On Gamification in Learning

12-12-2025

I haven't been super active in this blog lately. But that's ok, it doesn't allways have to be my main priority. I've been more concentrated on keeping up with Boot.Dev's Backend Python + Go curriculum. It's super fun and engaging, well thought out, and good explanations, exercises and projects. There's a really good, active and helpful community on their Discord; they help out with any question, and it's also fun to just banter there sometimes.

Apart from enjoying the platform and the curriculum, after a couple weeks of concentrating on that, I do have a couple thoughts about gamification in general:

Engagement

Gamification makes things addictive, right? In social media I think it can very easily become toxic; in learning I think it can be better, but still, with caution.

My main problem with it in learning is that it can be too distracting, you start caring more about earning points, continuing the streak, getting to the leader board, than actually learning. Now, some might say "well, yes, that's the point, and the learning just happens automatically"; but not entirely, I think that if you focus too much on the game and you don't do the lessons with intention, it's easy to pass through the lessons without really learning much.

On the other hand... maybe my problem with gamification is more because of my own lack of patience; maybe gamification should be used as a long-term strategy because one of the things it does well is to keep you engaged longer, both for the short-term —as in longer study sessions— and long-term —as in, complete the full course—, and that's a good thing, that's something I need... desperately. So maybe sit back, enjoy the game, and let the learning slowly seep into you the way it was intended.

Flexibilty

Another thought: it becomes less flexible, which sounds counter intuitive, like making it into a game should make it more flexible, but no; because you need to get the next xp level, the next gem, or whatever, you can't afford to loose your streak, you can't afford to make any mistakes, you can't afford to experiment, all your attention is on solving the problem presented by the lesson and giving them the answer they want to hear, no more, no less.

Boot.Dev does a great job giving you other complimentary tools, like you can chat with "Boots" (an LLM chatbot that's aware of your progress and trained to talk to you in socratic method) and the "Training Grounds" where you can do exercises related to what you are learning. But still, I think as long as you are in the platform, you are in the game.

For that reason I think it's important to supplement a gamified learning path with some more self-directed projects, even if they are just tiny experiments that you do to test some structure; or like I do on The Code Apprentice, the projects there are complete code examples (LLM generated) that I copy, analyze, and I often enhance and play with the code; I mentioned a bit about that project in my recap, and I talk about some of the ideas behind it here.

The point is: don't JUST focus on the gamified path. It's great for engagement, but it's not enough for deep learning.