Gamification in Education

What is Gamification?

How much fun is your classroom? How much fun is the learning? Are students excited to work on all your assignments? If you think there is room for improvement in any of these areas, gamification is something you should strongly consider integrating into your classroom. It promises to make learning more fun and exciting, even some of the more mundane tasks that every class incorporates. It has the ability to boost student motivation and engagement.



Gamification is the addition of game elements to non-game activities. There are successful examples of this everywhere we look, from credit card rewards to eating McDonald’s so you can play Monopoly. The biggest and most successful businesses in the world are using gamification to increase customer engagement and to find more success in their businesses. There is even an example of a train station in Sweden adding piano keys to the steps and it dramatically increasing use of the stairs versus use of the elevator. Gamification works and educators should not shy away from using it.

Click here for a visual intro to gamification.

I hope to provide some insight and examples of how gamification could work in your classroom and am looking forward to your comments and additional ideas you may have or could already be using with success!

 

Gamification For Grading

One area that shows a tremendous amount of potential is in grading. Teachers can gamify their gradebook, making checking and earning grades more fun and providing additional incentive for students to do well. In gamifying your gradebook, teachers can have students start with 0 points (or percent) and they have to work their way up by earning points through various assignments and activities throughout the grading period. As students reach different levels or letter grades, they could earn additional ranks, badges or other rewards. Teachers can get creative when it comes to what happens as students progress throughout the “game” but when using gamification for grading, the points they earn directly correlate to the grade they earn for your course.

One of the simplest ways to gamify your grading is to encourage competition by having a classroom leaderboard. This could be as simple as posting a top three students each marking period based on their percentage or something more involved, like charting mastery on various assignments. This would not require reworking your entire gradebook, but would simply mean taking existing data and adding a component of competition and gamification to it. The picture below shows one concept that could be used to help promote healthy competition and better grades in the classroom.




Gamifying the gradebook has tremendous potential to motivate students to get better grades by making their grades more fun and something they will monitor more diligently.


Gamification to Promote Engagement and Work Completion

Gamification also promises to increase student engagement and work completion in your classroom. When learning is a game or is more fun, we learn so much more. Students will retain significantly more knowledge when they are engaged and having fun and are much more likely to do work that has that fun game-like element to it. I know that many students spend countless hours playing video games like Fortnite or Minecraft. If we could bring some elements of those games, or even incorporate some of the games they are already playing into the curriculum. For example, when studying the American Revolution, several students already had fairly good background knowledge because of the time they had spent playing one of the Assassin’s Creed games. They were able to learn and retain much more information than they would have had I stood in front of the class and talked about it or given them a reading. They also already had strong foundational knowledge so that when we did talk about certain events or topics, they could more easily place that new information into their existing framework of knowledge.

In my classroom, each year students have to design a “green city.” We spend one unit studying how people have used the land and new or better ideas for land use in the future. Their final assessment is designing a city using the concepts and ideas we have covered in class. This is where some gamification comes in. I have had students do all sorts of things to design their cities, but one that some students always want to use is Minecraft. This allows students who already enjoy the game to use it to use what they know to create something showing they understand the concepts of the unit. I show the video below to my students as a world-class example of a green city design using Minecraft. SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon are two other games that could be used for this assessment piece that incorporate gamification.

When you bring gamification onto the classroom, students naturally want to do the learning they are presented. The work is fun, rather than a chore. I think everyone can relate to this. Think back to some of the required readings from your time in school. At the time, you probably did not enjoy those books or even reading in general. Many later find reading to be very enjoyable, even some of those required readings, when the reading is not a chore but a choice. You are also going to get much more out of what you do when it is not a chore. I recently had my students work on this Deck.Toy in my class. Although they were learning about the rights of the accused and even had a writing prompt as a part of it, they were really engaged and remembered the content that was presented. Their work was better because it was presented as a game. I had students and parents reach out to say how much fun they had working on the assignment. Gamification helped students engage more deeply and I saw an increase in the completion rate of the work when it had been gamified.


Gamification for Enrichment of the Curriculum

Gamification can also be used to promote enrichment and engagement with the topic outside of what is specifically delineated in the curriculum. Gamification can be used to provide students with options for what they want to learn and for independent investigation and learning. I think of my class as a tree. The roots are the foundation of the tree that comes from prior learning. Often the roots need some help before we can really get to growing the trunk. The trunk of the tree is the core content knowledge that students will need. All students are getting a trunk that is about the same. The branches and leaves and fruits are where the students can be different and where gamification can come into play. Say we are learning about the Bill of Rights. In the gamified classroom, the main quest that all students take might be to know and understand the first ten amendments to the Constitution. They could complete this quest and earn points for it, but in order to earn enough points for success (a high grade), they will need to complete side quests. Here, students could do research on the death penalty and the eighth amendment, or create a presentation on Thurgood Marshall or have a debate about Ernesto Miranda, for whom the Miranda Rights are named. They get to choose how their tree of knowledge will look and in the process, are branching out beyond the requirements of the curriculum.

I have also seen this for different assignments where a teacher will essentially make the student a chef. They have to prepare a “main course”, and all main courses in the classroom might look the same. They can enrich their meal with different “salads” or “appetizers.” The “drinks” and “desserts” can vary as well. This menu approach to assignments allows students choice, provides an element of gamification, and will help students enrich their understanding of the topic. It also helps students as they go out into the world and have to do investigation on their own. Here, students will learn more, and the more you learn, the more you want to learn.

Conclusion

Gamification is a powerful tool for anyone to use, especially in education. There are already a great many teachers and organizations using gamification and finding tremendous benefits and success. Although it may seem like a challenge, try working some gamification into your classroom and if you like the results, just keep going. Gamification can be used to spice up your grading policies, promote engagement and work completion and to boost enrichment for your students. I hope all of you reading found something you could take away from this post, and I look forward to comments about how you will gamify your classrooms, or ideas for us if you already have done this. Thanks for your time, and I’ll see you back here for another post in a couple weeks!




References:

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