For 15 years, a promise guided much of educational innovation: if learning looked like playing, children and adolescents would learn more and better. This idea drove the digital transformation in schools, based on two premises considered fragile: that technology used by adults at work would produce the same benefits for children in the classroom, and that young people would be "digital natives," with a brain especially prepared to learn through screens. The second premise never found support in neuroscience, although it gained enormous popularity.
In the United States, 88% of public schools adopted the one device per student model. However, math, science, and reading scores for teenagers, which peaked in 2012, have been declining since then. This data puts the effectiveness of the bet on educational gamification in check.
From these ideas, an industry emerged that promises to transform learning into a continuous experience of stimuli, rewards, rankings, sequences, and points. The article suggests that practical results did not confirm the initial promises, raising doubts about the future of this pedagogical approach in schools.
