Unlocking more and more advanced content gives players a sense of accomplishment. Games can also reward performance via increasingly difficult challenges, which boost satisfaction and motivation (Callaghan and Reich, 2018). Kinzer et al., 2012), and help motivate players to stay engaged. Most people get a little thrill when they see their name in the top spot! Rewards like these, together with the feedback players get as they progress, make up the incentive system of a game (e.g. Or, they may be external to the game’s story world, like points that do not affect game play but which determine a player’s position on a competitive leaderboard. Rewards may directly drive game play, like a power-up that temporarily grants a player’s avatar with special abilities. Incentives like this help educational games motivate learners to stay engaged with the material longer (Plass et al., 2015), reinforcing the concepts they’re learning. Gamers unlock levels, outfits, abilities, and access other special prizes and motivators like badges, and trophies many players are so motivated by these types of rewards that they’ll spend hours of effort, and even pay real money, to obtain them. Educational games can harness these effects by incorporating incentives that books, workbooks, and tv shows can’t. Rewards have powerful chemical effects in the brain, triggering dopamine release mechanisms that keep kids engaged. We’ll continue this series on the benefits of gamification for learning with a deeper dive into the special features of educational games that motivate, personalize, grant agency, and harness the power of social interaction. We started to unpack what makes games such excellent learning tools in our previous post on the ways that video games can turbocharge learning. Games are not only a great way to supplement a classroom or homeschool curriculum: they have unique features that other educational materials don’t. Set in a vibrant world filled with a delightful cast of characters, exciting challenges, and coins players collect to trade for fun in-game rewards, our new vocabulary app, Word Tag, gamifies vocabulary learning. Founded on the power of storytelling and visual language and with two award-winning card games already, we’re excited about our recent expansion into the virtual space. The Mrs Wordsmith team is passionate about the amazing opportunities afforded by games.
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