Gamification in education is the application of typical elements of game playing, point scoring, competition with others, a specific rules and rewards system, for example used to drive an educational experience. Game based learning is when specific content is taught or reinforced with the use of a game. While gamification uses the mechanics of gaming outside of the context of the game, game based learning uses an actual game as the vehicle for driving learning. My first experience with gamification was in high school. My calculus teacher allowed students to create games for our spring finals. Being a huge fan of The Price is Right I decided that I was going to create a Plinko board and have my peers compete to receive chances to drop a ball into the Plinko creation in order to score points OR to subtract points from other players. Math was the framework for the learning, as all of the questions were based on math content but the mechanics of how students engaged with the math were all game based. My first experience with game based learning came during computer lab time in elementary school. There was a math game that students loved, despite its content. It required one to move a shape onto an identical shape somewhere else on the screen by spinning, sliding and flipping the original shape. As a math teacher I now realize that the game was teaching the concepts of transformational geometry. As students were spinning, sliding and flipping, they were actually learning to rotate, translate and reflect images. I was lucky to find an updated version of this game hosted by Mathplayground and I am super excited to use it with my students as we progress through transformational geometry.
At the high school level students really appreciate any gamification that one adds to a course. Even if it’s simply putting students together in a team and having them race to complete assignments, or allowing students to gain class points toward a common goal by answering questions correctly, they enjoy the competitive and group elements it adds to the course. I get so much student by in when I use Kahoot or Quizizz by allowing the top scoring student to select a non academic kahoot or quizz to play next (Most common choices this year are: Disney movies, Minecraft and SexEd.) It is not a significant prize by any means but the students enjoy the choice and voice it provides them for demonstrating content knowledge. Next year I fully plan to incorporate more instances of Desmos based activities. Before I really looked into what was offered through their site I thought it was simply a free-use graphing calculator. Exploring all of the teacher created resources I found that there are a wide variety of games that help students learn complex topics such as functions and linear systems through exploration.
2 Comments
Scott Marsden
4/27/2019 08:04:59 am
Brandon,
Reply
Julie Lovie
4/28/2019 11:09:03 am
Brandon I love your personal reflection here I want to make a Plinko board ! I think it would be super cool to coordinate a group of math 1 teacher to all pick a different unit and then have our students make games for the unit and then share them with each other we would have a nice variety of games to play. I was also blown away with all the options and the organization of DESMOS and I will also be building this into each of my math units. I still wish for a game with lands and a story line like Fort Nite for high school level math it would be awesome !
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Brandon DeJesusMath Archives
July 2019
Categories |