Adding game design and mechanics to your online content can make it more engaging, motivational and enjoyable. Online educational content is competing with social and entertainment content, and so now is as good a time as any to start adding a bit of fun to your teaching.
We’re going to look at three very simple ways to add game design elements into teaching online to encourage students to engage with your content and activities.
1. Challenges rather than tasks.
By framing work as a ‘challenge’, ‘quest’ or ‘mission’ rather than a ‘task’ or ‘activity’, you can completely change the tone of a piece of work, even if the content is exactly the same. Adding an element of team work to this further creates a sense that they are playing a game together, rather than just engaging in another dreaded piece of group work. The work could also ask you students to assume a certain role(s) to help them complete the challenges.
Compare these two examples below:
Example 1: Today’s mission asks you to analyse the following intercepted telecom for hidden messages sent to the Nazis by renown double-agent Eddie Chapman (‘Zigzag’). In your role as linguistic analyst, you need to report back your findings in less than 500 words summarising what you have found and the reasoning behind your answers. You have just an hour to complete your mission.
Example 2: Analyse the following telecom for hidden messages in less than 500 words, including reasoning for your answers. The telecom was intercepted by MI5 from Eddie Chapman to the Nazis. (1 hour task).
You’ll need to scaffold this sort of activity around similar others, or you could just choose to have a week dedicated to ‘missions’ rather than your traditional content and get feedback on how your students have found it.
2. Progress indicators and difficulty levels.
Seeing out how much content you’ve made it through on a certain day or week’s worth of learning can create a sense of achievement and like you’ve progressed in your learning.
In many games you know how much you have left to complete the level either by a percentage or star system. Each ‘level’ or stage is often divided up into more manageable chunks of increasing difficulty for you to progress through. Once you get to the end of that stage you feel a sense of achievement and are motivated to carry on and complete the next level.
We can apply similar mechanics to online learning and a similar effect will occur. All you need to do to add this sort of engagement is structure the content in a way that looks like students are moving through stages or levels, rather than just completing one activity after another. Adding a ‘%’ to each task also helps students understand how long they should be spending on different activities
Consider the three different ways this week’s activities are presented and think about which one attracts you the most and why. What don’t you like about them?
| Understand what this week’s learning outcomes are. (10%) Join the live webinar (watch the recording if you can’t watch it live). (30%) Complete the week’s challenge. (50%) Feedback and share using the discussion board. (10%) BONUS: Complete this code-breaking game to unlock the secret material. | Level 1 (Easy): Understand what this week’s learning outcomes are. Level 2 (Moderate): Join the live webinar (watch the recording if you can’t watch it live). Level 3 (Moderate – Difficult): Complete this week’s challenge. Final task (Easy): Feedback and reflect on the discussion board. *Optional extra: Complete this code-breaking game to unlock secret content. | Understand what this week’s learning outcomes are. Join the live webinar (watch the recording if you can’t watch it live). Complete the week’s task. A checkpoint/ opportunity for feedback. *Extra activity – complete this game for extra material. |
Go one step further…
- Consider adding questions or quizzes students have to complete before moving onto the next ‘level’.
- Add ‘secret’ content students have to unlock by completing small challenges.
3. Healthy competition.
One of the more controversial aspects of gamifying education is the use of competitive elements, such as leaderboards and rewards. However, if integrated sensitively, they can provide light competition and drive among students, furthering engagement with the materials.
One way to do this is to allow students to vote on their favourite contribution to a discussion board, or a prize for the student who has engaged the most with the discussion.
You can also have a leaderboard for any quizzes that students take as part of the online content.
To bring some team work into your online teaching, consider hosting a weekly ‘pub quiz’ for students to show off what they’ve learnt during the week.
If you’re interested in gamification and game-based learning, you can join the Digital Education Office/ BILT ‘Learning Games’ learning community by getting in touch with either BILT or DEO.
BONUS: Further reading.
Read about ‘Gamifying History’ at the University last year here.
Watch this TEDx talk on ‘How gaming can make a better world’.
Take the ‘Lifesaver’ game – a brilliant example of using a game for learning.
I love this! So simple and yet so easy to implement! Thank you Amy!
Thank you Amy,
I am a fan of the humble pub quiz. I can see that by using questions which are progressively more difficult, I could get some idea of what they actually know at the end of each week. I am mindful though that this knowledge may only be in their short term memory! I need to devise a way to ensure that this knowledge has some chance of becoming embedded, since diagnosis from radiographs is an essential skill in dentistry.
Really like the steps Amy outlines here. Inspiring lots of ideas! Thank you Amy.
Very interesting! I particularly liked the section about ‘Progress Indicators and difficulty levels’. When unpacking assessment criteria for younger learners – it could be useful to ‘map’ these points to some form of ‘Skill Tree’. Any student who has played some form of RPG will be familiar with this concept – as you progress through a game and gain experience, you unlock new abilities and bonuses. Using this analogy may be greatly beneficial to my foundation learners as they develop their academic literacy.
Many thanks Amy!