Gamification in EdTech: What is it? Examples and benefits

Upshot.ai
5 min readJun 7, 2022

Technology has significantly changed the way students learn. Due to the evolving educational system and technology trends, EdTech businesses are now focusing on bringing out the best ways to engage students and make the learning experience interactive.

Many Educational institutions are adopting gamification techniques across the world to enhance participation levels among students.

A study from Blueweave consulting shows that gamification in the education market is projected to reach USD 4144.97 Million by 2027.

This article will discuss how gamification in EdTech turned the learning process into a fun experience and how it benefitted the students.

Gamification in Edtech

Gamification in EdTech is adding game-like elements into the learning environment to motivate students to learn and make the process more engaging. It involves concepts like rewards, points, and challenges to encourage learner participation.

For eg., When you receive a reward, your brain releases dopamine, making you feel good and inspiring you to do more. It makes the learning process fun and interactive while improving learner retention and productivity.

Gamification and game-based learning

In EdTech, the terms “gamification” and “game-based learning” are used to describe game design elements and principles that have been added to non-game educational products. Often they are treated as the same, but they are different in nature.

As EdTech companies search for ways to improve engagement and retention. It is crucial to understand the difference between gamification and game-based learning. With this understanding, you can achieve your company goals through the right tools.

Gamification consists of adding game elements and principles into EdTech products (or even real-life apps or services) in order to make them more engaging and usable.

Game-based learning is an instructional design approach that effectively helps learners apply new knowledge, skills, and attitudes by making games a part of their instructional experience. It is based on the principles of game design and incorporates components from digital games in order to improve educational practices.

Examples and how gamification in EdTech benefitted students and businesses

BYJU’s

BYJU, India’s leading EdTech enterprise, uses gamification to make users’ learning process easy and engaging.

The BYJUs Math App offers an engaging experience for students featuring a math playground and quizzes that reinforce essential math concepts. This unique combination of games and simulations helps students understand abstract concepts like geometry, algebra, and trigonometry fun and interactive.

The game consists of mini-games, each with different difficulty levels. The points that the players gain from each win serve as an encouragement to challenge themselves and enhance their knowledge of mathematics.

Benefit

BYJUs helped the students understand and learn complex concepts easily and playfully with mini-games. BYJUs, internal study shows that game-based learning increased the completion rate up to 96 percent, with an average of 83 percent. The completion rates indicate a better engagement and learning experience.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy, an online courses platform uses gamification elements such as badges, points and leaderboards to engage its learners.

Learners receive badges when they finish a particular assignment, and the in-game language indicates that they have “leveled up”. Also, they can see study progress in the form of progress bars. This motivates the learners to complete the syllabus, assignments or tasks as an achievement.

Benefit

Khan Academy used gamification elements such as badges, leaderboards and levels to help learners visualize their progress. It increased its profit by more than 100 per cent by implementing game-based learning. Students’ attention span toward learning increased with the gaming elements and helped them retain what they have learned.

Minecraft Education Edition

Minecraft is one of the most popular video games in the world. The game offers an education edition for teachers. They can download worlds that have been created for educational purposes or create their own.

Thanks to its fun elements that appeal to curiosity, this game has been a favourite among children for years. Teachers can use it as a tool to help learners memorize stories easily. Teachers can add whiteboards and helpers to Minecraft worlds to engage learners, gather information or create a narrative for other students to retell.

Benefit

The Minecraft education edition uses game-based learning to encourage students to bring out their interests and get them involved deeper in the lesson. The engaging and interactive learning experience prepares the students with the skills they need to succeed and increases motivation to learn.

SoloLearn

SoloLearn is a game-based learning platform that aims to gamify how we learn how to code. A creative approach to learning and social interaction strives to make coding fun and easy.

The app utilizes the code playground and creates a challenging competition where players can showcase the code they created and get feedback from the community players. The top coders are displayed in the form of ranks on the leaderboard.

Benefit

SoloLearn understood the importance of feedback, leveraging gamification focused on building social profiles and peer-to-peer competition(badges and leaderboards). This way, learners get real-time feedback from the community so they can improve their learning process and move ahead.

Duolingo

Duolingo is an American EdTech company that is most popular in language-learning platforms. It leveraged gamification, a badge reward system, to create a fun and engaging environment that keeps users engaged and boosts retention rate.

In the development process, Duolingo used other gamification tools such as leaderboards, feedback and push notifications to make the user experience a fun learning experience.

Benefit

The use of gamification elements, rewards, and leaderboards helped the users to engage with the platform consistently. It drove great results by motivating them to learn and get ahead to appear on the top of the leaderboard.

With the inclusion of gamification, Duolingo saw an enormous increase in revenue, jumping from $13 million to $161 million between 2017 and 2020.

Conclusion

Gamification is an effective strategy for bringing better learning experiences to students. It can significantly increase the interactivity of learning platforms, making the learning process more entertaining and fun for learners.

Gamified learning is a great way to add value to your EdTech platform and assist in achieving your business goals. Talk to us to gamify your EdTech app.

How Upshot.ai can help you gamify your EdTech app?

Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, user engagement, and gamification platform that helps digital product owners and marketers improve product adoption and conversions.

With the help of upshot.ai, unlock all the benefits of world-class talents and technology capabilities to develop a gamified product. With Upshot.ai, digital app owners can enhance their user experiences with pre-built gamification features such as badges, mini-games, rewards, and trivia etc., It can provide personalized insights, actionable recommendations, and contextual nudges designed to deepen your relationship with the users.

Book a demo of the most comprehensive user engagement and gamification platform to achieve your digital product goals. Join our communities for more insights, guides, and best practices that keep you updated with proven strategies and tips to supercharge your campaigns.

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Originally published at https://www.upshot.ai on June 7, 2022.

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Upshot.ai

Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, customer engagement and gamification platform that helps businesses to create amazing experiences to deepen customer relationships.