Personally, my most memorable online learning experiance to date happened back in grade school. We were learning how to type in computer class, and were asked to bring up a website to access the activity there. It was a bizzare game called Dance Mat Typing. (Finding this out required little more than a quick google search, and about 20 minutes spent browsing through websites, looking for one that seemed familiar.) In class, it was little more than an oddity, although it became more important after it was mentioned to my parents that we were learning typing through this game and it was brought into the household. As games go, it wasn’t particularly a good one, but for the purposes of learning it was a good resource. The issue with gamification of these education resources, especially those aimed at younger children, is making them engaging enough to hold their attention. There were plenty of other games out there that were much more interesting to a younger me, to the point where my parents, at their wits end, threatened to remove my computer access if I didn’t manage to learn typing soon. That turned the use of the ‘game’ into more of a punishment, and sapped any enjoyment I had from it. In particular, I grew much more frustrated with my own mistakes, and having to redo certain sections made me angy to the point of headache. And while it’s sad that it’s the most memorable because of my anger, writing about it has brought up some more positive memories of learning games.
I think that the situation could have been improved by making the learning experiance more human. My parents might have taken the time to sit down with me, watch me play, slowly learning, and helped me to calm down, or given me a little bit of guidance, rather than expecting a game to be able to teach me on its own. This is a problem that I feel is happening more and more, especially to young children, but happens even during university and during some jobs. Children are left on their own, and parents expect technology to be able to teach them. Teenagers are left on their own… lack of sex education, lack of social education, lack of education around LGBTQ+ issues… and the internet is their only resource for learning about these things. Either way, these tools are poor replacements for human interaction.