Gamification in Education: How do Games Help to Learn the Material?

Gamification refers to using game elements, such as rules or competition, to help others engage with a particular activity. But this isn’t only a marketing technique. Nowadays, gamification is widely used in education, making the learning process more enjoyable. 

In today’s guide, we’ll explore more details about gamification. We’ll see how games help students learn the material and whether this approach is effective. So, stay with us to find out more about this topic!

Gamification in Education Explained

Gamification in education requires adding game elements, like points, badges, leaderboards, and more, to traditional learning activities. This approach contributes to boosting the students’ engagement and motivation, making the whole experience a lot more enjoyable. 

For example, if you plan to give some kind of quiz on a weekly level, you may also create a leaderboard in which you’ll mark the winners. At the end of the month, the winner can receive some kind of prize. As a result, you’ll be able to foster friendly competition and more engagement in your classroom. 

But gamification is much more than just playing games, such as real RTP games in a casino or some video games on mobile phones. 

In fact, it’s all about structuring your lesson around game design principles. These may include levels, rewards, and challenges. After all, the goal is to make learning entertaining and engaging. Still, you’ll manage to promote thinking on a higher level and deeper understanding of the material you’re teaching. 

Basically, you first need to understand the gamification elements in order to incorporate them into your lessons. You can use one or more elements, depending on the content and your students. Some of the common game features that you can use are: 

• Goals
• Achievement badges
• Rules
• Levels
• Progress bars
• Leaderboards
• Rewards
• Points 

Benefits of Gamification in Education

While one of the main benefits of gamification is simplifying the learning process, it’s also crucial to understand how games help students learn the material. That’s why we decided to briefly go over all of the perks and see how they contribute to this process:

• Enhanced motivation: Incorporating game elements into the teaching process can boost your students’ motivation. They’ll start learning because they enjoy the process, perceive learning as entertainment and be more motivated to study.
• Increased active learning: Many expert research pieces show that active learning strategies help pupils improve their performance at school. This is another aspect in which gamification comes in handy. Thanks to active engagement in the learning and decision-making process, students don’t just passively receive information that they’ll forget. 
• Promoting collaboration: Gamification usually requires students to achieve a particular goal. Due to this, they start learning how to work together and build collaboration skills. However, in order to promote collaboration, you must structure your activities clearly and set straightforward guidelines. Also, consider assigning roles to different students so that they can all be included and participate in the learning process. To do this, you can set some time limits or rotate leadership roles. 
• Developing critical thinking skills: Experts state that you’ll learn critical thinking the best in the context of academic content. That’s why gamification has a significant impact on this. In fact, you can develop some fame that will require your students with a problem that needs solving. To do this, they’ll need to analyse data, make informed decisions, and plan a strategic next move. More so, students will need to approach the issue from different angles and consider various solutions. Although there will be mistakes, your students will learn from them and figure out how to apply their knowledge. Critical thinking is best seen through gamification elements like puzzles, challenges, and other problem-solving tasks. 
• Lowering stress: Last but not least, gamification will transform the learning process into a fun part of students’ days. As a result, they won’t feel any pressure. In addition, they won’t be afraid of making a mistake because real-time feedback is part of numerous games, such as Australian Roulette 77. Here, the power is in your hands. What’s more, gamification in education helps students approach learning positively, which significantly improves their mental health and overall well-being. 

Applying Gamification Properly

In the table below, you’ll see how to apply gamification in your class in the right way and how each step improves the application:

Final Words

Gamification is more than just playing games. When used in education, you can achieve much more productive lessons and engage your students more. Due to the fun approach of teaching and learning, your students will be more motivated to participate and learn new stuff and skills in a unique way.