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How can learning to gamify a classroom lead to students actually doing more work and even them seeking more work independently? It can often seem impossible to engage students when all they do for the entire lesson is stare blankly at the teacher waiting to be entertained.
While it isn’t the job of teachers to make lessons “fun” but to teach important information to prepare students for their next phase of life, there may actually be a way to kill two birds with one stone by learning how to gamify a classroom.
Video games engage students for hours, get them to practice the same skills repetitively to hone their skills, and encourage them to test themselves in the various levels of the game or in competition with other players.
Teachers also seek to get their students to do many of the same things. They need their students to focus for extended periods of time, practice what they’re learning, and be willing to challenge themselves with various tests of their abilities. Using some of the psychological and neurological truths that gaming businesses have utilized for decades, teachers can learn how to gamify a classroom to make their classrooms more of an interactive challenge for students.
Instead of dragging students along each lesson, hoping they remember a portion of what they are hearing, with a gamified classroom, students will be self motivated to learn lesson materials so that when game time comes, they get a good score, impress their friends, and have fun testing themselves just like they do with their video games.
5 Easy Ways to Gamify a Classroom
1: Competition is key.
It can be very difficult to motivate students to care about course materials that they don’t yet see the value in. Rather than trying to use logic to try to convince kids that course content is valuable, teachers can completely bypass this issue by using another source of motivation; social pressure. Getting kids to do things to impress and experience with their friends is much easier than trying to get them to do classwork with a good attitude.
While social pressure is generally viewed as a bad thing, being associated with peer pressure, bad behavior, and giving in to temptation, it can also be used as a way for students to motivate themselves to study.
Giving students competitions and games to challenge one another is simultaneously a fun way to practice learned content, but will also increase engagement and motivation to learn so that the students can score well and beat their friends in the game. Learning how to gamify a classroom can recontexualize any task into a fun challenge for students to take on with their friends.
An easy game for any subject area is to divide the room into two teams and have one student from each team on either side of the board with the teacher in between giving out questions. When the teacher finishes reading the question and says a “go”, the students have to write the answer or solve the problem on the board as quickly as possible before hitting a buzzer or bell in front of the teacher. A marker stood up on a table also works for students to grab in order to answer verbal response questions.
Students love to pick silly team names, cheer on their friends, and race to be the quickest to answer questions and get points. Just how people love little challenges in video games that would be incredibly boring in real life without the gamified approach, teachers can utilize the same approaches to get students engaged in their activities that might not have much draw otherwise. If gaming can make farming, building, and gig economy style questing fun, certainly it can make a fascinating school subject more enjoyable for both teacher and student.
This isn’t the only game that teachers should try out. While generally it will be best to activate some sort of social engagement to get kids on board, some students may hate the public nature of the competition and get embarrassed about their abilities. Adding in a few “two player games” will help include those shier students who might be willing to compete against a single friend but are reticent to perform in front of the entire class.
The teacher could come up with almost any game their creativity can imagine. Simply adding a board and game pieces with various prompts along the spaces the pieces move will give the students a bit more engagement compared with just answering questions on a worksheet, especially for younger students.
2: Gamify a classroom with leaderboards.
Another way to keep the motivation high beyond just the single game is to create a sort of “leaderboard” for various “games” or skills students are working on. Gamers love to compete for top spots, and the same will hold true if teachers post scores for various activities or challenges in the classroom.
Kids will be excited to come into class to see the new high scores for the day or week and will be begging the teacher for a chance to do class activities to get back their coveted top spots.
While this should definitely not be a way to publicize student grades to shame them into better performance, having performance on certain units or activities posted is less problematic. Teachers should always leave the option open to set their profile to “private” so that their scores either don’t show up or the name is just listed as “anonymous” or not appear at all.
This way, students who don’t necessarily want to be embarrassed by their scores can still engage in competing on the leaderboard in private. They can still shoot for high scores for their own challenge even if they aren’t comfortable with showing others their scores. Gamifying a classroom doesn’t always have to mean showing off to others.
This leaderboard could also just be for unofficial “bonus” content that students can access optionally as an extra challenge that would suit high flying students who get bored easily. Working on high scores and challenging other high performers is a great way to keep those students busy and learning independently while the teacher spends their time supporting students who are struggling.
3: Call quizzes and tests “bosses” and allow multiple “lives” to retry.
As should be clear by now, the way something is framed and contextualized can make a huge difference in the way it is perceived. Quizzes and tests would also benefit from this recontextualization.
Rather than students seeing quizzes and tests as scary because they stay on their record and could upset their parents if their performance is below expectation, students should be allowed to view quizzes and tests as “bosses” for the levels or units in the course.
In video games, “bosses” are incredibly difficult enemies that students are willing to repeatedly fail and retry time and time again in order to figure out the strategies that work to overcome the unique challenges posed by the boss to beat it. In addition to simply beating a boss once and being done, many times students will go for a speedrun record, or beat it with various self imposed limitations such as no weapons or armor. Imagine if students also took on increased challenges simply to test themselves or show off to their friends in class!
One way tests and quizzes differ from video game bosses is the ability to retry when failed. In a game, while some progress might be lost on “death”, the game almost always allows the player to simply try again from a recent checkpoint where they can train up a bit more before going back in to challenge the boss again. Teachers should consider allowing retakes much more often in order to get students coming again and again to take their tests instead of dreading taking them even once.
Some teachers may see this as lowering the standard as students are simply able to retake their work over and over until they pass making it improbable to fail. However, these teachers need to ask themselves: What is the purpose of tests?
Many times it is to ensure and measure students progress and understanding they will need before the next unit. In this case, does it really matter if students show that progress and learning after the first attempt or after the 3rd?
Teachers should not lower the standard, but instead allow students multiple attempts to reach that standard. If students are willing to spend more time and effort working hard on school work, why should the teacher stand in the way and tell them they are not allowed to?
Well, sometimes things in real life do have a time limit or must be done correctly and precisely the first time and so there is a fair argument to at least having some challenges that can not be revised. To use game terminology and framing again, teachers can call these tests “Hardcore mode”.
In Minecraft, a popular building video game often used in education that is similar to building with Legos but in a world with monsters that attack at night, there is a gameplay mode called “hardcore” where players only have one life and if they die, they lose their character forever. This encourages players to be extremely careful as death not only means the end of their character, but all of the effort and time they have spent building the world that character inhabited.
Similarly, some tests could be marked “hardcore” tests where students only have one attempt. While there is merit to having these occasionally, it is important that students always feel like they have a chance to get a good grade or “win” in the classroom. If they feel like they already have such bad grades that they could never pull themselves up to a good grade, their motivation may be unreachable as the student has already decided their failure before it happens.
Generally, however, the purpose of tests is to ensure that students have successfully learned the information of the course. If this is the intent, does it really matter if the student takes a few tries to get a real handle on the information?
Few players beat a video game boss the first time, and when they do, oftentimes that boss is seen as a bit underwhelming. True tests of a person’s abilities sometimes take multiple failures to truly show what they are capable of doing. Similarly, teachers should try to merge classwork and tests a bit more so that students can have multiple attempts to learn, test themselves, try new study strategies, and then try the test again.
This will teach students to be more independent learners who are resilient to difficulties instead of giving up at the first sign of defeat. The teacher will still get objective data that students are meeting benchmarks and can still include the occasional “hardcore” test, but generally, students will see the class’s challenges as something they have control over, rather than a looming threat where they aren’t sure what will be included, how it will be laid out, or if they will be feeling sick that day.
4: Have classroom earnables, superpowers, badges, and achievements!
Sometimes, students will simply need to do more traditional work like worksheets and sets of math problems, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to gamify a classroom for these approaches as well. Teachers can create challenge questions at various difficulty levels like “easy”, “hard”, “insane”, etc. and have students “unlock” the more difficult content as they “level up”.
This will get kids to actually seek out more worksheets and have them try to answer more questions to show they can do even the hardest challenges. In conjunction with the motivation from being able to put these types of activities on the class leader boards as discussed above, teachers can add more motivation by adding “achievements” or “rewards” for completing certain challenges like doing a number of worksheets, doing a brutally hard worksheet, or completing work under a certain time limit.
In video games, achievements are various additional challenges the game gives a player that often range in difficulty from incredibly difficult where only professionals can unlock the achievement to ones where it’s almost impossible not to get them as you play along. Achievements sometimes come with rewards, but generally these challenges are simply accompanied by a badge in a player’s profile showing that they have completed this achievement and the date they did so.
In games, examples could range from beating extra bosses, keeping their spell or bullet accuracy above a certain percentage during a match, or even reaching hidden locations in the game that are difficult to access. In the classroom examples could be “No Peeking: Achieve a perfect score on an insane level difficulty worksheet without referring to the textbook or Google once”, “Self Starter: Complete an independent research project/science experiment without teacher help, and score a B- or above.”, or “Beat the ‘times table challenge’ on the class website with a score of 90% or above in under a minute”.
Using the same logic, teachers can give out achievements that can come with or without actual physical rewards. Many classrooms, especially those of younger children, already incorporate some sort of reward system. Allowing students to “earn” tickets or points towards a reward is a great way to motivate learning and good behavior.
Similarly, points can be lost for bad behavior, making it a versatile way to motivate. Games also “punish” players and they can lose health, experience, and items. Real life comes with consequences as well, so students also need to learn to navigate rewards and consequences maturely as well.
Superpowers or bonus abilities could also be something for teachers to consider. Daily or weekly challenges are a common practice in many video games to keep players engaged and not get bored with the same content. Rewards are often given for completing these challenges that range from special tokens to purchase things in game or various fun items that look cool or give interesting bonuses to their character.
Teachers could also include these types of rewards for students who show good approaches to learning by completing classwork consistently and work to improve themselves mindfully each day or week.
Examples of things teachers could include could be powers like “Bonus Life: Get one additional attempt at a test”, “Clairvoyance: Student may ask the teacher about one test or quiz answer and get either a thumbs up or thumbs down (Not usable on hardcore tests)” or “One Quiet Night: Get a night off from any homework assignments or delay a deadline by one day.”
Though students will think they’re getting away with doing less work, actually the studying and learning they will have to do to earn these powers will far outstrip the loss of not doing one night’s homework or getting a tip on whether their test answer is correct or not. This will help students feel like they have more control over their learning, give them a reason to be consistent with completing work, and be something fun to save up to use on attempting difficult achievements.
5: Have “levels” for students to pass, not only for them, but for data purposes.
Another benefit of learning how to gamify a classroom is that all of the scores, checkpoints, and achievements work fantastically for data collection. Making data driven changes to classes can be difficult when all a teacher has are general grades on units.
When teachers have more data to look at, especially more data that is specific to various capacities rather than just simple test scores, they can make better decisions on what to include in lesson plans, help target student weaknesses more effectively, and ensure they have content challenging enough for students of all levels.
When teachers use gaming principles for their lessons, they can measure so much more of a student’s learning. They can see which levels of the class students have completed, what achievements they have earned, and what dates each of these events occurred on. This will give teachers a much clearer picture of how students are progressing than a simple test at the end of the unit.
Conclusion
The benefits to starting to gamify a classroom are endless and the classroom environment will be much more positive with students excitedly asking for more work to beat their previous scores and independently seeking out ways to study better than their peers instead of trying desperately to shirk their work and dreading every test.
Gaming has an endless supply of interesting lessons on motivation from the way it frames assignments as “quests”, gets players to “grind” and “practice” instead of study, and “defeat bosses” using what they have learned instead of just taking tests. Though it can initially take a bit of creative thinking to gamify a classroom, the end results will make for a much better experience for all involved.
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