All in all, Vietnam's response is probably only possible in a country with a communist government. A free nation would never be able to replicate the measures that Vietnam took.
Mongolia, New Zealand, and Taiwan would beg to differ.
Gamification means adding gaming elements such as badges and achievements to an otherwise unchanged mundane activity like working, learning or doing chores.
It is an old buzzword, nearing two decades now. But it definitely is _not_ just adding badges and achievements to a syllabus.
In fact, what you mentioned is the dreaded "PBL Fallacy". This is a common mistake by content developers to simply add Points, Badges, and Leaderboards to any learning module and then assume it automatically "gamifies" the content. I've seen this done wrongly so many times that it actually makes the modules worse instead of more engaging.
Short of turning the entire curriculum into a game, learning and development has had multiple schools of thought on gamification. My current favorite is the Octalysis model by SoCal developer Yu-kai Chou
"An organization dries up if you don't challenge it with growth." -- Mark Shepherd, former President and CEO of Texas Instruments