# data[].attributes.body
Gamification is taking non-game events and activities and adding games, rewards, and technology to them to engage students in the classroom!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We all want our kids to succeed in school, right? But, how much do we believe that they're profiting from their school curriculum and getting introduced to different perspectives and skills that the world out there is hungry for? If you're also one of these parents or early childhood development teachers that believe that the current school curriculum should include additional classes, we've got your back.

In that spirit, we will be talking about the benefits of coding for students, more precisely, the benefits of coding in the classroom. Come along!

Why Is Coding Important for Students?

Let's start by showing you why coding is important for students of all ages, not only for those that have chosen computer science and information technology for their future major and career. First things first, coding is becoming one of the essential literacy skills for current and future generations. Why is that? Mostly because technology is all around us, and since the computers and other devices can't interact with us through our language, we need to interact with them by using the machine code in binary or hexadecimal that they understand.

When Should Kids Start Learning to Code?

We're living in a world where children no older than five are technology-savvy thanks to the use of electronics from a very young age. While there isn't a particular age that one can say is the most appropriate age for children to start learning how to code, they can do so from the age of seven. Why exactly from this age? Well, because that's when students start first grade.

It's around the age of seven that children can be capable of grasping the basic coding concepts. Through different games and fun activities, they start learning how to code. With each school year that passes, the more they know and the more capable at coding they become.

Benefits of Coding for Students

It's very common that when thinking of developing a new skill, one immediately wants to know what the benefits of doing that thing are or if there are any. When it comes to coding, there are plenty of benefits, and we're going to be talking about them in no time.

Their creativity levels increase

It's argued that coding is a form of art in itself. One can follow multiple routes to find a solution for the problems they're encountering in coding. The more room you have to experiment, the more confident in your solutions you become, increasing your creativity levels.

When learning to code, you have to get familiar with a particular programming language. Just like any other language you might learn, you get to express yourself in that language. You'll never look at a website in the same way. Most importantly, you won't be just a media consumer anymore, but you'll be one of those who create and add personal touches to it.

They will grasp mathematics more easily

We're sure that most of us were intimidated by math at some point, and this fear wasn't entirely unfounded. Some of us didn't like the mingling between the numbers and letters, and some just couldn't understand a thing despite how much we would dedicate to learning it.

Children who learn coding can't relate to us at all. While it's normal to struggle with something while learning math, those who learn coding at a young age won't struggle as much as we did. On the contrary, they can build their math skills. Thanks to coding, many mathematical abstract concepts come to life, making it easier for students to visualize them.

Not only that, the kids get to see for themselves the real-world applications of math concepts and overall make math more fun.

Their collaboration is encouraged

Collaboration is one of the qualities that is required from almost all employers. As such, this quality should get nurtured from a very young age. With coding, the skill of teamwork starts to develop from the moment one dedicates themselves to it.

Even though programming seems like an independent occupation, it calls for collaboration far more often than one would expect. The programming projects which require multiple-person efforts make coding a collective endeavor. Each member of the group focuses on a different aspect of the project. One of them is the head coder, one of them takes care of the visuals, and one other focuses on another thing, and in turn, the project is finished on time and with no one left behind.

They will learn how to think

Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist, once said: "Children must be taught how to think, not what to think." And this is precisely what coding promotes. It stimulates logical and critical thinking. Computer programming isn't all about writing some lines of coding, and that's it. Instead, it teaches children to take a complex issue and break it down into smaller, digestible pieces and then step by step fixing the problem altogether-a skill applicable in almost every part of our lives.

Coding helps students develop a way of thinking that tells them that there's always a way to fix issues. If the first solution doesn't work, then maybe the second or the third will. Coding students will learn to try and try until the solution is found.

They become problem-solvers

There's a tendency for people to give up once an obstacle is on the way. Well, that does not apply to coders. They see those situations as a problem to correct, not a stop sign. By having this kind of perspective, they won't fear failure but instead will only look out for quick fixes.

While many of us needed time to develop this kind of mentality, young coders won't have to. They'll develop it alongside learning how to code.

They get prepared for the future

Without a doubt, code is the language that is characterizing this modern world. Considering the fact that all the devices we use daily need instructions in code to function properly and more devices and codes are underway to become more digitally sophisticated, one will have to "learn to code or get coded" as the Guardian puts it.

In a way, by learning how programming works, you're a step ahead of others. The coding won't only prepare you for the future in the programming field, but also will give you the skills (i.e., critical thinking, problem-solving skills) that will open you up to a multitude of career opportunities.

Coding is a skill much needed in the world that we're living in. While people can learn it at any age, it's argued that it's better if one starts at an early age as it will come along with numerous benefits. We believe that obtaining these skills from a young age will only benefit the individuals, what about you?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coding For Children: Benefits of Teaching Coding in the Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We all want our kids to succeed in school, right? But, how much do we believe that they're profiting from their school curriculum and getting introduced to different perspectives and skills that the world out there is hungry for?

# data[].attributes.body
This article explains the difference of gamification and game based learning. Game based learning is using the games to teach students, where as gamification uses rewards and game ideas to engage the students in the classroom learning.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gamification and Game-Based Learning | Centre for Teaching Excellence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Games can introduce goals, interaction, feedback, problem solving, competition, narrative, and fun learning environments,

# data[].attributes.body
This is video that also explains the difference!

# data[].attributes.body
This is a great website to help kids practice coding!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking "Accept", you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However you may visit Cookie Settings to provide a controlled consent.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coding for Kids | Game-Based Programming | CodeMonkey

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking "Accept", you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However you may visit Cookie Settings to provide a controlled consent.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Gamification has taken the world of education by storm in recent years. Rapidly evolving technology, as well as the push toward digital, also played a significant role in its rise.

With classrooms filled with tablets, e-books, and digital boards, everything is more interactive, which makes it even harder to keep students' attention. Gamification in the classroom, however, allows teachers to engage students more quickly and get them excited about learning.

Of course, while video games can be helpful in the classroom now and again, they shouldn't be your go-to for gamification. Luckily, it's easy to adjust your classroom gamification to complement your teaching style. Let's take a look at tested techniques to gamify your classroom and keep your students on the edge of their seats.

What Are the Benefits of Gamification?

So gamification helps pique students' interest and keep them engaged during lessons, but are there any other benefits? Students today get bombarded by information and images almost constantly. In order to keep up, teachers need to reassess their techniques to be in line with the times.

Although opponents of gamification say that it removes what makes education educational, students are still learning but in different ways. Traditional education techniques can sometimes be limiting, unstimulating, and extremely average.

Modern techniques, coupled with gamification, offer a nuanced approach that motivates children. Students can take on a persona, earn points, and feel a more profound sense of accomplishment with gamification. However, it's crucial to state that complete gamification may not be a great idea. Blended classrooms where students experience traditional and modern styles together tend to be more successful. Nonetheless, incorporating gamification in your class will give your students some variety and allow you to keep their attention better.

Ways to Introduce Gamification

If you're considering gamifying your class, you may not be sure where to start. Here are a few simple but effective ways to incorporate gamification into your classroom.

1. Set Up a Points System

Much like in video games, earning points motivates people and helps them feel rewarded for their efforts. Depending on your classroom activities, you can offer to give students points for participation, completing tasks on time or anything else you'd like. Your points system should fit your classroom style and help students track their progress. You can even use your points system to supplement your grading. For example, if students earn a certain amount of points, you could drop their lowest grade or boost their final grade. While gamifying grading is an entirely personal choice, know that it can motivate students.

Beyond motivating students to participate, it helps them feel compensated for their efforts. Receiving better grades can sometimes be disheartening. Earning points, on the other hand, allows students to feel like they are becoming masters of their learning. They can see their skills improve, feel motivated, and enjoy class time more than ever before. What's not to love about that?

2. Invent a Storyline With Avatars

Nothing quite gets students in the mood to learn like a great story. Taking the time to think of or invent a storyline for your game will help get students interested. You can choose from the typical stories about pirates, aliens, or zombies to set the stage. No matter what theme you choose, make sure you keep it going throughout the entire game.

Once you've set the stage, allow your students to get in on the fun. Letting them choose their role in the story will spark their creativity and get them to invest more in the game. You can even give them time to design an avatar who represents them. Young and old students alike enjoy taking the time to craft their character in the game world.

While avatars lend themselves well to video games or digital apps, there are low-tech alternatives, as well. From costumes to illustrations, as long as you let your students get creative, their fascination for the story will grow.

3. Hand Out Badges

Points are great for rewarding your student's participation in class, but badges allow you to reward achievements. Incorporating both of these reward systems is vital for maintaining classroom morale. After all, just because some students don't earn points doesn't mean they aren't accomplishing anything. Giving students badges also helps serve as milestones for the class. For instance, badges that indicate the mastery of a specific program can feel like a rite of passage for students. Students will want to collect all of their badges and mark their advancement through the course. You can even offer bonus points or level increases with different badges to add an extra layer of excitement.

Badges also help reward students with unique abilities. Therefore, it's worth it to invest time in creating badges for areas you want students to master. Additionally, you may want to create a few rare badges that will preserve the element of surprise.

4. Encourage Teamwork

Gamification of your classroom need not be divisive. In fact, your classroom morale might be better if you allow students to play in teams. Getting students to play and participate together cultivates a friendly atmosphere and teaches students the value of working together.

In their teams, you may want to allow students to share points, rewards, or even power-ups. Students will want to work harder to help their team and make their team members proud. This is especially true if they can share the riches (or points). Not to mention that the game will become much more energetic with students frantically cheering their teammates on.

5 Gamification Apps for Your Classroom

Gamifying your class and keeping it fresh requires plenty of resources. No worries, because I've scoped out some of the best gamification apps out there.

1. Gimkit

Gimkit is today's revelation and very suited for gamifiying your classroom. This game app lets teachers build quizzes students have to solve. They call themselves a game show for the classroom that requires knowledge, collaboration, and strategy to win. Students answer questions on their device at their own pace. Throughout a Kit, students will get exposure to the questions multiple times to ensure mastery.

Here's the "gamification-factor" about Gimkit: students earn in-game cash by answering questions correctly. But be careful, an incorrect answer will cost them! Students can reinvest their earned digital money by purchasing upgrades and powerups that suit their strengths.

Gimkit is especially a live classroom game, but you can use it for homework assignments which are graded automatically. Gimkit eventually generates a report detailing what your students need help on.

2. Class Dojo

Class Dojo works best with younger students usually in the primary school stage. The setting is a digital dojo where students can keep track of their mastery and skills. This app automatically assigns each student an avatar which is a little monster. Each little monster collects points for anything from participation to helping others in the class. Teachers can use this app from a computer or mobile device making it a flexible platform. One of the greatest things about Class Dojo is that it helps connect teachers, students, and parents. Although the app gives instant feedback about students' performance, it can also send a monthly report to parents. Therefore, it helps close the gap between home and the classroom.

This app even aids teachers in reinforcing good behavior. Its graphics and sound effects react to when students lose points, thereby motivating them to do better. Class Dojo also helps save teachers time. Spending less time on keeping up this gamification aspect of the classroom makes more sustainable.

3. BookWidgets

BookWidgets works well for anyone using Google Classroom or merely a digital whiteboard or any other device. This app offers 40 different templates for teachers to craft interactive lessons. Depending on the subject or aim of the lesson, teachers can use anything from quizzes to arithmetic to bingo cards. The variety of templates allows teachers to make lessons of all kinds more interactive. Furthermore, the different templates can help gamify things like reviews, tests, and more.

All teachers need to do is launch the app and select the "Create Widget" option to begin devising their next interactive lesson. Lesson planning time will decrease as student participation skyrockets with BookWidgets. Just check out this ready-to-use gamified WebQuest about Halloween. Students have to solve a murder and earn their inspector badge at the end. Just click on the image and share the link with your students. That's it!

Incorporating BookWidgets into the classroom is simple. With its Google Chrome plugin, you can get started using this app almost immediately in Google Classroom. You can also use BookWidgets standalone via the BookWidgets website.

4. Classcraft

Classcraft is probably the best game and classroom management solution for high school students. Classcraft engages students to live by your class rules interactively.

Students create their own avatars that have special powers. They play in groups to keep the team spirit alive. If someone ignores a deadline, it may disadvantage the whole group. You could say this game app focuses on teamwork and tries to build better relationships between students.

Students can gain or lose different points by playing by the classroom rules or by breaking them. For example, students who help other students with their homework receive a certain amount of points. When they have enough points, they can use a power like: the "warrior" can eat in class". As I've said before, students can also lose those points when breaking the rules. If they lose all their points they get a "punishment" like: bring a treat for the whole class or hand in an assignment a day early.

As a teacher, you can choose every power and punishment. Classcraft also has a timer and a stopwatch available, as well as a quiz tool where the avatars have to battle a "boss". In order to beat the boss, they have to get the answers right.

5. Kahoot

Kahoot has the power to make students extremely enthusiastic about learning. Similar to a gameshow, Kahoot! uses music, images, and a colorful interface to get students excited about the task at hand. Particularly useful for quizzing vocabulary, multiplication, and simple geography, this app asks students to select the correct answer within a time limit.

Kahoot! even allows teachers to include YouTube videos to add an extra layer of information to each question. Combining this interactive game with multimedia helps make the experience more immersive for students. Moreover, the app has plenty of sound effects that add to the excitement of the gameplay.

Students receive points for every correct answer and also get extra points for answering faster than others. Whether they're playing individually or in teams, students will feel very rewarded when they see their score growing. Racking up more and more points often means that students get invested in the game and want to continue playing. In fact, your students may become addicted to Kahoot!

Ready, Set, Game!

Getting students excited about learning is easier than ever with the help of technology and gamification. By using these techniques and apps, you can make your classroom wonderfully interactive. Of course, always remember to reward students for their efforts to keep them motivated and capture their imagination.

About the author

James Daily is a professional writer, content manager, and blogger with a Master's degree in Leadership and Teacher Education. Specialized in education, psychology and upbringing. Check out his work on this blog. "Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the promise of progress, in every society, in every family" © Kofi Annan

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The best gamification apps and techniques for in your classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gamification has taken the world of education by storm in recent years. Rapidly evolving technology, as well as the push toward digital, also played a significant role in its rise. With classrooms filled with tablets, e-books, and digital boards, everything is more interactive, which makes it even harder to keep students' attention.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We all want our kids to succeed in school, right? But, how much do we believe that they're profiting from their school curriculum and getting introduced to different perspectives and skills that the world out there is hungry for? If you're also one of these parents or early childhood development teachers that believe that the current school curriculum should include additional classes, we've got your back.

In that spirit, we will be talking about the benefits of coding for students, more precisely, the benefits of coding in the classroom. Come along!

Why Is Coding Important for Students?

Let's start by showing you why coding is important for students of all ages, not only for those that have chosen computer science and information technology for their future major and career. First things first, coding is becoming one of the essential literacy skills for current and future generations. Why is that? Mostly because technology is all around us, and since the computers and other devices can't interact with us through our language, we need to interact with them by using the machine code in binary or hexadecimal that they understand.

When Should Kids Start Learning to Code?

We're living in a world where children no older than five are technology-savvy thanks to the use of electronics from a very young age. While there isn't a particular age that one can say is the most appropriate age for children to start learning how to code, they can do so from the age of seven. Why exactly from this age? Well, because that's when students start first grade.

It's around the age of seven that children can be capable of grasping the basic coding concepts. Through different games and fun activities, they start learning how to code. With each school year that passes, the more they know and the more capable at coding they become.

Benefits of Coding for Students

It's very common that when thinking of developing a new skill, one immediately wants to know what the benefits of doing that thing are or if there are any. When it comes to coding, there are plenty of benefits, and we're going to be talking about them in no time.

Their creativity levels increase

It's argued that coding is a form of art in itself. One can follow multiple routes to find a solution for the problems they're encountering in coding. The more room you have to experiment, the more confident in your solutions you become, increasing your creativity levels.

When learning to code, you have to get familiar with a particular programming language. Just like any other language you might learn, you get to express yourself in that language. You'll never look at a website in the same way. Most importantly, you won't be just a media consumer anymore, but you'll be one of those who create and add personal touches to it.

They will grasp mathematics more easily

We're sure that most of us were intimidated by math at some point, and this fear wasn't entirely unfounded. Some of us didn't like the mingling between the numbers and letters, and some just couldn't understand a thing despite how much we would dedicate to learning it.

Children who learn coding can't relate to us at all. While it's normal to struggle with something while learning math, those who learn coding at a young age won't struggle as much as we did. On the contrary, they can build their math skills. Thanks to coding, many mathematical abstract concepts come to life, making it easier for students to visualize them.

Not only that, the kids get to see for themselves the real-world applications of math concepts and overall make math more fun.

Their collaboration is encouraged

Collaboration is one of the qualities that is required from almost all employers. As such, this quality should get nurtured from a very young age. With coding, the skill of teamwork starts to develop from the moment one dedicates themselves to it.

Even though programming seems like an independent occupation, it calls for collaboration far more often than one would expect. The programming projects which require multiple-person efforts make coding a collective endeavor. Each member of the group focuses on a different aspect of the project. One of them is the head coder, one of them takes care of the visuals, and one other focuses on another thing, and in turn, the project is finished on time and with no one left behind.

They will learn how to think

Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist, once said: "Children must be taught how to think, not what to think." And this is precisely what coding promotes. It stimulates logical and critical thinking. Computer programming isn't all about writing some lines of coding, and that's it. Instead, it teaches children to take a complex issue and break it down into smaller, digestible pieces and then step by step fixing the problem altogether-a skill applicable in almost every part of our lives.

Coding helps students develop a way of thinking that tells them that there's always a way to fix issues. If the first solution doesn't work, then maybe the second or the third will. Coding students will learn to try and try until the solution is found.

They become problem-solvers

There's a tendency for people to give up once an obstacle is on the way. Well, that does not apply to coders. They see those situations as a problem to correct, not a stop sign. By having this kind of perspective, they won't fear failure but instead will only look out for quick fixes.

While many of us needed time to develop this kind of mentality, young coders won't have to. They'll develop it alongside learning how to code.

They get prepared for the future

Without a doubt, code is the language that is characterizing this modern world. Considering the fact that all the devices we use daily need instructions in code to function properly and more devices and codes are underway to become more digitally sophisticated, one will have to "learn to code or get coded" as the Guardian puts it.

In a way, by learning how programming works, you're a step ahead of others. The coding won't only prepare you for the future in the programming field, but also will give you the skills (i.e., critical thinking, problem-solving skills) that will open you up to a multitude of career opportunities.

Coding is a skill much needed in the world that we're living in. While people can learn it at any age, it's argued that it's better if one starts at an early age as it will come along with numerous benefits. We believe that obtaining these skills from a young age will only benefit the individuals, what about you?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Coding For Children: Benefits of Teaching Coding in the Classroom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We all want our kids to succeed in school, right? But, how much do we believe that they're profiting from their school curriculum and getting introduced to different perspectives and skills that the world out there is hungry for?