Gamification is a great way to make content more interesting and engaging to students. Though some considerations must be made for accessibility, such as the dangers of forcing students to compete or implementing time pressures. However, there are many different ways in which lessons can be gamified and educational games can be implemented in learning.

I am someone who benefited from games growing up, including math games such as 2048, typing games such as Nitro Type, and the classic Oregon Trail. These games are valuable but specific in their implementation. Others I have come across can be used in a variety of situations.

One great tool I’ve used is Aggie.io, a free online digital art platform which allows multiple people to draw together in real-time on one canvass. This can be used for group mind-mapping, building maps or blueprints, and practicing a variety of visual art skills.

Gartic Phone is a similar art tool in which individuals will create drawings in response to others’ prompts, and then either those drawings are build upon, or other players must guess what the original prompt was. This can be valuable in an English Language Arts or Social Studies class to visualize concepts and create connections.

Another game that doesn’t involve computers is one in which each student is given a different “resource” which requires resources from other students to be able to be turned into products. Students much speak with each other and figure out ways in which they establish trade systems so that they gain access to the required resources from other students while providing their resource to the other students which require it. Resources can be “traded” through various means. The goal of this lesson is to encourage students to establish a community in which everyone is both reliant on and helping others, to the point where you cannot remove one member without the system collapsing. This can be used to visualize a specific community, a general human society, or other co-dependent groups such as a food web or ecosystem.

All of these games are designed to teach materials in a way that’s more easily digestible by students and makes learning fun.