Gamification: Sisyphus and Students

This comic from Existential Comics got me thinking about gamification in education. Sometimes tediously repetitive tasks are a necessary part of learning, and in such instances, gamification may offer real help. But sometimes as educators we fail to make the activities themselves more interesting, settling for busy work with no clear purpose. And so let’s make student learning as fun as it can be, both by finding ways to gamify tedious activities, and also by not making anything duller than it absolutely has to be.