Ever since I've entered the teaching profession, I always wanted to make my classes fun and entertaining. As such, keeping the lesson fresh and fun has always been a challenge. However, one day I tried out a semester long experiment on how to keep my students motivated. As such, I began turning 40 hours worth of class time into one big quest for the students to complete.
**What is gamifying a lesson? **
There are many principles and concepts associated with gamifying, but at its simplest, its about making your lesson into a game with the four principles as stated by Yee (2013):
- Display progress
- Maximize competition
- Adjust difficulty according to the situation
- Presence of a story
As such, if a lesson displays some sort of score, is competitive, has a story and has its difficulty adjusted according to the situation, its a gamified lesson.
Image taken from https://goo.gl/images/sgChdy
The use of a management system
Let me be clear, I don't own a stake in this Learning Management System, but I have been using it for four years now, its free, easy to set up and looks like Facebook. It's called Schoology.
Image taken from schoology.com
After signing up with Schoology, the teacher can create multiple badges of completion that indicated that a task is completed. I had an issue with students coming in late. After initiating a come on time badge, most of my students started coming on time. I also had an issue with some students being overly passive in the class and by awarding badges, the students started participating much more often in the class.
The best thing about the badges is that you can create any kind of badge, attach any picture and any name on it. This makes it very flexible when it comes to creating badges for your own course.
Image taken from schoology.com
Now, earlier on in the post, I've mentioned a few principles. The use of Schoology covers two of this principles, which are maximizing competition as well as displaying progress. In the class, the students are divided into groups with a need to complete the ultimate quest. The quest is to obtain all badges of power to unlock the coveted extra marks for their assignments.
The use of a story is only implemented in certain task as my students are all 18 years and above. However, if you are teaching younger children, having a story is much appreciated.
Ensuring success
There are a few things to bear in mind when using this method.
Being consistent: You would have to consistently run the quest and implement the badges. With that, the students will know that there's always a second chance even if they don't do well the first day. Furthermore, keeping the story going helps the students stay engaged with the lesson.
Rewards that encourage the right behavior : When constructing the badges, make sure that the badges address two things, the completion of the tasks and also the behavior you want to see in the class.
Image taken from https://goo.gl/images/crUDKJ
Conclusion
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what lesson or field you do, as long as you implement this, I'm sure your students will have fun. I don't know if you noticed in the pictures, I was teaching research, one of the topics that some deemed as the most boring. However, I still managed to keep the students motivated throughout the year.
Finally, this is an introduction to the general idea of gamification using Schoology. As usual, my intention is to help and if there is anything I can do to explain or clarify, please let me know in the comments below.
Reference
Yee, K. (2013). PEDAGOGICAL GAMIFICATION. To Improve the Academy: Resources for Faculty, Instructional, and Organizational Development, 32, 335.