14 Ways to Gamify Student Engagement & Learning
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Continuously evolving trends and technologies change the way people acquire information.
For college students facing demanding schedules, heavy workloads and an often overwhelming amount of content consumption, campus administrators and faculty are always searching for ways to more effectively engage students in and outside of the classroom to get them more active and involved in campus life.
Implementing gamification is a useful strategy to get students excited and enthusiastic about learning, while transforming even the most difficult or mundane subjects into programs and lessons with which students actually want to engage.
Gamification offers invigorating challenges, the ability to track progress, level up and be rewarded immediately for your efforts, and opportunities to work collaboratively with classmates.
It also offers a level of freedom and autonomy for students to make choices for themselves and carve their own unique path during their college career. For Gen Z students, this includes being invited to create their own avatar, earn badges and points for completing tasks, or compete for top positions on a leaderboard.
Gamification positively influences the learning experience in many other ways, too! Gamifying student engagement:
Improves intrinsic motivation in and outside of the classroom
Helps to support learning outcomes
Promotes positive behaviors and attitudes
Builds confidence
Improves problem-solving skills
Cultivates resilience and willingness to take risks
Encourages retention for at-risk students by incentivizing students to learn about available resources
Piques students’ interest and attention in lessons and fulfillment of required tasks
Provides opportunity for educators to interact and gather feedback and input from students
Helps students review content, Improve grades and increase attendance
Encourages students to explore co-curricular involvement opportunities outside of the classroom
And more
What’s not to love? Are you ready to press START? Check out our 14 ways to incorporate gamification techniques to help keep college students engaged, excited and on the edge of their seats!
1. Start By Defining Goals and Objectives
What do you want to achieve by gamifying a course or program on campus? Do you want to increase student engagement, improve knowledge retention, promote communication and collaboration? Establishing a clear goal helps determine the path forward and allows you to measure success.
Create fun and collaborative gaming strategies to transform learning and task completion into an engaging activity.
2. Turn Lackluster Lessons & Tedious Tasks into Fun Quests
Adding game-based learning or assignments boosts enthusiasm and engagement. Develop a backstory or theme to connect your learning objectives for a fun way to add context for students to approach the material. Include themed graphics and references in presentations, materials and room decorations.
Try tying in a real-world problem related to the lesson into your game strategy, and set user-friendly, exciting quests for students to complete. This may look like a series of missions such as completing activities, quizzes or projects related to lesson content.
Challenge students to solve problems in different on-theme scenarios, and award experience points with each achievement completed. Brainstorm creative ways to integrate quests into lessons throughout the course.
Add deadlines for a sense of urgency such as asking students to submit an assigned task or response within a time limit, or offering prizes and giveaways to the first 50 responders.
Online game creation tools can also make it easy for anyone to create simple and fun digital educational games with drag & drop tools - no coding required.
3. Create Stories & Characters
Gamification empowers students to get inventive and innovative, especially with the inclusion of creative constraints! Setting challenges and boundaries helps students stay focused and engaged.
With a backstory or theme in place, immerse students in the learning experience by inviting them to choose a role and/or create an avatar to spark creativity in a lesson. This is a great way to get students more invested in the overall educational journey.
Encourage costumes, illustrations and build in flexibility for students to make decisions for their characters in an interactive learning environment.
Encourage participation from all students and group members with badges and a leaderboard of engagement points.
4. Ignite Competitive Spirits with a Live Leaderboard
Just like in video games, most students are highly motivated by a sense of competition. Just about everyone wants to see their name or avatar on top of rankings, and a leaderboard provides the perfect space for it!
Fueling this competitive fire encourages students to participate more, and a Leaderboard, updated in real-time with involvement data, empowers them to watch their scores and position increase as they complete required and extra credit assignments. Can’t climb a mountain if one doesn’t exist!
5. Empower Students to Level Up
Moving up levels is an exciting gaming feature that can be applied to education in order to keep students engaged and motivated! Create ongoing milestones throughout a unit or program to give students the ability to level up continually as they achieve set accomplishments.
Allow a student to move from ‘Scribe’ to ‘Scholar’ after completing a number of assignments or a specific challenge.
Tip: Make challenges increasingly more difficult as students progress.
Offer many different choices to inspire and encourage college students to be an active participant in shaping their own learning journey.
6. Offer Choices
Students develop a sense of agency when presented with choices as they learn to make decisions toward desired outcomes. Allow students opportunities to pick among choices to offer them the flexibility and freedom to forge their own path, as they might in an adventure game.
Design gamified lessons to encourage students to explore a topic in greater depth without worrying about risks. In the same way that a video gamer’s character who gets killed off simply starts over where they left off, a student can restart each time with new experience and knowledge in their arsenal.
Offer students choices in the classroom such as different assignment options that may appeal to them based on their interests, strengths and goals.
Encourage students to explore a subject outside of the lesson by creating side missions as options to earn extra points, badges or an opportunity to level up.
7. Transform Failures into Opportunities
When it comes to gaming, people are far more willing to take risks and comfortable with stumbles, as there is always an opportunity to try again. This helps a gamer dust themselves off and learn from mistakes to overcome and persevere in the task at hand.
In a similar way, you can teach students to adapt when facing difficulties and tackle obstacles with resilience and resourcefulness. Encourage them to experiment with different solutions and strategies to solve problems and achieve their goals. Gamification shifts the focus to the enjoyment of the learning journey rather than simply the destination (e.g. getting an A).
Integrate this concept into the learning experience in a positive way by offering students the ability to redo assignments or quizzes. This helps to eliminate pressures and the stigma of failure in students’ openness to trying new things, speaking up, and even asking questions or sharing ideas they may worry are not welcome. (🧙 Imposter Syndrome, be gone! ✨)
8. Encourage Teamwork & Collaboration
Creating opportunities for students to work collaboratively in teams helps cultivate a friendly and challenging atmosphere and teaches students the value of working together toward a common goal.
Have students team up and use their individual strengths and knowledge to benefit their team! Offer missions or tasks that require team members to work together to earn a badge, points or prize. Students will work harder to help their team win and have an opportunity to build personal relationships as they cheer on their teammates!
9. Utilize Technology to Boost Motivation
Educational technology like apps are available to help engage students in interactive ways. Leverage technology to help students to keep track of their progress, mastery and skills and to reinforce good behaviors. Fun graphics and sound effects can help motivate students to do better and try a challenging task again with a positive attitude.
In the classroom, competitions such as live trivia games can energize students and turn learning into an interactive and lively learning experience!
You can utilize digital incentives in a campus engagement platform to gamify involvement, keep students motivated, and help showcase individual co-curricular involvements and career readiness skills and badges.
Comprehensive engagement data collection helps you to assess programming, identify students who need extra support, and share reports with students and their families as learning partners.
10. Incentivize Participation with Points & Rewards
Awarding points and rewards, whether virtual or physical, is a great strategy to gamify both coursework and engagement requirements. In gaming, points help gamers feel immediately rewarded for their efforts, and the same goes for students, whether as individuals or on teams.
Allow students to earn points through the completion of tasks such as submitting projects, quizzes, reflections or joining group activities. Award points on a tiered system: Making the Dean’s list can earn you more points than attending an on-campus event.
When students earn enough points, provide opportunities to cash in for campus merchandise, treats or other perks (e.g., skip a homework assignment!)
In Res Life, engage new roommates to build connections through trivia nights or challenge them to an icebreaker scavenger bingo or door decorating contest where everyone gets to vote for the favorite 3 designs (but you can’t vote for your own door)!
Bonus: Getting involved in the campus community combats feelings of social isolation, a major contributor of poor academic success and lower retention rates.
11. Award Badges to Inspire, Acknowledge & Showcase Achievements
Badges allow you to instantly reward students’ hard work they’ve put into learning or completing a program in a highly visible way! Badges help students feel they are progressing, display they have mastered a skill, and help showcase achievements in a meaningful way.
Launch a badge program to highlight students’ accomplishments in different areas of education and involvement in campus life. Gamify career readiness by creating custom badges that demonstrate resume-worthy transferable skills and leadership experiences that can be linked to their co-curricular transcripts.
This visibly connects the skills they have developed with prospective employers and recruiters.
Encourage on-campus event attendance by awarding badges to students who attend a certain number of events - this can be automatically tracked, set as complete and awarded instantly through a Tracks and Checklists tool.
Here’s a great example: let’s say your school’s mascot is the Duck 🦆 — award a Duck Badge for students who attend 5 events, and a Double Duck Badge for students who attend 10 events and so on!
Create your curated and remote-inclusive welcome experience including interactive gamification features to guide and track student engagement efforts.
12. Gamify Orientation & Onboarding
You can also incorporate gamification practices into training, welcome week programming, and ongoing onboarding and retention efforts.
Gamification helps students become motivated to access the information they need (such as learning about campus resources and academic expectations) in a fun and engaging way, while cultivating a sense of belonging and purpose. The interactive nature of gaming reinforces student awareness that they are supported, heard and seen.
Students will also engage more with a task if it’s interactive and entertaining, so gamify those onboarding tasks!
Introduce digital incentives for participation and task completion (e.g., mandatory videos, readings or events) by allowing students to earn points they can cash in for campus swag.
Make it a competition: The first 20 students to complete an assigned checklist of tasks wins a $20 Amazon gift card.
Gather students together at Summer Trivia Night for a fun game in which all trivia questions relate to information students learned about in their checklists of requirements. Offer prizes for the winners to ensure students play to win!
Set up a scavenger hunt comprised of clues and missions that lead students on a fun and engaging campus tour! Invite them to record and submit photo or video proof of task completion.
13. Acclimate Students to Accepting Feedback
Receiving and processing performance-based feedback is a critical element in the learning process, whether in school or in a professional workplace. Applying gamification into education programming can help students experience and become accustomed to receiving and learning from this feedback.
Educators can give feedback using game design elements such as visual and audio cues, tracking and displaying progress bars, and self-paced exercises such as interactive quizzes that prompt helpful & encouraging corrections (in text, video or any preferred format) when a wrong answer is submitted.
14. Network with Other Like-Minded Higher Education Professionals
Communication and collaboration are key components of modern education, including in professional development. It’s a great idea to connect with other educators and campus administrators who are also interested in using gamification in their lesson plans or campus life programming.
Meeting regularly in a thought leadership discussion forum is extremely beneficial in terms of knowledge sharing and acquisition of ideas you can start to utilize in your campus programming right away - what’s working well on one campus might be a great solution for yours!
Join or create a group of like-minded folks, set up a monthly meetup (whether in-person or via video-conferencing) to chat about gaming and gamification trends and strategies in the education landscape.
Getting students motivated about learning and engaging on campus can be a challenge with so many distractions vying for their attention, but implementing gamification elements into your campus programming helps to transform humdrum tasks and assignments into exciting, challenging and rewarding opportunities.
Gamification ignites learners to dive deeper into a subject, rather than skim the surface, and that’s arguably the most important aspect - enriching the journey to inspire students to become more excited about learning and actively participating in their campus communities!
Ready to spark some inspiration? Reach out to learn more about using CampusGroups to support your student engagement goals. We’d love to hear from you!
