Engage Me or Enrage Me

I like the sentiment behind this article a lot, but the term "engagement" is frustratingly nebulous in this context, and assuming that "gamifying" a curriculum will work for every (or even most) students seems naive. I like how he places emphasis on ideas rather than the elements used to dress up and present those ideas. There's a reason that games like chess or (much) more recently Tetris have remained popular and prevalent as games exponentially more complex come out around them: it's because the foundation on which those mechanics are built on are rock solid and timeless. So, by that logic, we as educators need to find simple, compelling mechanics to act as the foundation of our engagement strategy and build and iterate upon those tried and true basics.