The three days were long, not in terms of boring, but because Spanish people get up early and have dinner late. The talks on the second day started at 09:00 and finished at 20:00. That is over 10 hours of talking. And all talks were very interesting. Too bad I had to go home after the second day, since education was one of the main topics on the third day. See the Gamification World Congress website.

Gamification of education happened to be the topic of my talk on the second day. In 20 minutes I explained about the core principles of motivation, which are also embedded in succesful games. In order to intrinsically motivate students, they should feel autonomous, can truly master what they learn and feel related to what they learn. Slides of my talk are at the bottom.

A thing I did notice from all talks is the big focus on money, on the return of investments of applying gamification. From my perspective money should not be first, but people should. Gamification is always about empowering users, about creating solutions which truly motivate people and can therefore change behaviours. Money will follow.

Awesome that gamification is life and kicking in Spain, so much more than here in The Netherlands. Even awesome to have met some of the fellow gamification gurus, such as Kevin Werbach (@kwerb), Mario Herger (@mherger), Victor Manrique (@VictorManriqueY) and Andrzej Marczewski (@daverage). It would be great seeing them again on such a great conference here in The Netherlands.

Slides