This book, Playing to Win: Gamification and Serious Games in Organizational Learning by ASTD Research, claims to be the result of rigorous research into the value of gamification as an aid to learning. Gamification, for those of you for whom the word isn’t instantly definable, is the use of games in a non-game context to engage and encourage users to solve problems. It's a new paradigm in learning made more possible by recent technological advancements.
The book’s author, ASTD Research, is introduced by Wikipedia as “The Association for Talent Development (ATD), formerly American Society for Training & Development (ASTD)... a non-profit association for workplace learning and performance professionals.” It was formed in 1944. On its website ASTD claims the following for its research: “... an empirical foundation for today's data-driven decision-makers, containing both quantitative and qualitative analysis about organizational learning, human capital management, training, and performance.”
At this writing, the book was not to be found on Amazon. There were, however, a number of other books by ASTD; the reviews were favorable. Frankly I haven’t read the book as the online price is $199 -- I’ll wait for the movie. More seriously, the author has provided us with an infographic that does make me wish my employer would purchase a copy.
Based on the information provided by the survey and the infographic, other employers in the education industry might also want to take a look at this book. The results of the survey apparently showed that gamification improved learning “to a high extent,” an appraisal educators will find hard to ignore.
Our experience here at RobotsLAB certainly agrees with that finding. After all, our products are gamification raised to a higher lever. More than just screen shots, our award-winning RobotsLAB Box both motivates and engages children in learning more about math. Our MathBall does the same, and our robots, NAO, DARWIN, BIOLOID and CUBLETS are literally gamification anthropomorphized. Kids can’t keep their hands off them and can’t help but learn valuable skills for our increasingly technological workplace.