Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There are plenty of opportunities for life-long learning but peo-ple rarely seize them. Game elements are an increasingly pop-ular tool to keep students engaged in learning. But gamifica-tion only works when it is done properly. Here, we introducethe first principled approach to gamifying learning environ-ments. Our feedback mechanism rewards students’ efforts andstudy choices according to how beneficial they are in the longrun. The rewards are conveyed by game elements that we call“optimal brain points”. In our experiment, these optimal brainpoints significantly increased the proportion of participantswho attempted to learn a difficult skill, persisted through fail-ure, and succeeded to master it. Our method provides a princi-pled approach to designing incentive structures and feedbackmechanisms for both educational games and online courses.We are optimistic that this can help people overcome the moti-vational obstacles to self-directed life-long learning.