Pros and Cons of Gamification in the Classroom

By Hunter Hanson

What is gamification in the classroom? Well, gamification is about transforming your classroom environment and regular activities into a game. The teacher can do many things with gamification to try and get students involved with what they are teaching. They can use a leaderboard with students getting points each week as they progress throughout the year. This can be achieved through either effort from the student, the attitude of the student, or even how well the students perform in the activities. It can be a great tool in the classroom with many pros but also has some cons as well. Some gamification websites that you can use as a teacher include Kahoot, Quizlet, Gimkit, and many others.

Pros

One pro of gamification is that it creates enthusiasm in the classroom. Gamified learning can help students that may struggle with certain subjects in school like math. By gamifying the subject, you can make the students more excited and competitive while learning at the same time. Another pro of gamification in the classroom is that it provides instant feedback. Students after completing certain tasks on the computer can see how they did with instant feedback such as scores and rankings among students. This can help push students to do better with trying to get a better rank in the classroom. The last pro I would like to talk about is social connections. When gamifying a classroom, you can put students in different teams and have them work together which can help students who may have trouble connecting with other students socially. By playing games it can allow students to loosen up and interact with each other.

Cons

One con of gamified classrooms is badges. This is a reward system based on the skill level of students, leveling up as they progress in learning and receive badges along the way. One example of this in the classroom is with the program Khan Academy, the more time you spend on the platform doing problems and watching videos you receive points to earn badges. One con of this method is that ranking students may make some students not feel as smart as their peers, who have more points and badges than them. Another con of this method is with false learning, where students may think that they are understanding the material, but later they find that they just knew how to do those problems well. Some other cons of gamification in the classroom include decreased attention span of students. When playing games in the classroom students may not want to engage in the game and would rather talk with other classmates and not participate. The last con I want to talk about is student assessment. What I am referring to is how much are the games really tying into the curriculum of the classroom. It can be hard at times to make the classroom fun and exciting while at the same time staying on track with course materials and teaching it to your students properly.