How Gamifying Your Classroom Can Lead to Happier Students & Happier Educators
Gamifying your classroom will benefit teachers and students alike. Utilizing gaming in education allowed educators to tailor instruction to match individual student requirements, preferences, and learning styles, often without exhausting the educator’s time and resources to create individualized experiences for all students. Gaming also increases diversity of learning materials by tenfold. It helps students get out of the normal and mundane classroom routines and can add a level of excitement that will lead to increased engagement and content comprehension.
The Power of Gamification in Education | Scott Hebert | TEDxUAlberta
How Gamifying Your Classroom Can Help
Adding gaming into your classroom can enhance the learning experience and foster creativity within students.
First, we have to acknowledge that the Game of School isn’t real learning. Students are going through the school day trying to gain points on assignments, raise their grades, and play the numbers game. This leads to passive participation in the classroom, disengaged students, and burnt-out overworked teachers. In today’s world most of our students play some form of digital game, but the classrooms of today don’t reflect that.
“The Game of School” isn’t like a video game. Teachers don’t zap learning into students. Learning isn’t something that happens as a nice side effect when we go for the points and try to get an “A:. Real learning is transformative. Real learning changes something important about us”
Matera (23)
Gamifying a Classroom Helps Create and Foster Empathy
Some games used in the classroom are individual, however many of them require that students work together towards a common goal. Even though students may be competing with one and other, overall they share the same goal and are trying to meet the same objectives. This fosters empathy and equity, aligning with Brené Brown well know discussions on empathy. Students develop their sense of community and even though they may perform at different levels, may bring differing levels of background knowledge, and may have different skills, they are all working towards a common goal. There are some classroom games that require students to identify strengths and personal areas of growth, which helps them further develop their sense of identity. Students that are more self-aware can work better in group settings, have high self-confidence levels, and inevitably results in a more equitable classroom.
https://www.theeducatoronline.com/k12/news/how-video-games-can-teach-students-empathy/272900
Gamification of Classrooms Can Decrease Teacher Burnout and Make the Classroom Fun for Educators
Most educators strive daily to create differentiated assignments that appeal to varying learning styles, personality types, levels of interest, and prior knowledge. In a world where more and more students are receiving individualized education, classroom sizes are continuing to grow, and engaging students in today’s digital age is harder than ever, gamifying a classroom can help.
Many games allow for individual feedback whilst playing the game. Students are progressed through the game as they meet the targets and are presented with remediation or relearning opportunities until they “pass the level” This means that these digital gaming platforms are taking hours of prep off of teachers plates, allowing them more time to build relationships with students, provide scaffolding or assistance when needed, and focus on other duties or tasks that they may have.
Example: Choose your own Edventure: Matera and Meehan highlight the point “imagine how much more immersed in a reading assignment your students would be if you could take any bit of textbook content and transform it into a “choose your own adventure”-style quest” (90) Not only is this a great way to engage students in learning, but it is also easy for teachers to create. In a world where we know that teachers are experiencing high levels of stress, low levels of job satisfaction and even lower retention rates, anything that can help engage students without exhausting teacher resources is a huge win in my book. Educators simply find a text that they want to read, create a Google Form, and then format a Google Form in a specific way that routes students to different sections based on their choices. It allows for check-for-understanding points along the way, keeps students engaged because they are given an element of choice, and increases engagement by gamifying the classroom.
Gamification in Education: 7 Benefits of Engaging Students Through Playful Learning
“Gamification isn’t solely advantageous for students; it also benefits teachers. Learning games allow teachers to monitor students’ progress, identify learning gaps, and adapt their teaching strategies accordingly. Real-time feedback from gamified activities enables personalized instruction that caters to individual needs.”
-Mimio Educator
Gamification & Equity/Social Justice
How gamifying a classroom can create a more equitable learning environment and apply principles of social justice to our educational spaces
Curriculum is co-constructed
Gamifying your classroom helps students feel like they have ownership in the learning process. The educator takes the lead on choosing the game and formatting it to match the learning standards, however the students themselves control their progress in the game. It shows students that teachers are willing to create materials that appeal to students and are relevant to current 21st century learning trends.
Both Teachers & Students Have Empowerment/Agency
Adding games into your classroom helps give students empowerment over their learning because it often adds elements of personalization and choice. Many only games can adjust based on individual student performance, making students feel like assignments are catered to their individual needs and comprehension levels. Also, it helps students see that classrooms are staying relevant and current and educators are putting time and energy into creating learning experiences that build digital skills, which we know are very important in post-secondary life.
Teaching & Learning Honors People’s Full Humanity
The element of choice and personalization that gamifying a classroom can do is so crucial in our classrooms. It helps students feel like they are being catered to at an individual level, growing their skills from wherever they were to where they can be. Many games work on ensuring that students are not just learning content but are also learning skills, including the ability to identify and grow their own identity.
My Experiences Using Blooket in a Secondary Social Studies Classroom
Blooket is another learning tool that can be used to gamify the classroom. Blooket is similar to Kahoot in that there are multiple choice questions, however there are many more elements to it. Students play at their own pace, unlike Kahoot’s teacher led model. Students can spend as much time on a question as they need and are told the correct answer should they be unable to answer it correctly the first time. Once a student answers a question correctly, they are rewarded in different ways depending on the type of game that the teacher has chosen. Given that there are many free game options, educators are able to ask students the same questions using different game models to increase engagement. Of course educators can create new questions too, however this is another benefit to Blooket. Not only is this a fun learning tool that students can use to be engaged in class materials and healthy competition, but it also increases equity in the classroom. For many learning games the student who answers the most questions correctly is the winner, which leads to many students feeling disheartened and unmotivated the first few moments into the game. However, Blooket allows students to steal other students’ points, meaning they can very easily move from last place to first place after only getting one question right.
I used Blooket this past week as a review tool. We are finishing a rather large unit that has been broken into three smaller units and their larger performance task assessment is coming up next week. This means that we are doing review activities for content comprehension questions and vocabulary review. Blooket is a great way to make sure students are engaged, cultivate a sense of community in the classroom, allow students to communicate with members of the class they may not otherwise, and lets students work at their own pace. It was VERY successful my first time trying for the following main reasons:
- The leaderboard changed constantly
- Students that usually struggle to be engaged were enaged
- Students engaged in verbal healthy competition discussions with one and other
- I played as the teacher, which created a common goal for the class to “beat Ms. P”
- Students who struggled finding the right answer were able to show immense growth in a short amount of time
Although this was a great first run, there were some areas of improvement
- Questions were all multiple choice, limiting this to base levels of understanding and remembering
- The timing of the game can differ, I let students play for 10 minutes and engagement levels declined towards the last two minutes
- Once students had cycled through all the questions, they began to memorize parts of the correct answer. This made is easy for them to select the right answer, however it was a bit memorization-based and not focusing on building critical thinking skills or applying their knowledge
Additional Resources Discussing the Benefits of Gamifying the Classroom and Example Tools to Use
Using Gamification to Ignite Student Learning: Gamification taps into the power of noncompetitive play and students’ desire to improve their skills
https://www.edutopia.org/article/using-gamification-ignite-student-learning/
20 Ways to Gamify Your Class
https://ditchthattextbook.com/15-ways-to-gamify-your-class/
A Literature Review of Primary and Secondary Classroom Gamification
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1378588