Gamification in the Classroom: 6 Steps of Achieving the best Results

Have you ever accumulated reward points by eating at your favorite restaurant? Do you have a badge for your seven-day streak of steps? Have you fought for the top spot on your language learning app’s leaderboard? If you said “Yes” to any of those, you’ve engaged in gamification, the process of adding elements of games to activities that are clearly not games in order to make them more fun.

It’s a well-liked engagement technique for marketing initiatives, productivity apps, health and wellness initiatives, and workplace training… and it turns out that gamification in the classroom can be a useful tool for K–12 training as well.

In fact, while being a relatively new field of study, early research suggests that gamification in the classroom may help children increase their attention span, minimize disruptive behavior in the classroom, and develop a more positive attitude toward subjects like arithmetic.

Despite the fact that we are unable to gamify this blog, we can promise a fascinating analysis of gamification in the classroom, some lesson planning suggestions, and instructions on how to include it into your lesson planning and curriculum mapping.

Understanding the Fundamentals of Gamification

So, exactly how does gamification in the classroom operate? Well, the fundamental reasoning goes something like this: we enjoy ourselves when we play games. Fun activities promote involvement and immersion. We are aware that more engaged pupils produce higher learning results. Therefore, we may improve student engagement and foster their growth by incorporating game-like elements into our classes. (We realize that this is perhaps oversimplified, but you get the idea.)

Gamification is the process of adapting the elements that make games so interesting to other types of learning activities, as opposed to game-based learning, which urges students to play games for educational purposes. These qualities include the following:

• Accumulated experience points that lead to mastery
• Badges that honor players for noteworthy accomplishments
• Leaderboards that display players’ positions in relation to the opposition
• Quests that allow gamers to make significant decisions
• Checkpoints that show advancement towards a goal
• Boss fights that present a difficult challenge and put players’ skills to the test

Even while it can be tempting to dismiss it as a short-lived trend, gamification in the classroom has been in existence for quite some time. Since the early 1900s, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts have been giving merit badges to members who show mastery in a variety of abilities and expertise, from robotics to first aid.

The distinction in 2022? Teachers have more opportunities to use new forms of technology and connection in the classroom to implement gamification in the classroom in novel ways and assess student learning. There are now numerous platforms and apps that support gamified instruction, and as the trend develops, there are more and more lesson planning options available. There is no longer just one app for everything these days.

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Benefits of Gamification in the Classroom

It is the goal of gamified learning to incorporate these kinds of advantages into regular classroom activities. Students can: By adding a little game magic to learning activities, they can:

1. Take more responsibility for their education:

Students gain more agency and control when given the opportunity to make significant decisions throughout their educational path.

2. Having space to fall and then get back up

The emphasis on “play again” as opposed to “game over” fosters a more comfortable environment for pupils to try out novel strategies and concepts.

3. Keep track of their successes:

Students can see their starting point, where they are headed, and how close they are to their objective thanks to progress markers.

4. Get inspired:

Rewards are undoubtedly an extrinsic motivator, yet they can still be useful for increasing knowledge and proficiency. And who knows, they might inspire a natural desire to learn!

5. Share their experience with others:

Games and education may both be social activity. Gamification in the classroom gives students the chance to collaborate or compete with one another to reach higher levels of mastery.

6. Continue a positive trend:

The more interesting the material is, the more eager pupils will be to engage with it and learn more.

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How to Execute Gamification in the Classroom

Gamification isn’t about tossing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks, like any successful classroom method. Developing a strong, gamified curriculum plan begins with a few deliberate steps:

1. Decide what needs to be gamified.

Focus on areas in your classroom where those components are weak as motivation and engagement are the two main components of gamification in the classroom. You can utilize badges or experience points to offer pupils an extra boost, for instance, if they are having problems starting their anchor tasks.

2. Recognize your Students

Include game mechanics that your students are familiar with in your lesson planning. If they’re more into Pokémon, you may emphasize building up your class Pokédex with achievements; if they’re more into battle royale games, class competitions might give them that extra push to be the “last kid standing.”

3. Establish Rules.

This game follows the same rules as the others. Explain to the students how your gamified approach works, and spell out exactly how they can advance and be rewarded.

4. Maintain Flexibility

Giving students a choice in how they wish to advance based on their interests and skills is crucial at the same time. Make sure there are numerous ways to obtain experience points, for instance, if you are granting them.

5. Expand it to cover more than one topic

Aim high. Look for ways to incorporate gamification in the classroom that links in learning from prior years and connects with other disciplines as you lay out your curriculum. Even better, you may collaborate with other educators to develop cross-class objectives that make learning an ongoing experience.

6. Monitor your own development

Is your gamified strategy effective? If you don’t track your own advancement toward your academic objectives, you won’t know. Hey, take advantage of this exciting opportunity to create your own experience bar!

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Gamification in the Classroom Planning: Features

The best news of all is that gamified learning may be incorporated into training without completely altering your lesson plan or syllabus. In reality, it might be as simple as giving your current learning activities a few minor tweaks. Some of our favorite gamification in the classroom planning concepts are listed below:

Badges:

As students achieve particular benchmarks for various tasks, talents, assignments, criteria, or even class participation, award them badges. You can offer various “levels” of difficulty and accomplishment within each category, making that sense of accomplishment available to every student in the class while also adding stages or learning scaffolds. Give pupils a chance to proudly exhibit their badges in front of everyone to foster rivalry or camaraderie.

Level-up:

Introduce a system of “leveling up” with experience points that may be exchanged for prizes at specific milestones. Students can see their progress bars fill up as they finish assignments or meet learning objectives. Once they reach a certain level, they can use these bars to redeem individual rewards (like additional computer time) or combine them to receive group rewards (like having a five-minute dance party). When deciding how points can be gained, make sure to include a wide range of activities to provide kids an option in how they’d like to earn them.

Leaderboards:

Utilize leaderboards to promote a healthy feeling of competition. Leaderboards that show the total points each student has accrued may provide top scorers a sense of satisfaction and validation while inspiring their peers to work harder in an effort to overtake them. However, using leaderboards without caution or tact might demotivate pupils near the bottom.

Quests:

Convert tasks into quests. RPGs, or role-playing games, frequently contain a storyline and provide the player choices with varying results. As an illustration, in a classroom setting, students might select between reading fiction and nonfiction, which then branch off into many genres and subgenres, allowing them to “choose their own adventure” based on their areas of interest.

Skill Trees:

Create a curriculum map using skill trees. It’s common for “unlockable” skill trees in video games to use tiered objectives, prerequisite skills, and branching options to advance. For instance, you might need to master casting fireballs in order to summon fire elementals. You may do the same with the learning objectives in your classroom, where students have to master one before they can open the next.

Frequently Asked Questions about Gamification in the Classroom

Do not forget that your objective is to improve student learning by making your curriculum and lessons more interesting throughout, not only for fun. Now, let’s play!

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