Educators have been attracted to gamification because of its apparent appeal to students who are digital natives, but more research is needed to evaluate the effects of gamification on student motivation, learning, and related outcomes. This article presents the results of a gamification project conducted in an upper-division interdisciplinary course and suggests that gamification is not "too cool for school" but rather, an emerging instructional tool that will need to be filtered through the complexity of student experience in order to live up to its claims. Keywords: Gamification, instructional design, classroom assessment, student perception of learningUnderstanding learning is a Gordian knot of a challenge, just the kind of intellectual exercise that tends to motivate academics. So, while there is no dearth of research and publication on learning (and teaching), whether or not we are any closer to unraveling the knot remains an open question. Certainly, we have done a better job understanding the knot itself. While learning is often associated with educational research (practice), the study has inexorably expanded to include physiological, psychological, physical, and socio-cultural-political perspectives, making the full study of learning to be very much a syncretic art. A recent contender for the attention of those interested in teaching and learning is gamification, which draws inspiration and momentum from sources not often associated with serious pedagogy (Educause, 2011). This study explores one example of the nexus between gamification and learning in an interdisciplinary college class.Broadly speaking, the term gamification, coined in either 2005 or 2008 (depending on who you ask), refers to the use of various elements from games in non-game contexts (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled & Nacke, 2012). With origins in the technology industry, the concept quickly obtained a toehold in the business world, especially for marketing applications (Huotari & Hamari, 2012). To provide an idea of the scope of that infiltration, a 2011 Gartner report predicted that over half of all businesses would employ gamified marketing strategies by the year 2015 (Gartner, 2012) and M2 research predicts that gamification services will reach $2.8 billion in revenue by 2016(McCormick, 2013. Some of the most commonly used examples of gamification are retail programs where participants accumulate extra savings or other rewards for continued patronage. Foursquare, Fango, and StackOverflow are popular gamification apps.The widespread use of such techniques to engage customers in business began to catch the eye of educators who saw the potential inherent in engaging students. If the current generation of students spends a great deal of time playing online games, the reasoning goes, then why should we not harness that same kind of motivation to engage them in the classroom? Large funding agencies, such as the MacArthur and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have begun pouring support into prototype projects that examine the applic...
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