Our students nowadays are digital-natives and spend a lot of hours glued to screen -- What would happen if we introduce technology and certain elements during our classes?
Millions of teenagers spend most of their time online and find school and English classes boring. As secondary teachers, we face this challenge every day. How can we motivate them? Well, we can implement a new approach which attract our students attention: Gamification.
Gamification uses game-based mechanics, aesthetics and game thinking in order to engage and motivate students, promoting learning in an entertaining way. In doing so, learnes feel more interested in what they are learning, they participate more actively and they can also compete and collaborate with their peer, thus learning from each other.
We can use these elements to gamify our classes:
- Challenges / tasks that users perform and progress towards defined objectives
- Points that are accumulated as a result of executing tasks
- Levels which users pass depending on the points
- Badges which serve as rewards for completing actions
- Ranking of users according to their achievements
Using gamification is quite beneficial because it does not base on the tedious grammar classes, which students are tired of, and it helps to change learners' behaviour and adds a playful spirit to some boring and routine things.
Using game elements for educational purposes can be a good tool that can help students enrich their language skills, develop commitment and cooperation.
Posted by Natalia Moreno.
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