Words & Monsters has elaborate gamification (battles, crystals, random rewards, leaderboards), but its learning is mostly receptive: pick from three options, single words, weak glosses. ‘The science required to inform the manipulation of reward schedules for educational benefit is very incomplete.‘
Problems identified
- Recognition only; no production or retrieval.
- Single words, not chunks or collocations; senses split or poorly glossed.
- Overstated claims (CEFR-level prediction, “neuroscience-based” motivation).
- Random rewards felt like a “treadmill” rather than a “thrill”.
Research
Dehghanzadeh et al. (2019) systematic review, CALL; Driver (2012) “The irony of gamification”; Howard-Jones & Jay (2016) Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 10.
Design rules (for your apps)
- Reward productive retrieval (type it, say it, use it), not recognition.
- Teach chunks with example sentences and co-text (Ten paper activities for recycling vocabulary sets).
- Gloss by sense, in context.
- Publish your scoring logic and validation for any level claim.
Limits
One reviewer’s opinion; the vendor disputed it in the comments.
Connections
Gamification as pointsification · Teach lexically - collocations as minimum units of meaning · Learners decode far less than teachers think (fuzzy lexical representations) (add audio)