DragonBox: Algebra beats Angry birds
Does anyone have any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that gamification is good for teaching STEM ideas in the long term?  I am wary of rewarding the brain with in-game loot for memorizing the rules of algebra rather than with the deep satisfaction that comes with understanding.  Obviously, this latter type of reward cannot be as consistently provided and requires a certain maturity (maybe), but ultimately I think it's what drives most insightful people.<p>Here's a good example of what bothers me:<p>>As the game progresses, you’ll start seeing cards that are above and below each other, with a bar in the middle — and you’ll learn to cancel these out by dragging one onto the other, which then turns into a one-dot. And you’ll learn that a one-dot vanishes when you drag it onto a card it’s attached to (with a little grey dot between them). These, of course, are fractions — multiplication and division — but you don’t need to know that to play the game, either.<p>That last sentence is especially telling.<p>To me, gamification is suited for making necessary but painful tasks fun (e.g. cleaning your desk, tagging media, memorizing facts), but not for deep learning (e.g. algebra, quantum mechanics, object-oriented programming).  But maybe, at 26, I'm just not with the times.<p>EDIT: I think ColinWright is getting at the same worry, and his comment is more fleshed out  <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4106567" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4106567</a>