TPACK Quest

Throughout my Technology in Education course, we have been sent on a mission to complete a series of tasks in order to receive different technology badges. The badges were presented and weighted as follows:

My favourite badge to complete was in fact the very first, gamification. 

In this mission, we were tasked with responding to two questions regarding gamification. The reason I enjoyed this badge so much was because it opened my eyes to a whole new educational strategy and philosophy that, before this, I had never heard of! 

If you are unfamiliar with gamification, let me quickly catch you up to speed. Gamification entails taking the elements of game-play, and incorporating them into your curriculum delivery methods. This could look like using resources like Kahoot! to create a game-play like assessment for your class on a specific unit, or on the other end of things it could look like using game-play motivators during the pitches of projects or new lesson discoveries. Research has found that children in America spend on average 21 hours a week online, 8 of which are spent playing games. Children are extremely motivated by online games and technology, so as educators, if we are able to harness that motivation and direct it into a progression of interacting with and exploring the curriculum, children will be learning and having fun doing it.