[Christina Taka]

Step 1: Assess your students​
Step 2: Define learning goals​
Step 3: Structure the gamified learning experience​
Step 4: Identify resources​
Step 5: Apply gamification elements

Step 1: Assess your students
Identify your students’ trouble spots​

Pinpointing student trouble spots and pain points will help you determine the best gamification strategies for your classroom. ​

For example, if you notice PowerPoint presentations disengage students, you can add interactive elements.​

Most importantly, identifying student issues will put them at the forefront of your gamified learning strategy.

Survey your class​

You should survey your class to determine the best ways to engage them.​

Keeping students actively involved in the education gamification process will allow for greater engagement and retention. ​

By using aspects from their favourite games, you should see a favourable response to gamification in education. ​

Step 2: Define learning goals
Set learning and behaviour goals​

Deploy clearly-defined objectives in the form of learning and behaviour goals that address the trouble spots and pain points you identified.​

Learning goals include helping students understand concepts and develop skills.​

Behaviour goals involve helping students concentrate and work efficiently.​

Structure open projects to help meet goals​

Video games allow players to make choices that challenge them, so consider offering choices when it comes to projects.​

Allow students to complete the project as a:​

Presentation or Creative piece​
Paper or essay​
Unique product that’s appropriate for the given topic​

Presenting choices encourages students to test themselves in new ways and demonstrate their strong suits.​

Step 3: Structure the gamified learning ​experience
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).​

Use “stages”​

You can change how you refer to topics and units, clearly illustrating skill-building progression. Try calling them stages.​

On the other hand, it may be natural for students — especially gamers — to understand that to reach the next stage you have to overcome precursory challenges.​

Unless students do homework, participate in class and complete quizzes, they won’t be ready for its challenges.​

Step 4: Identify resources
Create a manual and organize teams​

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​

Organize studying and learning teams​

Dividing students into studying or learning teams helps replicate a core element of almost any game —instant feedback.​

After a player makes a choice in a game, he or she will quickly learn if it was correct. Especially when handling a full class, you can’t provide observations at the same rate.​

Devote a brief lesson to teach students about sharing constructive criticism, encouraging them to actively give comments while working in teams.​

Step 5: Apply gamification elements
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.​
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Offer rewards​

To combine gamification and learning in a way that truly engages students, you should strongly consider giving rewards.​

Research shows that reward systems in gamified education encourage students to acknowledge their accomplishments and continue to progress.​

The more difficult the task and lofty the achievement, the larger the reward.​

• This topic was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by Christina Taka.

[Janet C Read]

We have done some gamification in the classroom in our institution but using leader boards – but found that students don’t all do well on that. It can be quite demoralizing when you are always last:-) Does anyone have any ideas on this?

[Martin Sillaots]

One option is to transform the leaderboard to the progress board – you don’t change the order of students in the table based on XP. They are listed in alphabetical order. And the length of the is changing.
E.g.: http://htk.tlu.ee/icampus/mod/file/download.php?file_guid=225230

[Martin Sillaots]

The easiest way to start gamification in the classroom is to use some single game element. For example randomness. You can use random number generator for deciding who is the next student to make a presentation. First you generate the number of the row then the number of the seat. Or if teams have numbers then …

The easiest tool for calculating RND numbers is on the Random.org page: https://www.random.org/ The use of this tool does not require any pre-work. You can roll the dice as well but the visibility of the results is not that good.

You can find more advanced tools for example from the Flippity net https://flippity.net/. For example Random name picker but using this tool requires some minimal pre-work. Flippity has also other tools that can be used for gamification e.g.: progress board, quizes and puzzles.

[Martin Sillaots]

If you would like to gamify the entire course then here is a good book fro example: Lee Sheldon (2011) The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game https://www.amazon.com/Multiplayer-Classroom-Designing-Coursework-Game/dp/1435458443

Inspired from this book I gamified some of my courses: Reseach Methods, Computer Games. If you are interested then here is a downloadable pdf copy of my course programme: http://htk.tlu.ee/icampus/pg/file/martinsillaots/read/225078/course-programme. The course LMS page is here: http://htk.tlu.ee/icampus/pg/groups/225054/computer-games-2018/. For more details pleas contact with me. I can give you access to this course.

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