Speaker 1: When game mechanics improve the effectiveness of training, they're usually doing it either by increasing learner motivation or their cognitive engagement. In this video and the next, I'll show you examples of both and you'll see how each of them enhances learning in its own way. And understanding this will help you pick the right game elements for your specific program. The more common path of gamification is to use game elements to increase learner motivation. Here's a very simple example of this. Imagine you have a basic course about the stock market. So you've got some training content here in four modules and each lesson ends with a little knowledge check. And in this example, you've put your course into a learning path format. So in each of these little bubbles, there's the content of a lesson in your course and its knowledge check. You can add motivational mechanics to this learning path, including, of course, our good old points, badges, and leaderboards. So here you've decided that depending on how well the learner does on each assessment, they'll get a certain number of these little dollar signs, and they can see how well they've done on each assessment over here. You could also lock some of the content away and give the player goals to achieve in order to access that content. For example, here the learner needs to get enough dollar signs to unlock each new section. Motivational mechanics are very much associated with rewards, but they're not limited to extrinsic rewards like points or power-ups. If you peak learner curiosity for what comes next, you don't have to come up with stuff to give them. Just unlocking new content can be rewarding if you've whetted their appetite for it. For example, in this course about zoology, we're teasing the player a bit by showing a hint of what's coming up through these silhouettes. You can also show them a challenge that they can't possibly overcome yet, but which they'll be able to do after more training. Some people like to use stories for the same reason, ending each chapter on a cliffhanger, so the learner wants to know what happens next, and they'll be motivated to achieve the mastery necessary to unlock the next chapter. If you can excite that curiosity, then satisfying it is also a reward. Important thing to note here, often with this type of gamification, your content itself, that is the teaching part and the assessment, is quite separate from the game elements. So you could actually change the content in each of these lessons and make the course about genetics, it really wouldn't change that much about how the game elements work. So these motivational mechanics are often quite independent from the content. So how does this impact learning outcomes? Well at the very basic level, this form of gamification provides a clear series of goals for the learner, taking them from one accomplishment to the next, and ideally it makes it very clear where the learner stands in relation to each goal on the way there. Games in general tend to be very good at that, and we know that just showing the progress towards a goal increases the likelihood of attaining it. Gamification layers like these incentivize the learner to do more training, more exercises, so they increase the quantity of practice, of training. And when they hit a challenging patch, the motivated learner will persevere longer and try again instead of giving up. So that retention too goes to quantity. But a motivated learner, one who really wants to get that last dollar sign or that final step towards a goal, will pay more attention to what they're doing. And since attention is key to learning, you're also increasing the quality of that time they spend training. Those factors are what ultimately boost the learning outcome with this path. By getting the learner to stay in the training and pay more attention to it, the gamification layer can be seen as a multiplier of your training content. That means the effectiveness of the whole thing depends on how well designed your training is in the first place. The better your training, the better its multiplied result. So that's the motivational path. In the next video, we'll look at the path of cognitive engagement and then we'll get into figuring out which one's actually better. Till then, happy designing. Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.