How can Gamification Improve Student Engagement and Learning?
- Emma Forrester
- Mar 8
- 6 min read
Do you play games? What types of games do you play? How do you feel when you are playing games?
Personally, I love playing games, specifically board games and video games (anything to do with sport can jump off a cliff for all I care, but I digress). The reason I opened this post with those questions was because I believe that as adults, it is easy to forget the importance of play on our own learning, socialisation and wellbeing. Games and play are often seen as something only kids do or are just simply forgotten is the insanity of being a responsible adult with bills to pay, dinner to cook (every night!) and other work to do. If we transfer this reality to the classroom, that is where we see students engaging repetitive activities and rote learning because there is just so much in the curriculum to get through and so many diverse needs in the classroom. Without dismissing those genuine realities, in this post I’d like to talk about the role that gamification can play in the classroom to improve student engagement and outcomes.
What led me down this path early in my teaching career was ‘that one class’ that I had. You know the one I’m talking about, right? The class where everyone arrives late and no work is completed, but not because they are being loud or disruptive, quite the opposite actually. They are like zombies, moving listlessly through the classroom, grunting responses to direct questions and staring at the world around them without actually seeing anything. Everything I tried with this class was met with deafening silence, and while I can’t say that I was able to completely transform them into a loud, excitable class, it forced me to find alternative methods to reach them. Enter gamification.
Gamification is the process of adding game-like elements to a non-game context. In our case, that is the classroom. It does not mean turning the entire process into a giant game but picking one or two elements of a game and incorporating them into your lesson in some way. Think back to the questions I posed at the beginning of this post. What is it about those games that you enjoy? Is it being able to earn points? Is it climbing the leaderboard? Do you like collecting resource or coin tokens? Do you enjoy the process of strategizing and planning out your next moves? Do you like sabotaging your friends? Do you like collaborating to solve a problem or mystery? All of these are elements that you would find in popular games like Monopoly, Call of Duty, Chess and Uno. By adding any singular or combination of these elements to your lesson, you are gamifying it.
Game-like elements include:
Earning points or badges
Climbing the leaderboard
Completing challenges
Strategising ‘plays’
Working in teams
Role playing games (RPGs)
Embedded story telling
Obvious progression from one stage to the next
Rapid feedback (e.g. losing resources, dying and having to start again, etc.)
But why would you even bother?
The goal in doing this is to increase student motivation, knowledge and skill retention. There is a growing body of evidence that supports this, particularly in the field of cognitive science.
James Paul Gee, a researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, bilingual linguistics and education wrote a fantastic book titled What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning (you can find a free copy of it here) that was inspired by his experiences watching his children play video games and his attempts to coach them through the processes. In this book he provides a really good overview of how games actively encourage our brains to think differently and explores how games teach us to do so, often without providing explicit direction and instruction. Through this process, Gee discovered that players don’t often read the manual before playing a game, they do this as they are going, and often need to use outside resources to learn the things needed to complete the game. He also became fascinated by the way his children would persevere with a game even when it was very challenging. He draws parallels between video games and the classroom, arguing that if students are provided with opportunities to build their knowledge the same way players do as they progress throughout a game, increased engagement and learning could be achieved.
This example is of course very strongly based on video games, a resource that is a bit harder fit within the classroom setting, but the principles of his argument are still relevant. For example, as soon as someone starts to explain the rules of a boardgame I zone out and remember nothing. For me, actively playing the game, trying different plays and listening to others verbalise their thinking is what build my understanding of the rules and how to win. This fits within Gee’s argument that “human learning is not just a matter of what goes on inside people’s heads but is fully embedded in (situated within) a material, social, and cultural world” (pg.8).
A history mystery source analysis bin. 2. A cryptex for an escape room. 3. An earthquake simulation competition
Another reason why gamification can work to increase student motivation and retention relates to how we feel when we are playing games. Emotions influence many of our cognitive processes including attention, memory, reasoning and problem-solving. Experiencing emotional arousal during a learning event improves retention of that event because it increases activity in the amygdala with correlates with improved retention of information. Furthermore, studies have also found that positive academic emotions such as interest and enjoyment, are associated with improved retention and performance.
By their very nature, playing games is an emotional experience. If we are able to tap into this in the classroom, we have the potential to improve retention of knowledge and skills, and thus overall student academic outcomes.
This leads up to the million-dollar question: But how do we do this?
I believe that this can be achieved on a continuum in terms of the number of gaming elements embedded and time committed to creating and playing them. To use gamification in one of your lessons, I would suggest the following steps:
Identify the specific content or skill you want to teach or revise.
Identify one game element that you want to try using.
Look at popular games that utilise the game element you have identified. How does it work in that game? Can you re-imagine a game that already exists with the content or skill you want to teach added to it?
Start small. Don’t jump straight into making escape rooms or large, complex games. Start with small games or activities that take between five and 15 minutes to play.
Test your activity out on someone first. I often subject my partner to my experiments.
I freely admit that I am a Humanities and English teacher so many of the examples I provide below come from that context, but I believe that some of them could be transferred across subjects. I have tried to list them in order from ‘easiest’ to ‘hardest’.
Matching games – e.g. match the term to the definition
Unscramble – e.g. unscramble the sentence (This is best done with a sentence that you have printed and cut up)
Categories – e.g. categorising cards with information. To make it extra challenging, don’t tell them what the categories are.
Re-invent a known game – e.g. Taboo, Snakes & Ladders
Quizzes with points – e.g. pub style quiz, Kahoot, Blooket
Role play scenarios
Relays and races – e.g. race to the whiteboard, answer correctly and shoot a hoop to earn points
Crack the code – I will do a future post on how I make and use these
Escape room – I have only done this once before and used a template to help me create it that I found on TPT.
Student made boardgames
Have you used gamification in any of your classes? What was the activity and how did it go? Share below so we can continue to learn from each other.
Further Reading (for it you have hours of free time)
Tan, J., Mao, J., Jiang, Y., & Gao, M. (2021). The influence of academic emotions on learning effects: A systematic review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(18), 9678. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18189678
Tyng, C. M., Amin, H. U., Saad, M. N. M., & Malik, A. S. (2017). The influences of emotion on learning and memory. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1454. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01454
Pekrun, R. (2014). Emotions and learning (Educational Practices Series No. 24). International Academy of Education. https://www.iaoed.org/downloads/edu-practices_24_eng.pdf
Gee, J. P. (2007). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
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