Using GBL to keep students motivated during COVID

Keeping learners engaged and motivated in their learning is a challenge at the best of times. We are constantly competing with social media, video games, and other forms of entertainment for our students’ attention. Add to that a global pandemic that has led to students learning from home, and the competition is even greater. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this year, it’s the importance of building learners’ resilience and keeping them motivated to learn in spite of the global challenges we face. 

Games are designed to keep people engaged and motivated to keep playing, and game-based learning (GBL) is an extension of this. They provide a safe space for fun failure in which the consequences of failing do not impact the player’s life in any great way. This can be so powerful in building key skills like problem-solving, collaboration, and resilience. 

Some of the features of games that keep players motivated and engaged include giving instruction and feedback in small chunks, regular and meaningful rewards, just the right amount of challenge, a little competition, a compelling narrative, and player choice. All of these features can also be applied to learning activities and we can use this inspiration in combination with technology to design playful, blended experiences for our learners. Here are some ideas and tools for you to try:

Choose your own Adventures

Scenario-based learning activities make use of narrative and learner choice and are a great, playful way to assess practical knowledge, digitally. Either use slides with buttons linking to different outcomes, or a forms program that allows you to send the learner to a different question based on their choice. Then, make sure to add some fun failure when learners make questionable choices to build that resilience and encourage them to have another go. Be creative with this: the funnier the failures, the more memorable they’ll be.

Digital Badges 

Rewards like stickers, charts, points, and certificates are already commonplace in the classroom and can be replicated in the digital world as digital badges. The key to rewards in games is that they’re meaningful. Try working with students to come up with a list of meaningful achievements, attitudes, and behaviours that should be rewarded. Then, get them to design the badges themselves using digital design tools like Canva. Ensure that learners have somewhere to share their badges and achievements with others – quick drag and drop website building tools like Google Sites are a great way of building quick digital portfolios while giving students the experience of web design skills.

Scavenger Hunts and Escape Challenges

These activities embody playful learning and key features of games, allowing for exploration, critical thinking and problem solving in a project based way. Thinglink is a great online platform for hiding a variety of clues, puzzles and challenges within an image. Make use of tag transitions to simulate ‘locks’ which learners have to break to move on in the game. These activities are as fun for the teacher to create as they are for students to play!

Quizzes 

Quizzes are a quick win for adding a bit of playfulness to assessment and there are lots of platforms out there to help with this. Kahoot and Quizizz both make use of competition, fast feedback, and rewards to motivate players. Take this one step further by getting learners to research and write their own quizzes to share with the class.

The opportunities that technology brings to designing playful activities are endless and there are lots of existing activities that you can find online and use as inspiration. The great thing about all of these examples is that they can be used as part of online learning or a blended approach in the classroom. 

We may be living in a world where we have to compete with things like video games for our students’ attention and enthusiasm but we’re also living in a world in which the jobs our students will have may not even exist yet. The world is unpredictable, technological change is accelerating and students need to be resilient and motivated to succeed. 

Games provide a safe space for failing, problem solving, critical thinking and collaborating, all of which are key skills young people need. We need to give our students the confidence to take risks, seek challenges and fail fast. Prepare them to continuously iterate, have another go, re-evaluate and improve.

So instead of competing with games, let’s use what games are good at to engage our students in their learning and help them build key skills for the future. 

Mia Pledger
Mia is an EdTech trainer and consultant with a passion for making learning fun and engaging. She has worked with young people of all ages and begun her path in EdTech teaching Computing in Primary school. In 2018, Mia co-founded My Code Kit who aim to help young people build resilience while learning to code.
@ItsMiasTweets