BLOG 702 Let’s Play! Gamification & Game Based Learning
There are two types of game related learning we explored this week. Gamification is used a lot in classrooms and means taking content knowledge like vocabulary and key concepts and putting them into a game format. In the past when all of my students were in my classroom we played college bowl, a buzzer style game with teams. This was a fun and intense way to review for tests. When I run into kids I had 10 years ago they still talk about College Bowl. I really love games so we also played Pictionary and Back to the Board with vocabulary words. Now with online learning, I have switched to playing Kahoot!, Quizizz, and Gimkit in place of College Bowl. Each of these games has a slightly different feel. Kahoot fits best for a College Bowl replacement, with winners that get to the podium getting extra credit points for the unit assessment. Quizizz and Gimkit I use more for quick review and formative assessments. Quizlet has a decent matching game and it works well for review and homework. All of these are a fancy gamified way to do drill and kill style review of key concepts and vocabulary. It is effective for this purpose. It does bring a fun feeling of playing together to class. I especially like Gimkit for the playfulness it brings out in my students. Game-based learning is playing a game to actually learn the concepts. Before online learning, I used a lot of game based activities from Project Wild and Project Aquatics. They actually have some really fun role playing chase & tag style games to teach about ecosystems, food webs, and water cycles. I have a great card game called “What Eats What?” that teaches food chains & webs. For physics we have played a giant game of “Minute to Win It” (popular game show style activity about 10 years ago) and kids do the timed event challenges and then analyze the physics of each event. For online learning I am really struggling to find free games to play with my students that teach science concepts. What I have been using that is similar to games is simulations. There are two websites that have excellent simulations for most of the science concepts I teach and are for middle school and high school level students. One is Phet Simulations from the University of Colorado, Boulder. The simulations are colorful, intuitive to use, and provide great data. The only problem is that about half of them require Java so I have to select carefully. The newest simulation website I have been using is called Gizmos. Gizmos is for math and science simulations and you can get a trial account for 30 days. The cost after that is something crazy like $800, but they do have about 15 Gizmos that you can use for free every semester without the subscription price. It is designed for middle school and high school. Each simulation has a Google document that comes with it for students to record their results. My 8th graders liked it better than my 7th graders but that was probably also partly because of the topic. I checked out Legends of Learning also and felt like some of their games were really just a digital lesson with a little Quizlet style matching tossed in. I found a few lessons that were more game based but probably not anything my kids are going to spend their weekends playing. So what are my kids playing? I asked recently. Fortnite and Minecraft are still popular. One of my kids was playing in a live streamed Fornite tournament this last weekend. Dota 2 is the game my own boys play with their friends. Genshin Impact is a game some of the girls in my classes are playing. The graphics look beautiful. I haven’t started any video game playing yet, but I am going to give it a try over Christmas break. My family still plays a lot of board games. We love Blockus, Pictionary, Codenames, King of Tokyo, Pandemic, and a new one we just got called Bang. We also still play card games like Cribbage and Rummy. Play is such a natural way for us to learn things and it is so enjoyable. I especially like how connected kids feel as they play a game together. I have this poster on the wall in my classroom that says, “We do FUN here” and I am trying very hard to still make that poster true. Virtual teaching makes this more challenging but as I learn about more games that connect to my science content I will keep adding as much play as I can. There is so much powerful learning that happens as kids collaborate in a team, play a role on a team, become an expert on some part of the game, and seek out knowledge to improve their skills to win the game.
5 Comments
Kimberlee Nelson
12/7/2020 06:16:10 pm
Betsy,
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Amy Bardwell
12/8/2020 06:35:53 pm
I enjoyed your thoughts on game play. The College Bowl sounds like a great way to mix learning with play. I find it interesting your students play the same games as my students; Minecraft and also Fortnite. I tried playing those games and it didn't work with my brain. My students are also playing Among Us which I am going to check out this Christmas Break! Your teaching format is so awesome!
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Abie
12/8/2020 10:01:29 pm
I love your poster! The classroom should be a fun place, and I'm sure you're doing a good job of engaging your students in fun Betsy. I'm curious if you could use a game like Pandemic in the classroom as a lesson! Also i looked into Gizmos and they look so cool, I wish I had that as a student!
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Jamie Lutz
12/9/2020 07:42:55 am
Wow, you play a lot of games! I love it! I also love to play games. It is a wonderful way to learn strategy & stretch the mind. I have always loved games. It is great how you have incorporated so many games into your classroom. I have always struggled with finding a way to incorporate games into my content in a fair way that does not take a major amount of prep. I think many of these online games will do that for us! I'm excited to use more of them in my classroom!
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Scott Marsden
12/9/2020 05:20:18 pm
Betsy,
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AuthorHello! Welcome to my blog! This will be a fun place to share thoughts about teaching and learning. I am a middle school science teacher at Redwood. When I'm not teaching, I'm hanging out at home with my family or enjoying nature somewhere in the valley. Archives
March 2021
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