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Discover practices and methods to make learning more engaging

Explore ways to bring creativity in your classroom through games

Reflect on how learning happens through games

Reflect on how the use of games can change the way we teach

Define gamification and game-based learning

Recognise different types of games and ways to use them in education

Explore game design

Reflect on your own teaching

Make connections to fellow teachers

Learn from the experiences of educators around Europe

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“Play is our brain’s favourite way of learning."
Diane Ackerman

investigate how playing games, learning and creativity are interlinked

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I’m Katerina from Marousi, near Athens, Greece. I teach CS and ICT in Junior High School (age of students 12-15 yo).

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Playing is such an effective process of learning:. Learning through games encourages the acquisition and development of various hard and soft skills, as it stimulates problem-solving, encourages experiential learning and increases motivation. The player learns through repetition, failure, ongoing and non-threatening feedback and accomplishment of goals in a risk-free environment, which is aligned with clear objectives.
All of the above is also confirmed by the eminent 20th-century educational theorists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, who argued that play is a crucial component of cognitive development from birth through adulthood (Piaget 1962; Vygotsky 1962) .
As teachers, we therefore need to understand, facilitate, and use the concept of play to shape the learning experiences we create for our students.

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Gamification is a recipe for fun and engaging learning that uses game mechanisms. The main idea of gamification is to take the engaging elements of gaming, like the challenge, the element of chance, the competition, the cooperation, the feedback, the rewards, the winning or the progression, and implement them into the teaching process. Let us look at five typical game mechanisms in more detail:

1. Interaction and feedback: Games are interactive experiences and every action of a player provides some form of feedback.

2. Risk-taking and failure: Feedback in games is non-threatening because it is “risk-free”. Negative feedback (e.g. dying in a video game) is not perceived as a big issue because the player can easily start again or load a previous saved game.

3. Customisation: Many (video) games have different difficulty levels, thereby allowing the player to customise their experience.

4. Ownership: Most games allow for multiple strategies to succeed, giving the player ownership of the path to take.

5. System thinking: Games require the player to understand a system’s rules and relationships, rather than focus on isolated facts, events, or skills. A player must consider their strategy in the context of the system.

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1.3 How do games impact teaching & learning dynamics?

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1.3 How do games impact teaching & learning dynamics?

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Maintaining students’ engagement and reigniting their enthusiasm for learning in the classroom are probably among the main challenges we face as teachers. High engagement levels can enhance academic motivation and achievement (Appleton et al., 2008) whereas disengagement may induce negative consequences as severe as school dropout (Henry et al., 2012).

Generating engagement is best achieved by making our students active and letting them take ownership of their learning. Games can play a crucial role in this because they may promote a student-centred pedagogy that facilitates a more personalised learning approach. Games usually set players on different paths depending on the actions and decisions they take. Crucially, we educators need to grow into a new role when using games in the classroom: the role of facilitator of learning. Teachers as facilitators provide their students with resources, opportunities and guidance, as students take on agency for other aspects of their learning. They are flexible, and support students in taking charge of their own growth and development. Games can provide an important stimulus and context for such change.

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Creativity: "a process typically of imagining possibilities, creating something new, and reflecting upon and modifying what is being created. In a broader sense it is a way of interpreting and acting upon the world" (European Council Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning).
Creativity is associated with characteristics like "curiosity (or inquisitiveness), use of imagination, critical thinking, problem-solving, and perseverance (resilience or persistence) which includes positive risk-taking".
The use of imagination, positive risk-taking and the development of new ideas only happens in an environment which is trustworthy and safe. Creativity is nurtured in an environment that encourages experimentation and risk-taking and allows or even promotes failure. Good games stimulate creative problem-solving by providing players with risk-free, judgement-free environments that give them ownership and allow for experimentation.

Creativity gap: the discrepancy between the creativity students display when they are in school and that which they display when they are not in school.

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Although we realise that using games can provide added value to our classroom, several factors impede us from actually using them. The structure of the curriculum and the amount of the topics we need to cover, too much focus on assessment in schools making it difficult to integrate games into everyday teaching.

Lack of time to experiment with new tools and pedagogies, poor infrastructures, not enough equipment and the school's internet connection as well as cost of some games (online) and time needed to make a game (some interesting games are time consuming) are also prohibitive factors.

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We could start by gamifying the lesson, i.e. adding elements of a game not the game itself.
For starters, we could gamify the grading system: I use diplomas or certificates. I think I might try badges coming next year. I really don't think you could gamify the grading system a lot, especially in High school. After all the students do get marks on grade reports twice a year.