5/5/22
I love to use gamification to make learning more engaging for my students. There are entire books written about gamifying academic content. Below are just a few simple ways I have gamified lessons on the fly that consistently yield high engagement and focused learning time. While some of these ways to gamify take a little prep, most can be ready in 10 minutes or less.
Dice & Cards:
- Students roll dice (or flip over a card from a deck) to determine who speaks first during a small group discussion or who will move to another table to create mixed groups.
Example: Lowest roll speaks first, highest roll speaks last. Lowest roll moves to the table to the right, highest roll to the table to the left.
- Teachers create a 'key' assigning each number on the die a specific question, sentence frame, math operation, or concept. Each student rolls a die to determine what they need to do.
- Students roll dice to determine which problems they complete on a worksheet, which text selection they read, etc. After students complete their work, they can participate in a jigsaw with students who rolled different numbers.
Example: Roll a 1 and read the biography of Albert Einstein. Roll a 2 and read the
biography of Benjamin Franklin, etc.
- Students flip over a card from a deck and whatever number they flip is the number of sentences they need to write to explain their thinking, how many pieces of evidence they must provide to support a claim during a discussion, the number of examples they need to provide for a math concept, etc.
Wheels:
- Make a wheel on Wheel of Names with the weeks vocabulary words. Students spin the wheel to determine which vocabulary words they should use in context.
- Make wheels for characters, settings, plot points and more. Have students spin each wheel to 'spin a story' they will write. This can also be done for nonfiction topics and typically fewer wheels will be needed. There is a a great wheel for this on Flippity called the Flippity Randomizer.
- Make a wheel with different amounts of time on it. Have a student spin the wheel to determine how long the class has to complete a task. Obviously this gamification strategy only works with selective tasks and content. I've used this in writing, giving students a topic to write about for a given amount of time. Students 'compete' to see who can write the most on the topic at the highest quality in the time they are given. This is a great way to build writing stamina.