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

During the challenge breaks of each module, we will try to find ways to gamify different parts of school life.

Examples of serious educational games for young people and for teachers: UNI! The Regions Game, a role-playing game which helps educators and 10- to 12-year-old students to learn about the European Union while playing, ‘Partners’ web doc is an investigation game with a full complement of multimedia tools which takes you to 6 regions of the European Union, Aqua Republica, a serious game to raise awareness of the importance of managing water and ecosystems in a sustainable way, PeaceMaker challenges you to succeed as a leader where others have failed, and WolfQuest, a science-based game, lets players learn what it’s like to live life as a wolf in Yellowstone National Park.
Serious games can be very effective, and can positively affect students’ knowledge and behavioural change. 

The main ingredients of an escape room in the classroom are:

Geocaching is the world’s largest Treasure Hunt, using a handheld GPS. You can create an account on the website and find them.
If used for educational purposes, Educaching encourages children to use a handheld GPS, explore and find hidden content that has real curriculum value. Geocaching also provides a nice means for thematic learning, as you can introduce elements of geography, place, space and distance in your various lessons.
Tools like Flippity help to create virtual locks.

Creativity is seen as a key skill required for the modern workplace, developing creative capacity in our students also improves their confidence and responsibility. Other benefits such as physical and psychological health improvements, improved resilience in the face of difficulties, and even lower levels of aggression (Richards, 2007, p.9).

In the revised version of Bloom’s original 1956 taxonomy by Krathwohl (2002), the process of creation – a key element of creativity – is included, and is in fact placed above evaluation as a higher-order thinking skill.
Play is the cornerstone of creativity. It provides an authentic place to be fearless and experiment, to collaborate, to raise questions and to try to find solutions that you would otherwise not have conceived of, because the imagination runs free.

Creative learning and game activities need to respect Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. That means that if students are not used to being asked to demonstrate creative habits and skills, they need to be guided, and as with all habits, creativity can be encouraged or discouraged.

The maker movement is an educational/social movement that emphasizes the ability of anyone to be a creator, thus empowering new innovators. It promotes an informal, networked, peer-led, and shared learning by providing a platform where people get together to create things. The maker movement has resulted in hackerspaces, makerspaces, and fab labs. In the school context, a makerspace can be any space where students and teachers come together to create, invent, prototype, design, tinker, explore, discover, code, build, craft, draft or draw.
DIY (coming from the acronym Do It Yourself) is a free online community for kids (6-16) to upload, share and view pictures and videos of projects they create, to learn new skills and find friends around the world who share their passions.
The Tinkering Studio, located inside the Exploratorium, the museum of science, art and human perception in California, motivates aspiring makers around the world to generate new ideas. Check out some of the projects here.

At European level, the Tinkering EU strategic partnership aims to implement tinkering as an innovative pedagogy by creating a Europe-wide community of practitioners and encouraging the exchange of expertise and practice between formal and informal learning institutions. 

Gamified teaching takes the above elements and brings them into the dynamics of the lesson. It can thereby support a more personalised learning, as students are usually given the freedom to choose their own pathway in order to better customise their learning.