In February, the education services company Pearson introduced Alleyoop, a personalized digital-tutoring service that tries to gamify the classroom — and to do it, specifically, outside of the classroom. Think Zynga, but smart. And also: Zynga, but trying to make you smart. The platform focuses on middle- and, in particular, high-school curricula, and emphasizes the immediate feedback aspects of the gamification model. Instead of a once-a-semester report card, featuring the blunt assessment metrics of letter grades, students get real-time feedback on the details of their performance — from real-time tutors who are not their teachers. The system is personalized, iterative, and adaptive, so a student having trouble with, say, trigonometry can delve into trigonometry at his or her own pace, learning from mistakes and gaining immediate rewards from successes.
