Companies Impacting Higher Ed through Gamification

Higher education, the term in itself brings anxiety to students.

Further, gamification in higher education has helped students evolve and actually engage and enjoy their education.

Below is a list of 5 amazing companies that have impacted and gamified higher education in major ways.

PaGamO

With this online gaming platform, user enter in a fantasy world where they get to choose between a public and a private quiz the answers to which result in a gain or loss of island territory. Teachers can create private quizzes for their students or students can play public quizzes. The results of the quizzes provide data for both students and teachers in a statistical report. With an aim to increase engagement in the area of study, this platform requires user to create a profile on the platform which can be accessed for a licensed period of one year and needs to be renewed for further use. In case the teacher is creating quizzes for the whole class, they receive the results of student performance in the Teacher Console. In this space, the teacher can vary the difficulty level of a quiz and then assign each level to groups of students with different proficiency levels. As students’ progress, teachers can move students into different proficiency groups. Teachers have the option of sharing quizzes publicly or keeping them private for their students. PaGamO is a multiplayer social gaming platform that makes studying fun by combining learning with play. The fun comes from competing with others and knowing that you are studying at the same time. The major objective of PaGamO is to raise students’ motivation to learn via games.    

GameDesk

This LA-based non-profit that is designing what it calls “the classroom of the future” by developing a variety of game based learning initiative.  Named one of Fast Company’s “Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Education”, GameDesk has taken 4 major initiatives namely, GameDesk Studios, Educade, PlayMaker School and GameDesk Institute.

KnowledgeGuru

The company uses game-based learning, learning science and micro-learning to increase knowledge retention and improve performance. Students play games by KnowledgeGuru on their mobile devices and can learn along with it.

It’s a game engine that focuses on building long-term memory of facts, procedures and processes. It ensure effectiveness, it is designed around three proven tactics for retaining information over time: spaced learning, repetition and immediate feedback.  In 2014 it was awarded a bronze Brandon Hall award in the “Best Use of Games and Simulations for Learning” category.

BrainScape

Brainscape is an adaptive mobile education platform that is changing the way over 500m people study. Founded by cognitive neuroscientists, engineers, data junkies, and executives from the education industry, Brainscape is building the foundations of a comprehensive “knowledge graph” that is helping people learn nearly any topic more efficiently. Brainscape allows professors, thought leaders, and top students to create “smart flashcards” in the Brainscape format and share them within their schools, organizations, and the rest of the world. Brainscape’s ultimate goal is to map the world of knowledge into bite-sized, learnable chunks — an initiative it calls the Knowledge Genome Project. Students and teachers collaborate to create their own custom sets of “smart flashcards, which break large concepts into more digestible granular components. Students can then work through the cards at their own pace, track progress and mastery in real time, and share and compare card sets with friends.

D2L

D2L or Desire To Learn provides a Learning Management System”BrightSpace” for online teaching and learning. Their game based approach towards learning makes it engaging for students to keep up with their courses throughout. Catering to the education system, within higher education many universities like University of Colorado Boulder, Minnesota State University, University of Arizona and a lot more are using their interactive platform. A global leader in EdTech, D2L boasts of providing an open and extensible platform for more than 1,100 clients and 13 million learners.

Is there any other company that you’d like to mention?