Colleges and to meet our All-Star Student Entrepreneurs.

Sheldon uses the same techniques as companies such as Foursquare — turning the world into a game. “Gamification,” as the trend is called, is the use of game elements everywhere — from the classroom to the shopping mall. Gartner, a technology research company, estimates that by 2014 more than 70% of the companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list will have at least one gamified mobile application.

Starbucks, for instance, has used game techniques to revolutionize its rewards program. Instead of receiving punches on a card for buying coffee, customers earn stars. Once they get enough stars they “level up,” as game developers would call it, and become a “green” or “gold” level customer, with a host of new benefits such as free refills. “Gamification is really about understanding what motivates your users and designing for those incentives,” says Gabe Zichermann, author of the new book Gamification by Design.

In the best games, players understand what’s expected of them, experiment with ways to achieve their goals without significant penalty and immediately see rewards for their accomplishments. Slaying the dragon in “Legend of Zelda” earns players new weapons and brings them one step closer to facing the final boss and saving the princess, but if they fail they simply restart the level. The game has complex puzzles, some as complicated as the material in the average college course, yet it does a far better job breaking objectives down into easily digestible parts. Sheldon and other professors take advantage of the way popular games reward completing small tasks, and high-scoring players move proudly to the top of the leader board.