Step 1: Assess your students
a) Identify your students’ trouble spots
b) Survey your class
Step 2: Define learning goals
a) Set learning and behavior goals
To gamify education, deploy clearly-defined objectives in the form of learning and behavior goals that address the trouble spots and pain points you identified.Learning goals include helping students understand concepts and develop skills.Behavior goals involve helping students concentrate and work efficiently. For example, you may set a learning goal to have students master a specific skill by a certain deadline. A behaviour goal may focus on empowering students to tune out classroom distractions.Although these goals can remain private, they’ll help guide the gamified learning experience – a key to making sure you gamify your classroom effectively.b) Structure open projects to help meet these goals
- Presentation
- Creative piece
- Paper or essay
- Unique product that’s appropriate for the given topic
Step 3: Structure the gamified learning experience
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a) Adjust your scoring system
Many students see their marks as the most nerve-wracking part of school. So, the gamification of education should involve modifying how you present grades, highlighting progress instead of mistakes.On tests and assignments, you can give scores both traditionally and in the form of experience points (XP).You can also award XP for completing extra-curricular assignments, participating in class or anything else that demonstrates an effort to learn. For example, if a student scores 75% on a quiz, give them 7,500 XP.You’ll add this amount to the XP they’ve earned throughout the year, giving them a clear reference point to see how much they’ve learned and accomplished.This gamification element helps change how they look at grades-- instead of going downhill from 100%, they’re going uphill from zero XP.b) Use "stages"
Step 4: Identify resources
a) Create a manual and organize teams
Creating and distributing an instruction manual is not only a way of gamifying a rubric or course outline, but acclimating students to the gamification of learning in general. Instruction manuals -- either digital or physical -- come with almost every video game. They explain how to play and progress, sometimes including tips and secrets. Your version should contain information such as:- How stages work
- The kinds of assignments that students will tackle
- Your new scoring system, including the ways students can gain XP
- How students can obtain rewards, and what kinds of rewards are available
b) Organize studying and learning teams
Step 5: Apply gamification elements
a) Make Progress Visible
Displaying student progress and how much they’ve achieved since the start of the year is a social element of gamification in education, promoting a sense of student community.You can create and share a bar chart that contains each student’s progress towards mastering a skill. Whenever a student achieves a certain score on a quiz or completes homework and assignments, you can fill in his or her appropriate skill-mastery bar with the amount of XP they earned. [caption id="attachment_583" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
b) Offer rewards
Benefits of gamification in education
While researchers and teachers around the world have given a range of answers to this question, a great deal of them can all be boiled down into one simple sentence. Gamification makes learning fun.And while “making learning fun” can sound vague or cliché, research has shown that gamification in schools can help students with issues related to:- Focus — Students who have a hard time focusing may find it easier when tackling an engaging topic.
- Skill-Building — Students can shy away from building certain skills until they see the relevancy.
- Content Delivery — Students may have trouble processing content presented through traditional methods, such as textbooks.
- Engagement -- It may seem obvious that most students would enjoy gamified exercises. A 2011 study from a South Korean university investigated this notion, measuring student engagement depending on the activity they were doing. Researchers found that gamification indeed correlates with more motivation and engagement.
- Tangible Progress -- Progress indicators, such as skill-mastery charts, allow your students to clearly see how much they’ve learned. The idea of filling one of these charts can serve as further motivation.
- Increased Comfort -- Take a quick poll to see how many of your students are gamers. Odds are, they would be more comfortable in a gamified environment than a classroom without any sort of differentiation.
- Improved Retention -- It doesn’t explicitly apply to elementary education, but a popular book called Corporate Universities posits that interactive learning games can boost long-term knowledge retention rates “by up to 10 times.”
- Resilience to Failure -- Often, players must fail before succeeding in a game. Borrowing this concept, by allowing students to re-do certain assessments, can teach that failure isn’t always an end-point. Instead, it’s another step in the learning process.
- Near-Instant Feedback -- Students should quickly correct each other’s mistakes when you’re not available, as long as you’ve taught them how to do so.
- Consistent Homework Completion -- A book called Gamification in Education: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice, suggests gamification can make homework as appealing as games, capturing students’ attention and willingness to learn more outside of the classroom. You’ll likely find that more students regularly complete homework if you award XP for it.
Examples of gamification in education
- Free Rice -- Spanning subjects found in most curricula, this website gamifies fact fluency. And it uses an empathetic twist. For each question a player correctly answers, Free Rice donates 10 grains of the cereal to those with limited food access. Gratification is instant, and there are leaderboards to motivate competitive students.
- Ribbon Hero -- This Microsoft Office integration helps elementary students familiarize themselves with the software suite’s features. Players must complete guided challenges within Word, Excel, OneNote or PowerPoint, continuously reaching higher levels with increasingly-complex scenarios. In doing so, they’ll become proficient Office users.
- World Peace Game -- An engaging supplement to your interdisciplinary teaching efforts, this tabletop game is a political simulation. The goal is to free countries from dangerous political, economic and environmental situations. To extricate these countries, students group together to represent specific nations and find solutions to diverse problems.
Final thoughts on gamification in education
If you gamify your classroom, you can bring benefits such as increased motivation and engagement to your students.Keep in mind, there’s room to experiment regarding what you gamify. Just because students aren’t receptive to gamified lessons, doesn’t mean gamified projects will disengage them.Ask for student feedback to hasten this process and guide your efforts.Create or log in to your teacher account on Prodigy -- a free, game-based learning platform that assesses student progress and performance as they play. Aligned with curricula across the English-speaking world, it’s loved by more than a million teachers and 50 million students.
