Don’t you hate it when students don’t pay attention in classes? This has further been magnified by the rise of online classes. 

While there are many ways to increase student motivation, gamification quickly is becoming quite popular with students and trainers alike. 

Why Is Gamification Important For e-Learning?

Gamification is when you use elements that are commonly found in video games and weave it into your online resources. 

Implementing gamification into online learning increases motivation, boosts engagement & decreases boredom.

Not only will you feel less frustrated, but so will your students. This article will cover everything you need to know about gamification to apply it to your teaching. 

Key Gamification Elements

Point/Coins

Point systems can be the heart and soul of a video game, and it is usually what makes games competitive and worth playing. If you give out points to students or workshop attendees, it will encourage them to pay better attention. Another big aspect of games is coins. Coins are used to buy things and make the experience better. 

Rewards

What is the point of giving out coins if you can’t use them? Just like in games, why not give your students an option to use their coins to get rewards, such as gift vouchers. Not only that, it motivates students to try harder because it gives them a goal.

Leaderboards

When a leaderboard is involved, everyone wants to be number one. Using the point system from earlier, you can create a competitive spirit between your students or attendees and give them recognition for their efforts. In addition, there are bragging rights up for offer! 

Animation

According to the Brain Balance center, teens and young adults have an average attention span of 32-48 minutes and will be even less if your event app is plain and boring. With some interactive animation, that can easily change. It can be anything from the words sliding in when you scroll down, to a plane carrying a banner when you get a quiz question right. 

Penalties

This may not seem like an important and successful element in your event app, but according to Verywellmind, penalties such as point deductions hit harder than points earned. After all, no one wants to be the one that didn’t put in the effort. What kind of game doesn’t have a way to lose points?

6 Fresh Gamification Ideas In Education

Video Challenge

Everyone’s probably written an essay about a topic, but what about making a video? Challenge your students to create an animated video about a topic, with a voiceover explaining what is in the video. Give out rewards for the best videos. This can be a much more entertaining task for learners compared to writing essays and can deepen their understanding of the topic without making them feel bored and uninterested.

Daily Crossword

Recently, the “Wordle” craze spread across the world and was known for its simplicity and easiness of sharing scores. Why not treat your attendees to the same fun? With a topic-based daily crossword, you can get attendees to pay attention during classes or workshops, and give them the satisfaction of doing so! Allow them to create streaks over consecutive days that they complete the crossword and compare their scores with their fellow participants. 

Quizlet Live

Let’s face it. Students LOVE quizzes and the competitive spirit that they offer. Why not combine it with teamwork to create a competitive atmosphere where students have to work as a team to get questions right and win points. A question or definition will come up on a shared screen, and one of the team members will have the answer; if they don’t know what the answer is, communicate with your team members to help them out. The first team to get through all their questions wins!

Taboo

This word game will test how well participants have studied. Play it just like the classic word game, except using words from a topic. See if your attendees can give effective clues to the opposing team without saying any of the tabooed words. The more words that your opponents can guess, the more points you get. For example, if the word is Africa – you won’t be able to say the words “continent, desert, hot,” etc. . The original game has its own rules, but you can put your own twist on the game and dictate the scoring however you like!

Hangman

Hangman is a classic game that you can play with teams of 2-3, and makes you think hard. If you don’t pay attention and don’t have a good vocabulary, this game will be a challenge! Depending on how many lives you have left, as well as how long it took to get the word, teams are given points. The team with the most points wins. As a bonus, you don’t get all the noise and fuss of some other word games!

Who wants to be an expert?

Just like the 1999 game show, this game tests how well you know your topic. Teams of less than 6 players get event-based questions. The first question can be worth a certain number of points, and if they get it right, then they can choose to keep the points or answer a harder question for double the amount. The questions progressively get harder. If the team chooses to keep the points, then they are awarded the points they earned (see gamification elements), and if they don’t answer the question correctly, they get nothing!

After reading this article, you should now be able to implement a gamification system into your teaching. You don’t even have to apply all of them; it can just be throwing in a quiz here and there, or creating a class leaderboard for Math. Not only will you get better results from your students, but you will feel more enthusiastic at the end of the day!