It’s almost unheard of for me to read advertorials or sponsored posts, especially when the words “Advertisement” appears in small print somewhere other than the headline. But the title of a recent newspaper article made me curious. It was about gamification in education, and one of the points it made was that if you use games in the classroom then students can learn without even realising they’re learning.

I thought, “What?!” I want several things in my classrooms:

I want the students to know that they’re learning. I also want them to know what they’ve learnt and I want them to know how they’ve learnt it. And I want them to know why they’ve learnt it.

Funnily enough, I was discussing this with (adult) students last week. We were discussing using AI to help generate blog post ideas and blog posts. One of the ideas that AI came up with for me for me was:

Unleash the Fun: Transform Your Classroom into a Coding Playground!

Well actually, and as I half-jokingly said to my students, I don’t want my classroom to be a playground, at least not in the sense implied by that title. I want the fun to come from tackling difficult problems, and working collaboratively with others to solve them.

As I wrote in 50 Features Of Excellent ICT And Computing Lessons

Pupils keep looking at the clock on the wall, because they want to get to a certain point in their work before the end of the lesson. They have a sense of urgency.

But I want that urgency to come from the excitement of the challenge, and the hunger for more knowledge. I think it is a very sad state of affairs that some companies (or all of them for all I know) think that the only way to engage students is to bribe them with the prospect of fun, and hope that they don’t realise they’re engaged in learning something. Quite apart from anything else, it strikes me as extremely patronising, both to students and to their teachers.