3 Ways To Gamify Your Online Classrooms
Teaching online is hard — we get that. It is frustrating when you’re hearing underhanded comments like ‘Wah, must be nice to be a teacher now, teach from home je’ or ‘Eh teach online, basically don’t need to work right’, when in reality your students are completely disengaged from your classes and with each passing day you grow increasingly worried about their learning.
From our experience running over 70 unique virtual workshops for Malaysian students since the start of the Movement Control Order, we have accumulated some tips & tricks to boost student engagement in online classes.
This article belongs to a series of 3 articles covering various ways to gamify your lessons. Each section is linked to a more detailed article. Click on the section titles to learn more!
1. Creating themed classes
Themes and stories from pop culture enable us to engage students in unique ways, leveraging their narratives and/or far away locations to create diverse classroom experiences that draw more interest from students.
This also enhances student learning, as the storytelling element presents a hook and retains attention onto material that may be otherwise perceived as dry.
Step 1: Identify an attractive story
Step 2: Design the lesson around chosen theme
Step 3: Create visual content — slides, stickers, gifs
2. Establish reward structures
Rewards and points are a great way to nudge students to participate in class. We often observe a multiplicative effect with participation, where one act of participation by one student encourages another. It makes classroom situations into mini competitions, which help reinforce learning.
We identified 3 types of reward structures that you can integrate into your classroom:
- A simple point counter leading to a reward
- Virtual reward cards
- Virtual badges in the form of customised stickers/gifs
The trick here is managing the chaos effectively by refocusing and directing the students’ attention strategically towards learning the material, and not ‘winning.’ In our experience, students can get pretty competitive!
3. Use interactive web platforms
Many of you probably already use a combination of platforms online to teach. The challenge often lies in smoothly integrating these platforms into a lesson plan where its use meaningfully improves students’ learning.
Here are some platforms we have found to be effective with students from our workshops:
Random pickers: wheelofnames.com, classtools.net
Gamified quizzes: Quizizz, Kahoot!, Baamboozle
Visual polling: Mentimeter
Online learning is constantly evolving. These days, being a teacher also means being visual designers, storytellers, and tech wizards all at the same time. The ideas listed in these articles are simply tools we found useful in our workshops and our hope is that it is helpful and inspires you to gamify your lessons.
Let us know, how are you teaching online? What methods/principles have you applied to make your classes more interactive? What are some of the other things that we could share to help you with your lessons?
We would love to hear from you!
This article was written by Alexander Khor, a Programme Associate for Project ID, with the research and support of Ang Chiew Teng, a Programme Lead for Project ID.
Project ID is an education social enterprise that runs high-impact programmes empowering students to lead self and others with 21st century skills. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Project ID has run over 70 online workshops with more than 1600 student participation across Malaysia.
