Event Report: Gamification of Teaching and Learning

This is an event report following the implementation of the webinar Gamification of teaching and learning conducted by the Community of Innovative Educators on October 28, 2021.  

The event started with several examples of gamification in different spheres of life. Gamified activities are fun and are attracting more participants. We need to try to transfer this in education too and to engage our students more in learning process. Serious gaming are games designed not for entertaining purpose but for some other goal, for example for educational purposes. But generally, teachers are not in a position to design games for own materials. Here comes the importance of gamification. Gamification is using game-like elements in non-gaming environment.

Gamification in education has a great potential because students are very used to playing games and will easily accept game-like elements in non-game concept. Several game-like elements were presented during this event are:

• Point/Coins
• Ranking/Leaderboards
• Avatars
• Content unlocking
• Try and fail
• Badges, rewards
• …

For some of this game-like events there was a discussion on how and when should be used. For example, Try and fail should be used only for formative assessment and not for summative.

The guest speaker in this webinar was a teacher from Vocational dental school from Sarajevo, Haris Hamzic. For his implementation of Digitcoin, Mr.Hamzic have been awarded as the most innovative teacher in B&H for 2016 and nominated for Teacher of the Year in Canton of Sarajevo in 2019.

Mr. Hamzic is a teacher of Mathematics. As a teacher of mathematics in vocational school, he struggled to retain the interest of own students. That lead to introducing a concept of DigitCoin. Digitcoin is a coin that is rewarded to a student after some achievement, like solving assignments, class activity. Digitcoins can be used to “purchase” extra time for a test, or to postpone test, or to increase grade. Mr. Hamzic has explained in details how Digitcoins can be obtained and used.

The event continued with questions and open floor discussion. Participants agreed that gamification of teaching and learning can be very useful. Presented examples can help teachers and guide them in implementation of gamification in education.

Please fill in short survey on Gamification in Education. 

Both presentations can be found in the Files section below.

Please find a recording of the event 

The following event in the Community of Innovative Educators is on 10th November at 11:00 CET. It is Battle Webinar: Soft Skills fad or need of our time.