Degamification of Education

education without consequence. education without reward. education only for the sake of learning.

with the advent of game theory in popular culture, and Silicon Valley’s wet dreams of gaming behaviours through incentives, the majority of formal and informal education (app-based, for example) has started revolving around external rewards for learning.

before exploring the counter-case, let’s explore this idea a little more —
in formal education, gamification fundamentally happens through marks. as a student, one of the things that is hammered into our behaviour, either subliminally or overtly, is that attaining good marks or other indicators of performance is desirable. this happens when we enter kindergarten and ends with a Ph.D, including everything in between. marks, therefore, are the archetypical incentive or reward of studying in a particular way — the heart of gamification.
in the case of alternate education, this gamification happens through points (in the case if game-like learning systems like quizzes) or mock tests, or time tracking, or progress trackers… you get the idea.

i’ve been using this learning app called Brilliant to (re)learn my holy trinity — Physics, Math & Logic.
it’s a platform that teaches us concepts through a series of Brilliant quizzes and stories.
the most interesting aspect of this game is the complete lack of gamification — beyond showing whether the marked answer is correct or wrong, there is absolutely no other tracking of which questions are right or wrong. each question, by default, has a “View Explanation” option that simply does not change state or colour no matter what happens, whether the question is unanswered or it's wrong or correct.

confession time — i have a bit of a superiority complex with my ability to deal with my holy trinity. subconsciously or otherwise, it’s always been unacceptable to me to have made a mistake in this, no matter how simple or complex the problem and solution.

even in private, if i would get an answer wrong in my own head, i would somehow just gloss over it a little and not really bother with taking the time to deeply understand the subject matter. i would be at least a little concerned with my *rightness* or *wrongness* as opposed to completely focusing my attention to the fact in itself.
it’s not as evident an emotion as embarrassment, but just a sort of half-formed internal dialogue along the lines of “Of course, this is how it is!” or “It’s very stupid of me to go wrong with something as basic as this!”

over the course of using Brilliant for a few weeks, i’ve realized i’ve become a lot more comfortable with viewing explanations for the most basic concepts of a subject that I’ve formally studied, sometimes. this is a powerful shift because my grasp of the underlying thinking behind so many fundamentals (like transistors, universal logic gates, logic systems and operators) is much firmer now, in a few short weeks, compared to the three years i studied them in undergrad. this happened because once i got used to the fact that my answers made absolutely no mark in the universe, not even to the dashboard of my profile in the app itself, i became a lot more comfortable in going back and viewing explanations of everything that puzzled me, no matter how trivial or advanced it is.

the key point here is the incentive — when all external rewards are removed from this process of learning through an inherently gamified system of learning (quizzes in Brilliant), it makes for a deeply meaningful experience because there is no dilution of intent or motivation in even the tiniest way; instead, the entire focus is only on developing stronger conceptual frameworks.

i wonder how powerfully a person’s education can change them in a context like this, with education without consequence. education without reward. education only for the sake of learning.