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Tag: gamification

  • The great game: dodging blame for the 2020 A-level results train wreck

    The great game: dodging blame for the 2020 A-level results train wreck

    The A-level results came out on August 13th. In the absence of exams, they were estimated from several data sources using a fairly intelligent algorithm. Results were well up on last year, yet there were such howls of anguish that the government was forced into a humiliating policy U-turn four days later. What on earth…

  • The Game of Education

    Controversial blogger Donald Clark has boldly announced that “Gamification does NOT work” in education. What he misses is that education has been gamified for the last 1400 years. Here is how that game works, and how we can…

  • Our first-ever 8th Dan student

    Meet Beatrice Wongsanguan, Y11 student at Patana School in Bangkok. Beatrice is the first student ever to achieve the 8th Dan belt in Yacapaca. In case you do not know, we copied the Judo belt scheme to describe our levels. Students earn White Belt almost immediately, the work up through the colours to Black Belt. After that,…

  • Timed questions help students get in ‘flow’

    It all started one warm Friday afternoon about 12 years ago. I was observing a Y10 class in a fairly typical mainstream secondary school. They were taking a test using Paperless School, a now-defunct system that I had designed. One pair of boys particularly caught my attention. They were lolling back in their chairs, chatting about snooker and doing their…

  • A very short primer on gamification

    Yacapaca is a gamified formative assessment system. I want to discuss briefly what that means, and how we interpret it in software. Gamification is the art of making things you want to do anyway more fun, and more motivating. To understand why this is so powerful, I recommend this 12-minute TED talk by Seth Priebatsch because it…