February 8, 2026
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amy baskin

Low-Tech Gamification for Students with Amy Baskin

Ivan Kuo01 mins

Educators are some of the hardest working people out there with some of the lowest budgets to do their jobs right. It takes ingenuity, creativity, and passion to achieve real engagement with students, which is why Amy Baskin’s Grammar Olympics and other game concepts for grammar really demonstrate the power of fun for teaching.

We invited Amy to come on our weekly webshow to tell us more about what she’s been up to and she shares some of her secrets and successes from her gamified endeavors. Check out the full video below for the interview



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Be sure to join us this Thursday at 1 PM ET as Nir Eyal comes on to talk to us about designing habit-forming products. RSVP and sign-in to chat and join the conversation!

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Following Gamification Through Gartner’s Hype Cycle

Sudarshan Gopaladesikan19 mins

Gamification has finally hit a significant speed bump—overinflation from hype and expectations. In a recently published Gartner article, in-house analysts have predicted that about 80% of gamified solutions will fail in reaching business objectives by 2014 due to poor design. This could be easily avoided if people would simply just use good gamification design, but that simply isn’t the case.

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6 Steps to Successful Loyalty Programs that Win

Sudarshan Gopaladesikan27 mins

Reward programs are nothing new. They all work under the simple premise of “more you do business with us, the more we will recognize your loyalty in the form of discounts and/or prizes.” For example, airlines give out frequent flyer miles that can be redeemed for free trips depending on how many times you have flown with that certain airline. Rewards program extend to any and all retail, from airlines to Starbucks to your local gelato store. However, did you know that in 2011, it was reported that Americans accumulated $48 billion dollars on loyalty programs. What’s worse, $16 billion of that $48 billion went unredeemed. Would you ever want to throw away a third of your money?

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The Six Rules of Gamification

Gabe Zichermann101 mins

Since the dawn of the blockbuster gamification industry, I’ve been compiling, distilling and summarizing design patterns and systems. The objective has always been to help people across diverse industries such as marketing, healthcare, education, consumer tech, CPG and others find common entry points to this exciting new design approach. Over the course of the last…

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GamesBeat 2011: Mobile Games Level Up

admin01 mins

GamesBeat 2011 is VentureBeat’s third annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year’s event, taking place on July 12-13 in San Francisco, will focus on the intersection of games and mobile, two of the hottest markets in the technology sector which have shown promise for engaging players in interesting and innovative ways. Friends…

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SCVNGR Raises Another $15m in Funding

Gabe Zichermann12 mins

Congratulations to SCVNGR, the location-based mobile app, for recently raising another $15million in funding from European VC firm Balderton Capital! SCVNGR is a fast-growing location-based site that puts its focus on gaming by giving challenges to go with your check-ins. SCVNGR is among the most business-friendly of location-based apps as hundreds of companies, schools and…

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GAwards 2013 Winners: The Best in Gamification

Ivan Kuo62 mins

Each year we hold the GAwards to recognize companies for their best practices and use of engagement techniques with gamification. We crowdsource the nominees to see who has had the most impact on the gamification communities and we officially announced all the winners at the main stage of GSummit SF 2013. Here’s a recap on who won:

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Zynga to Collaborate with Half the Sky Team for Social Good Game

Ivan Kuo13 mins

Half the Sky, the bestselling 2009 book by Kristof and WuDunn, sparked a global movement (www.halftheskymovement.org) to address “the central moral challenge of our time” – ending the oppression of women and girls worldwide. The Half the Sky movement is producing a number of big projects to raise awareness for their cause, including educational materials, a four-hour miniseries on…

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Gigya’s Social Gamification Boosts Content Discovery by 68%

Ivan Kuo05 mins

Gigya has recently released a new infographic that shares some statistics about their gamification implementations in 2012. According to their internal study, Gigya was able to raise website commenting by 13%, social sharing by 22%, and content discovery via activity feeds by 68%. Overall, Gigya has claimed their implementations in 2012 have resulted in a general 29% increase in site actions.

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Blitz Brainstorming Gamification Tool Fosters Organizational Creativity and Innovation

Sudarshan Gopaladesikan47 mins

If creativity is a muscle, then gamification is the bench press. Much of workplace frustration stems from being stuck on day-to-day problems that arise such as optimization of a large workload or maximization of quantified metrics such as sales. Organizational creativity is in great demand for companies, and Blitz—a speed-thinking process that brainstorms innovative solutions—may be the gamified answer to the knot in the creativity muscle.

Dr. Ken Hudson, former marketing director of American Express, created Blitz as a fast, easy way to bring people out of a production rut. The main idea is to create as many as nine ideas in about two minutes. He found that when he gave managers less time to generate novel ideas, not only could they do it, but also they did it in inspired ways. Blitz’s rules and platform combines energy with creativity and production to drive innovation.

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