Many people are looking for alternatives to the industrial-style learning so ingrained in American education, with desks in neat rows facing the board and rote memorization of multiplication tables. Richard Newman is one of those people, and his approach incorporates individual, self-driven learning through gamification.
Richard is a veteran of the tech industry currently serving as CEO of Rezzly Education Technologies, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. The premise behind the Rezzly way of learning is quest-based learning. While you hear a lot of talk in the gamification world about badges and points, Rezzly takes a much deeper and more holistic approach. They want students to choose how they learn tasks, and for them to gain a much deeper knowledge of subjects by immersion, which includes failing and trying again.
The Rezzly way also encourages discarding traditional grade books. As Richard puts it in this interview, “When you talk about grading students, you talk about what would be a perfect score, and then you subtract from it for the things they get wrong. When you’re walking through mastery learning, it’s just the opposite. You’re really adding as you build up your capabilities to get to the point where you’ve demonstrated what it was that you set out to learn.”
Rezzly is catching on, online communities are forming, and students and teachers alike are posting videos online of their experiences. Maybe gamification really is the future of education.
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