Following up on the
leaderboards I created a few days ago, the gamification idea really started to take hold. I am not up to the challenge of gamifing my whole classroom yet, but I started thinking more and more about gamifying a unit of study. After all, we do not play a game forever, we play it until we achieve the goal, and move on to another game.
I went on Edmodo looking for inspiration (thank you Edmodo gamification group), and tinkered with the material I already had to create:
Building these was not hard, just very time consuming. Even though I already had most of the materials from previous PBL units, putting everything together in a way that flowed, and that allowed me to keep track of mastery, objectives and content was a tiring endeavor. Feedback from actual students, who will be playing these games starting next week, was crucial in creating engaging, visually appealing quests that followed gaming more or less true to form.
Will I be rewarded with more student engagement and particularly effort towards mastery? That is yet to be seen. However, I did get the all important question "Can we start playing those right now?"
Further reading:
- Farber, Matthew. "Beyond Badges: Why Gamify?" Edutopia. N.p., 11 June 2013. Web. 01 Dec. 2013. <http://www.edutopia.org/blog/beyond-badges-why-gamify-matthew-farber>.
- Miller, Andrew. "Get Your Game On: How to Build Curriculum Units Using the Video Game Model." Edutopia. N.p., 17 Oct. 2011. Web. 01 Dec. 2013. <http://www.edutopia.org/blog/gamification-game-based-learning-unit-andrew-miller>.
