History

While gamification, or the application of gaming principles and ideas to non-gaming situations, has been in practice for more than one hundred years, its presence in education came much later.  Games themselves first arrived in educational settings in the early 1970's, but the first game to make its mark in with catastrophic impact was The Oregon Trail in 1974.  Cohen (2015) writes, "the text-based game recreated the experience of pioneer immigrants crossing The Oregon Trail in 19th century United States.  Students and faculty alike were impressed with the outcome which combined strategy gameplay while giving players an understanding of what those early pioneers had to survive during the long journey."

Gaming continued much the same way throughout the remainder of the 1970's and 1980's with other commercial hits such as Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (1985),  Math Blaster (1987), and Sim City (1989) taking classrooms by storm (Heick, 2012).

The 1990's remained fairly quiet until the end of the decade when Whyville (1999) was introduced, becoming "one of the first virtual worlds to emphasize user-created content" (TeachThought Staff, 2012).  The "Serious Games" movement began close to 2002, and the ever popular World of Warcraft (2004) entered the gaming arena inside and outside of learning environments (TeachThought Staff, 2012).

Toward the close of the first decade of the new millennium, Gamestar Mechanic (2009), an "online game-building community for students, became available (TeachThought Staff, 2012).  Most recently, Minecraft (2011) became commercially available and has swept not only the gaming world, but also the educational world off its feet (TeachThought Staff, 2012).

The following infographic provides not only a brief introduction to the beginnings of gamification of education, but also the history of gamification as it applies to many aspects of life outside of traditional gaming.