I’ve read more and more in recent years about ‘gamifying’ education, and I have to admit, I never got it. This helps to put it in a little more context:
If what you want is an answer and not an exploration then I don’t recommend pretending you’re looking for an exploration. Students are very attuned to bullshit.
Using gaming to engage students and teach certain skills like exploration and problem-solving makes some sense to me.
It also reminds me of an episode of the Debug podcast I listened to recently, with software developer Mike Lee. His current company made a chemistry game for iOS based on actual chemical reaction modeling. Lee tells the story of creating the game in the interview, and how the lack of access to real chemistry sets for kids these days played a small roll in the idea, but rather than trying to replicate mixing chemicals on the iPad, they approached it from the standpoint of letting the technology do what it’s good at. Taking that approach, it seems like there are so many opportunities to create games that teach, it’d hard to know what to work on next.
Gravitropic 
Good article. Thanks.
I especially liked, “In many ways, games force you to study learning outside of an environment that is already predetermined by our education system.” It’s about engaged learning, not gaming.
Have you seen FoldIt? http://fold.it/portal/ Or Serious Games? http://www.seriousgamesinstitute.co.uk/ Or Games for Change? http://www.gamesforchange.org/