Gamification goes beyond playing games in class – it’s about engagement. It includes game-based learning and principles like ownership, creativity, and social influence for an engaging classroom.
Author Archives: Lee Tucker
Links: Finding the Common Thread
Links challenges students to group 16 related terms into 4 categories. It encourages critical thinking, communication, and justification of reasoning. The game offers various variations including whole group and individual assignments. It’s a useful tool teaching critical thinking and communication skills.
Matching Minds: A Quick-thinking Creativity Game
Matching Minds is a fast-paced, word association game that challenges students’ vocabulary. Players compete to come up with unique words that fit specific categories. Setup is easy; just duplicate the slide deck, create categories, and pair up students. The game promotes creativity, communication, and brainstorming. The team with the most points after the final round wins.
XP and Grades: Moving from Subtractive to Additive Grading
In my gamification journey, I’ve learned a lot through trial-and-error. In this blog series, I’m going to outline how I developed my gamified grading system to increase student engagement and focus on learning. To begin, I’ll look at why I changed the way I grade and some initial setup.
The Limitations of Authority
In his book, Gladwell talks about the unrest in Northern Ireland, and how a British officer attempted to quell the unrest by cracking down severely on citizens and instituted a harsh curfew. The idea was that they would instill fear into the citizens and keep them from breaking any laws. The opposite happened.
David vs. Goliath
We are going to encounter Goliaths this school year, possibly more than in previous years.
The Thing about XP and Grades
I’m working on adding a gamification overlay to my class next year, and I’ve been thinking a lot about grading as I’m going through the process. I’ll utilize XP and levels to determine grades each grading period, and students will have the opportunity to earn XP through a variety of methods.
A Nice Reminder to Lead by Example
I had a nice little reminder about the importance of my job this week.
The Post-Spring-Break Struggle
This week was a real struggle. Coming off of Spring Break is always tough. The end of the year is in sight, but there’s still a long way to go.
The 8-Bit Instructor: The BIG NEWS from John Meehan (EP030)
This week, John Meehan’s here, and he’s got some BIG NEWS! Listen in for some excellent stuff, and a little bit of wrestling talk. Plus, news from Microsoft and Google.
The Educator's Quest 