Memrise wants to turn learning into a 'recreational sport'

'We're using crowd-sourcing, game-dynamics and lots of memory science' says co-founder Ed Cooke
Memrise's gardening visualisation helps its users to learn

You'd be forgiven for being wary of anyone who talks about gamification, with the term having become a buzzword for a lot of people whose main talent is, well, spouting buzzwords. But that doesn't apply to everyone.

Ed Cooke is a Grand Master of Memory – a title awarded to people who prove they can memorise 1,000 random digits in an hour; the order of 10 decks of cards in an hour; and one deck of cards in under two minutes.

His business partner Greg Detre has a PhD in neuroscience from Princeton. When the pair talk about "gamifying language learning", they're not messing about.

Their company is called Memrise, and it was the first UK startup to graduate from the Techstars Boston incubator, before going on to raise $1.1m of seed funding from some prominent US investors in February 2012.

"We're using crowd-sourcing, game-dynamics and lots of memory science to turn learning into a recreational sport," explains Cooke. "Technology should allow us to make learning massively more efficient and enjoyable."

The idea is that people can learn languages, while also contributing their own content to help others. Memrise started with a website, but has also released an iPhone app.

One of the core theories is that people memorise vocabulary using animations, drawings or photographs – "mems" is the word Cooke uses to describe them – and are then prompted to test themselves at the right time to keep them in memory. A "colourful garden of memory" to be specific, which involves lots of game mechanics.

Cooke says mobile is an important part of Memrise's future. "It's the perfect thing for downtime in the bus queue or while waiting for a sandwich," he says. "It's inherently enjoyable. I think that what we think of as the education market is going to blend a lot with the entertainment market."

Cooke also has strong views on why something like Memrise may appeal to young people ahead of traditional educational material they encounter at school, based on what he's seen while doing talks in schools around the UK.

"It's quite striking how, with all the best will in the world, it's quite difficult as a young person now to really care about anything inside a school," he says.

"The experience is so much less engineered than a decent computer game. If you think about all the resources and thought that have gone into creating the experience of a computer game, and then compare that to a geography lesson…"

Cooke says Memrise's website currently has a wide range of age groups using it, from schoolchildren through to people in their 60s and 70s. It's starting to benefit from a network effect too: the more people on the site, the more there are contributing new content for the mems.

He adds that Memrise has been watching social games like FarmVille very carefully – Zynga Boston boss Nabeel Hyatt is one of its seed investors – and understanding how their motivational dynamics work.

"FarmVille allows you to create something which is immediately social, and which binds you into motivating patterns of reciprocity within the game, which is why people click billions of times a day on pieces of virtual ground," he says.

"What we're trying to do with Memrise is take some of those dynamics and use them to enchant learning."

Hence the garden of learning, which is the educational equivalent of a FarmVille farm: something visible to show off the progress that you have made. When a Memrise user has learned 1,000 words of, say, French, they have a blooming digital garden to show it.

How does the company make money? It's early days, but Cooke says it's unlikely to involve charging for basic access to Memrise's site or apps.

"Our dream business model is based on building a community at large scale which can disrupt the normal way that knowledge is transferred, and then find ways around the sides to make money without directly charging for the central product."

For now, it's all about building that scale and attracting users – something Cooke accepts will involve a new round of fundraising at some point. For now, he's focused on building a community of people engaged with Memrise.

"Learning is bound up in school with the least enjoyable things, and in one sense, a lot of the things you learn at school you're too young to really care about," he says.

"But learning is fun. It's the core mechanic of games: that sense of change and mastering yourself. That's our dream: turning learning into pure recreation."