What is Playful Learning

Engagement is essential in higher education but can be problematic to achieve. Successful games are, at their core, designed to be engaging experiences. In attempts to increase engagement in learning, there has been an increase in playful learning, game-based learning, and gamification as educators attempt to encourage engagement by explicitly harnessing the engaging attributes of games. Additionally, other attempts to increase engagement in education have implicitly resulted in the incorporation of game-like attributes. This chapter provides specific definitions of these terms and acknowledges that such attempts to increase engagement often offer an additional layer of extrinsic motivators. The authors propose that this can lead to unexpected and undesirable effects if extrinsic motivators are not well aligned to the desired behavior. This chapter presents a taxonomy of engagement strategies regarding their implicit and explicit game attributes and their implicit and explicit teaching attributes.