This document summarizes Barb Light's experience attending a conference on teaching and learning where she learned about gamification. She enjoyed many sessions at the conference and found the session on gamification particularly impactful, changing her teaching the most. Since then, she has tried to completely gamify her first year seminar course and has incorporated some gamified lessons in other courses. In the document, she provides examples of gamified activities she does with her students, like team pictionary and code breaking games. She discusses how gamification can be used to promote desired student behaviors and shares ideas for other ways instructors can incorporate gaming elements into their teaching.

1. Gamification
Barb Light
School of Education

2. Thank You!
Thank you to the Title III folks for
providing the opportunity to attend the
Great Lakes Conference on Teaching
and Learning.
• at CMU in May
• great keynote speakers
• current educational theory
• fired up

3. I enjoyed many great sessions.
The session that has changed my teaching the
most so far was about gamification.
I have tried to completely gamify my first year
seminar course (EDUC 100).
I have tried to gamify a few lessons in other
courses.

4. The best way
to learn about
gamification
is to
experience it,
so let’s play
some games!

5. Team Pictionary
• Teams of 4-6
• Send up one team member
• When someone on the team gets the
right answer, send them up for the next
clue.
• The first team to finish both clues wins!

6. So, the answers were:
• Facebook
• 28 million people harvest their crops in
Farmville on a daily basis (Mashable,
2010, as quoted in Lee and Hammond)
• World of Warcraft
• Over five million people play World of
Warcraft for more than 40 hours per week
(Blizzard, 2010, as quoted in Lee and
Hammond)
• Massively multiplayer online role playing
game (MMORPG)

7. Game Culture?
• Gamification, defined as the use of game
mechanics, dynamics, and frameworks to
promote desired behaviors, has found its way
into domains like marketing, politics, health
and fitness, with analysts predicting that it will
become a multi-billion dollar industry by 2015
(MacMillan, 2011, as quoted in Lee and
Hammer, 2011).
• I game almost daily for 30 minutes to 2 hours
on my Kindle.

8. Code Breaking
Can your team solve the codes?
You can use the internet to help you.

9. The coded messages
were:
• Crowdsourcing
• Weeks, not years

10. From:
How online gamers are solving science's biggest problems
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/25/online-gamers-solving-sciences-biggest-
problems
“In 2011, people playing
Foldit, an online puzzle
game about protein
folding, resolved the
structure of an enzyme
that causes an Aids-like
disease in monkeys.
Researchers had been
working on the problem
for 13 years. The
gamers solved it in
three weeks.
A year later, people
playing an astronomy
game called Planet
Hunters found a
curious planet with four
stars in its system, and
to date, they've
discovered 40 planets
that could potentially
support life, all of
which had been
previously missed by
professional
astronomers.”

11. Ideas
• Make assignments that have elements
of competition or gaming in them
• Review games – either as part of class
or offer them to students as study tools
• Class group work that has problem
solving that is game like