Many universities around the world had offered MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) to make learning easier. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses are very popular among the MOOC. Coursera is one such MOOC that has courses from more than a hundred top universities. Recently, a new social online educational system, PaGamO, created a partnership with Coursera to offera probability course.
But it grew from there, and by 2014, PaGamO’s creator Professor Yeh had worked with MOOC specialists on creating educational games for every subject.
This social gaming platform allows thousands of students to compete on the same map by occupying territory through problem solving. It can turn long, boring math homework into entertaining learning experiences. According to Professor Benson Yeh, this social learning platform is useful at both K-12 and university level education.
“We launched PaGamO in my probability course on Coursera with about 4,000 students, and they absolutely loved it, our course completion rate was significantly higher than expected, and students kept asking for more problems to solve on PaGamO.”
— Professor Yeh, creator of PaGamO.
Teachers can use PaGamO to assign homework and exams, measure students’ performances, and even assign unique curriculums for each students. Some US teachers participated in free beta version of PaGamO and claimed 90% of the students’ grade were improved after implementation.
Screenshot of PaGamO, ranking players based on questions being solved correctly
In conclusion, PaGamO may not the first online gaming learning platform as it claimed on its slogan, since gamers can learn Japanese language on games like Hiragana Battle. But players still can have an enjoyable learning experience. “Gamified education” might be playing a major role in education development in the future.
