If you're a home educator and spend any time on social media, you'll probably have noticed how much we're being advertised to right now.

We seem to be fair game for almost any new business promoting the latest curriculum, app or resource to make things easier. 'Just ten minutes a day!' 'Make learning fun!' 'Learn to read in 3 simple steps!'

And I understand why. Home education comes with lots of decisions, a lot of uncertainty and even some vulnerability - especially when starting out. We're the perfect audience for new business.

The bit I wonder about the most is the increase in educational apps and learning platforms involving 'gamification': rewards, streaks and unlocking new levels etc.

There can be a lot to like about these types of learning app. They introduce new skills, make progress visible and turn something potentially boring to a child into something fun, especially for reluctant learners. And when you're having a wobble about your children's learning (there are plenty of them in home ed), they might seem to offer the perfect solution.

So is this the future of learning?

I sort of hope not.

That's not to say I don't like them - we've used a few and found them pretty useful, particularly when starting out ( I love a bit of Duolingo or Simply Draw now and again) and there's some evidence that gamification can help learning when well-designed and used.

But I do think there's a difference between making learning engaging and making the experience of learning itself depend upon being engaging.

Why I'm Not Buying Into It

I'm fascinated by the learning process and its complexity. I've home educated for seven years now, and spent years teaching before, that and have learnt an awful lot - still am.

So when I see so much being offered in a way that takes this complexity and promises to make it 'simple,' it makes me interested in what we're trying to achieve underneath all of this.

I'm becoming slightly cautious about the growing expectation that learning should be quick, fun and rewarding at every stage.

Are we doing it because it helps our children learn, or because it makes learning easier to get them to do?

As a teacher, I saw the challenge and drawbacks of teaching 30 children using a one-size-fits-all curriculum and how rewards and punishments were used to motivate learning.

Home education showed me something different: when children have autonomy, can follow their interests and have time and space to explore, the learning itself can become rewarding, with less need for extrinsic motivation alone.

So I'm slightly wary when I see gamification presented as the answer to making learning engaging because it feels like taking the old problem - how do we get children to do the learning? - and giving it a shiny new solution, rather than asking a different question:

What makes children want to learn in the first place?

Learning Through Games vs Gamification

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about learning through games here.

We use games all the time in our home education - board games, number and word games, cards and strategy games. There's a difference between learning through a game and adding game mechanics such as points, streaks and levels to keep children engaged with learning.

In the first, the game is the learning activity. In the second, game mechanics are being used to motivate you to keep going.

The Duolingo-Style Streak - Are We Learning the Language or Are We Playing the Game?

I've talked in a previous post about the plateaus we noticed my son reaching with both Duolingo and Chess.com - both heavily gamified - and how after a certain point, his progress seemed to slow rather than continue.

There were things he was definitely learning, but we also noticed he slowly seemed more interested in keeping his streak or building up rewards than learning the language or analysing his chess games (an important part of learning chess).

You might wonder whether this is even an issue. Is it a problem as long as he's still engaged and learning?

But when he started, the skill was the point. The intrinsic motivation was already there.  He wanted to learn Mandarin and get better at chess. But then, gradually, the game around the learning felt like it was becoming the pull more than the skill itself and, interestingly, he was also becoming frustrated that he wasn't improving in the way he had at the beginning.

Of course, regular practice matters. If a little cartoon owl and a 126-day streak gets you to practise a language every day, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The question for me is what happens when the reward for practising starts to become more important than the reason you started practising in the first place?

To me, gamification feels like a more appealing version of the same extrinsic motivation that I felt schools and parents were trying to move away from in recent years. But instead the streak has replaced the gold star and the points and levels have replaced the sticker chart.

Gamification can be very good at getting children to engage with learning, but engagement isn't the same thing as learning, and are the habits that make an app engaging, the same habits we want learning itself to depend upon?

The bit of learning that isn't always 'fun'

There's a point in almost every skill where the easy learning progress slows down and we have to push through the tricky part. I've experienced it many times and am seeing it more and more with my son who is almost 11.

Progress at the start of a new skill can be very quick, and learning platforms can make it fun. But it naturally starts to slow down and worthwhile progress is harder won. This is totally normal.

Apps and learning websites do step up in difficulty and challenge, but I'm less convinced they can always help you navigate the particular kind of stuck-ness that comes with getting better and gaining a more in-depth understanding: getting things wrong, understanding why, changing your approach and sometimes simply staying with something that's difficult for a while with not much forward movement.

And unfortunately there's no particularly exciting animation for this part, no happy owl congratulating you 🦉🥳 - it's just difficult.

If a child wants (or needs) to move beyond this, something different is usually required, like knuckling down and accepting being bad at it for a while.

And my goodness, that part can be frustrating, but it's certainly no bad thing.

In this brilliant video by Dr Becky Kennedy from 'Good Inside,' she describes what she calls the 'Learning Space' - the frustrating gap between not knowing something and knowing it, and why that gap is so important for learning.

And I think it's important that our children get used to being there.

The more comfortable they become with being in that space - with not knowing yet, with getting things wrong and with feeling frustrated without immediately needing to escape it - the more able they'll likely be to stay with something when it gets difficult. That's where resilience comes from.

And that's also when the accomplishment itself - mastering a tricky new song on the guitar, finally finishing a chapter book, confidently speaking a new language to a native speaker - becomes the reward.

This doesn't mean I think learning shouldn't be fun. Learning is a deeply enjoyable and rewarding process. But it isn't always exciting, quick or full of visible progress, especially as they get older. Some of the deepest learning I've experienced and observed has looked fairly ordinary from the outside.

What this has made me think about self-directed learning

This experience made me think a bit differently about self-directed learning too.

When my children were very young, I was much more convinced that if they were interested enough, they would naturally learn. It feels easy to believe this idea when they're little and it does sort of work in this way to an extent. I still think interest is one of the most important starting points for learning, and I'm still a big believer in autonomy and interest-led learning.

But as they've got older, I've become more aware that interest is the starting point. You can really want to learn or get better at something and still not know what you need to do next.

A child can love chess and still need someone to show them why they keep making the same mistake or love maths and still need to spend an uncomfortable amount of time wrestling with something they don't understand.

Which is where we come in. Enthusiastic, supportive parents. Also great teachers, tutors, coaches, high quality books and resources as well as passionate experts. An app or website can't replicate these in the same way.

And the brilliant thing is what happens with this support. Being shown and supported with what to work on next can open up a whole new level of learning. It can help a child over a hurdle they may not have managed alone, allowing them to do even more with the thing they're interested in.

Perhaps we need both

I don't think we need to choose between gamified learning and learning without the rewards. We don't need to choose between enjoyment and challenge.

If an app takes a child who previously hated maths or reading and gets them practising for ten minutes every day, that's a good thing. And if a child who would otherwise never be interested in learning a new language is happily using Duolingo every morning, I think that's a good thing too.

But it shouldn't become our definition of what good learning looks like.

Instead I think we need to be cautious about the idea that seems to be advertised to many parents, new home educators especially: that if learning is a struggle and isn't engaging your kids, the answer is to make it more fun, easier or more game-like. Or maybe even the idea that the app will take care of the learning so you're not needed.

The deep, meaningful, lasting learning I've seen to work time and time again isn't anything new.  Lots of play and reading, games and conversations, following interests and supporting our children's curiosity. It's supposed to be an enjoyable process, but it isn't supposed to be quick and easy.

Home education constantly opens my eyes. The simple answers I thought I had found at the start are never quite that simple. Things change, our children change, and our perspective changes. For me, anything that promises an easy final solution to parenting, learning or home education - whether its a one-size-fits-all idea, a learning ideology or a quick, simple method - is now very quickly challenged by me (and often discarded).

I think that's one of the things I value most about home education: it keeps reminding me that learning and parenting, like children, is never quite as simple as we'd like it to be.