Gamification in My Classroom

 

The Stages of Gamification in My Classroom

Previously I have blogged about my integration of technology in the classroom; during this post, you will be presented with my desire to gamify my classroom. This blog will describe my progress towards gamification. It will describe what I’ve accomplished, what I’m currently planning, and my plans for the future.  The blog will share why and how one could go about gamifying their classroom in three stages.

What is Gamification? Why Should I Gamify My Classroom?

Gamification is defined as the addition of game elements to non-game activities. By turning things into games it creates motivation, competition, a desire to achieve, and fun! However, this is not a unique trend to education. Gamification can be seen all around us, and our students may very well encounter it as a consumer and an employee. Many businesses use this highly motivational tool to attract customers or train employees. For example, one of the most famous gamification examples is the McDonald’s Monopoly game. Where we all went to McDonald’s to play Monopoly and have a chance to win great prizes!

Additionally, many companies such as Domino’s Pizza have started to gamify their training to get their new employees up to speed on their menu. A gamified mini-course was created to help new employees quickly and accurately learn how to top all of the delicious pizzas that they make at Domino’s (Dubey 2016).

Why do these multibillion-dollar companies gamify? – Simply because people love games! In fact, people love games so much – that not only do we enjoy playing them, but we also enjoy watching them just as much. Television shows have made money off of people’s love of gamification. There is a history of shows that have gamified our everyday lives as well as children’s games. Such examples could include: the act of listening to music – Name That Tune or the act of shopping – The Price Is Right! Even popular children’s games have been gamified for a television production. Examples include such children’s games as hangman – Wheel of Fortune and tic-tac-toe – Tic-Tac-Dough. These popular shows generated audiences of millions proving how much we love not only playing games but watching them as well. We have gamified sports such as football, baseball, basketball, and more with fantasy sports. Now instead of watching your favorite team in one game a week, you have to watch all the games in order to successfully win your fantasy championships.  Even video game consoles have been gamified. PlayStation and XBOX both offer trophies and achievements for playing games. What does all this do? It Encourages and motivates people to play more games, thereby, creating more revenue for these companies. Could you use such concepts in the classroom? Of course, you could! Thus, with multimillion-dollar companies seeing the importance and popularity of gamification we as educators should also recognize its popularity and power so that we too can harness that for ourselves and our students. If you are not yet convinced or still unaware of how it works you can click here

Now that we have the why it would be good to gamify. Let’s go look at the how. We will explore how through my own personal experiences and plans to gamify my classroom.  I hope that you find it informative and interesting. Feel free to share any connections or aspects of gamification that you have tried in your classrooms. I would love to see how they compare to my experiences. I would love to read some of your experiences encountered if you tried to gamify your classroom. What worked? What didn’t?  If you haven’t tried it, then share if you think you might try it, or share why you might be against it. I would love to read some other personal experiences and thoughts on the subject. Without further ado let’s get started…

Gamification Stage: Beta Version – Tutorial and Trial Level

Honestly, the first step I did in gamification was without thinking about gamification. I have always had a Top 3 Leaderboard for all my classes. I have recently recreated this online for use in my Schoology classes with Google Slides that you can see here by clicking here. My leaderboards have always been used as a source of motivation in my classroom. Students would always challenge each other and try to overtake the student above them. This created desire and motivation in two ways. First, the student above had to keep up their work and effort to maintain their spot which was always being challenged. Secondly, students always wanted to see their names in the top three. They had a desire to push and strive to overtake the person above them in their effort to climb to the top. Leaderboards can easily be made. I usually update mine every two weeks. This gives students time to create some change in their grades and show movement on the board. Adjusting the names is not that hard to do with electronic grade books. Simply click your grade book in e-school to sort the students’ grades from lowest to highest or vice versa. Thus, because of the ease in creating leaderboards, I feel that they are a great way to start for beginners to gamify their classroom.  I can personally attest to the fact that leaderboards are low teacher effort and create some significant motivation within the students.

My next step towards gamification started last year in March. We were sent home due to the COVID-19 pandemic and had to do remote learning. I had never used Schoology prior to this date. I quickly learned enough to make due, but then started to experiment with badges for fun. I saw that Schoology allowed me to create badges and rewards for doing work and I couldn’t resist trying it. I also had a little problem with students logging in and actually doing assignments during this time. It was public knowledge that grades were not being counted. So I wanted to create something to reward them for doing their work and participating in class. Badges were the perfect answer! It totally worked too! Students had to talk to get the “Participation Badge”. Students that shared a pet on camera received a “Pet Badge”. Students that played an instrument in an online Zoom session received my “Music Badge”.  I was bringing fun back to the classroom and participation was on the rise. The badges then carried over into their work. They had to receive a passing grade (70% or higher) on any given assignment to receive a badge. I made badges for formative and summative assignments. Student work completion was on the rise. Again, this was another low work input by the teacher that translated into a significant gain in motivation from the students, making this another excellent place for beginners to start their gamification process. 

For any teachers that are just beginning to think about gamifying their classrooms – above are some examples of badges I have created for this year’s students to help you generate some ideas of your own.

 Gamification Stage: Alpha Version – Ready to Play – Press Start

Okay, the beginning stages of gamification are present. Rewards? Check. Motivation? Check. The focus now shifts to grading. Why grading? It must be revamped and gamified to take the stigma of failure away from the classroom. In standard grading students start out with a 100% (A), but as they complete assignments their grade slowly diminishes. Grading is actually the observation of students losing points. To gamify we must rethink it and reverse it. Students start with 0 points. And they must earn points to reach the next level or the next grade. I attempted a brief reworking of my grading system last year from March until June of 2020. Students were told that they would not be graded in the last part of the school year. Instead, they could receive up to four extra percentage points added to their current overall grade. Likewise, they couldn’t lose points by not doing work. As previously stated, I came up with a system of badges to motivate them to do work. I then created the system on how to earn these potential four points. I decided to base them off the badges. If students could earn 10 or more badges, then they would receive all 4 possible extra points towards their overall grade. Students that earned 8-9 badges would receive 3 points, 6-7 badges would be 2 points, 5 badges would be 1 point and 4 or fewer badges would receive no extra points at all. This seemed to be fair and motivational. They never lost points or badges – they could only earn points or badges. Why does this work? – Because the desire to win is greater than the fear of losing.

“…The Desire to Win > The Fear of Losing.”

Students receiving low grades get discouraged and lose motivation because they are losing points. In this case, a passing grade earned a badge. An 80% was as good as a 100%. Students didn’t fear getting a few wrong answers. However, a student that didn’t receive a badge – oh ok I’ll get the next one. They didn’t lose points, they didn’t lose a badge they already owned – they simply didn’t get this one. The fear of failure seems to subside when gamification is applied. Just ask anyone who has died in Pac-Man a hundred times but still wanted to keep trying and see what fruit came next. Now practically speaking some planning will have to be done to start this from scratch in a new year. You’ll have to know how many points will be available in the marking period or in the year. How many points will it take to equal the letter grades that the school will still want you to use? Will you create levels or ranks that your students can obtain? These questions and some planning must be done prior to completing this step. I am currently in the progress of planning this. My initial idea can be seen in the picture below –it’s subject to change as I plan and think it out, but the overall points and ranks will equal grades. For example, each level is a new letter grade F, D, C, B, A.

Students will then get to choose an avatar character to represent them. These avatars can be placed along the scale as they earn points and level up. Thus, they can keep track of their own progress and see how they compare to other students creating even more competition and also give them a sense of autonomy in the classroom.  Each green arrow in the picture above could symbolize a certain number of points. This is still a work in progress for me as I plan it out and I do have some concerns. One drawback that I can see with this is the fact that other students would know everyone’s approximate grade and the lack of privacy in student grades. Would this be acceptable?

Gamification Stage: Remastered Version – Education Is Transformed

Alright time for the Boss Level so to speak. However, before we progress to the last stage, let’s review our accomplishments so far. We have added rewards and leaderboards for motivation and we also reworked how grades work to remove the fear of failure and add a sense of autonomy for the students. The last step is to make school fun! Games are inherently fun and the fun they have will increase student engagement and retention of material. Making school fun sounds like a daunting task for some students – I know. How is this achieved? We must now gamify the content, lessons, and delivery of information itself. This process will be the most challenging and take the most time for educators. What kind of game do you want? Should there be a theme behind it? Will it be a zombie survival horror game? A murder mystery?  An escape room? The teacher will have to plan how the game works, the rules to the game, the avatars for students to choose from, and so much more. How will the lesson be adapted or transformed to be part of the game? Will there be side quests? How will the students show mastery of the content? How will they earn points to make progress and level up? This seems like it will take some serious time to fully integrate. While I am not at this stage yet, I do have several activities that have been gamified. In my class, we hold a Mock Constitutional Convention that plays like a game. I have also gamified several Economics lessons like Econoland and a Colonial Bartering Game for a few examples. I have also created a Deck.Toy game that has students solving a Scooby-Doo Mystery while learning about the principles of federalism and separation of powers. I feel as if I have a good start in gamifying my classroom, but I am also aware that I have a lot more to do in order to fully integrate gamification in my classroom. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Lastly, I would like to provide a link if you would like to learn more about gamification or get some ideas on how to gamify an elementary, middle, or high school level classroom. If you are interested in learning more then check out my infographic here.

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