Dear Jesse Fox,

thank you so much for your input and very interesting article. This is exactly what  I am looking for. For my master of education in the arts thesis, as a senior educator, I designed an ARG arts course "Finding Omen' for my 3rd years pop music students at the conservatorium van Amsterdam. In a vote the majority of students asked for a scoreboard as I was highly critical of such mechanic. However most of them during or after their study do successfully compete in music competitions. In my opinion art education should not be about a contest however I do need to adjust to the students needs considering their realistic professional environment.

Most of your articles contend I already witnessed in this semester. Although my later questionnaire among those playing the ARG showed only 7% of students not interesting in the scoreboard or the game itself.

Every student designed a gamers profileI. After that the 29 students formed teams by their own game profile: killer/explorer/achiever and socializer. To my surprise only 5 students were socializers. So we built 5 teams, each team had to have one of the socializers. The killers are the most fanatic checking the scoreboard on a daily basis (not the achievers as I would have thought).

I saw some students give up indeed, most problematic. However I designed a team zero and every team could vote out members who were highly dysfunctional into team zero. So far nobody felt out. The team constructions does seem to have the benefit of loyalty and might 'drag' some students along.

I need to solve the consequences of the scoreboard or get rid of it all together.

For this course I built an app. Publicly visible at www.room803.nl

If you are interesting in my experiment, I'm blogging about my research both in Dutch about the ARG and English about music competition studies. http://bpesja.bluehost.education

Would you know of other studies, papers, research that have dealt with this subject?

If you could be so kind to send me links that  I should read, that would be most helpful.

I would like to quote from your article in my paper if that's alright with you.

Again: thank you for responding, very useful.

http://bpesja.bluehost.education

An important consideration is that the score not decrease. This is unusual in a classroom context where the grade is considered to be a weighted average, and not doing well on an assignment can cause a grade to fall. This is controversial amongst educators, but is essential in gamified classrooms. In a game one advances by accomplishing things, not usually by doing them better, and the score can't fall. Yes, the health level or power level can fall, but not the score.

Check out Katrin Becker's work - she's working on a book on gamification in the classroom and is something of an expert on the subject. I've been doing it, but she also writes about it. http://minkhollow.ca/becker/doku.php

One example is:  Katrin Becker, Scott Nicholson (2016) Gamifying the Classroom: Pros and Cons, (Ch. 3) in Learning, Education and Games Vol. 2: Bringing Games into Educational Contexts, edited by Karen Schrier, ETC Press http://press.etc.cmu.edu/content/learning-and-education-games-volume-two-bringing-games-educational-contexts

Dear James R. Parker.

Thank you very much for your answer and links. Working with gamification for the first time I find it indeed controversial. The students seem to love the absolute grading of points, while I am much more into grading effort, process etc. through spoken and or written feedback.

Some students love 'dark play' and think of ways to obstruct, they even suggested teams should loose points when not delivering. As an educator I did not go there. And reading your advise I'm happy to feel your support. 

Will study the links you send me.

In gratitude, kind regards.

Blanka Pesja

I have to say that I am extremely sceptical in regard to scoreboards for art education. We frequently present artists to students who had bad marks and still did great art. In the Paris Salon of 1863 Courbet, Manet, Pissaro and Jongkind were rejected and still they did great works of art. I think if we introduce scoreboards we have to also introduce a Salon des Refusés that shows that the score says little about quality and rather a lot about what it is to work according to a rule-set.

Why would you apply a scoreboard to art education?

Art education is the epitome of a cultural subject. Culture is a matter of shared references, and therefore inclusiveness. A scoreboard implies exclusiveness and a false sense of excellence.

It is meaningless to know 'more' or 'less' when discussing art. What is necessary is to create new access to all that raw knowledge, and new nodes of reference to keep past culture alive and to include and expandinto new culture. Forty years ago, the Beatles were just another has-been group. today they are an intergenerational shared reference. How do you linnk the Beatles to Bach? How can the Beatles help us Roll over, Beethoven, tell Tchaikovsky the News?

The same questions apply to retrieving the significance of Mark Twain, Molière Tchekov, Van Eyck, Da Vinci, Lao Tseu, Shakespeare, Cervantès, George Sand, Mary Cassat, Sidney Poitier, Spike Lee, Berth Morisot, Manet... the list can go on, but the meaning of the list is what teachers must convey.

When I talk of a Mother's Heartbreak and show a Pietà, does that idea still shine through?

Francis Steven Mickus obviously has a point there. I agree. Art is not a scoring ground like horseraces or cricket.

Dear Mathias Fuchs and Francis Steven Mickus,

Of course I am very well aware of these arguments as they go around for some decades now. However the reality of professional artists is that most of them do compete wether inside the education or outside. Art could provide the safe haven from comparison but the reality is that art's function within society does not escape society's context.

Look at the site of for instance the University of Arts of Amsterdam (or many others) and you will see the concept of 'scoreboard' under such titles as 'prizes'. Newsletters from art academies and universities promote their 'top' students through competition. Just this month a new competition has started for scriptwriters so as to enable the graduates to get their work out their in the public eye and find attention and as such enable their professional growth.

This is indeed problematic as art education on the one hand serves artistic autonomy (as one of its main goals) and on the other hand has to deal with the reality of art competition as a professional perspective.

Applying 'gamification' into art education, acknowledges the competing spirit that is evidently all over the place. However my current research and thus my question here is very much interested in the how rather than the why. 

Fair enough! This is a free download of our book "Rethinking >Gamification". Mathias  http://meson.press/books/rethinking-gamification/

Thank you, your information helps me with my research.