Hello everyone! Thank you for joining us throughout our exploration of gamification in education. Many of the concepts we’ve touched on in the last five posts are only part of the discussion. Now it’s up to you to take those tools, continue the exploration, and engage your students in new ways.

To help, we included one more post to the series. As a guide and a gift to you, we’ve compiled a number of resources that inspired us while researching this series.

Many of these resources were mentioned in various posts. However, others that didn’t offer enough to merit a full post, have their own uses and have proven themselves useful in gamified classrooms. We even threw in a couple of resources that we only just discovered in the last couple weeks. Feel free to peruse the list below, and find the tools that work for you.

Classroom Tools

ClassDojo
Simple point-based platform for tracking and displaying student behavior. The platform also makes it easy to communicate with teachers and parents, to keep them posted on their progress.

Classcraft
One of my personal favorite resources uncovered in this series was Classcraft. With Classcraft, students create a customized World-of-Warcraft-esque avatar that links to their academic and behavioral progress, and engage in ‘missions’ with abilities linked to their own skills. It’s got one of my favorite leveling mechanics too!

The Great Behavior Game
A simple point-counter platform for monitoring and displaying student behavior. While it doesn’t assign real-world rewards to certain point tiers, it can streamline a teacher doing so.

Socrative
Mobile assessment at its finest, and one of the best for gamification. Students can answer questions, receive immediate feedback on their answers, and track their progress on an assessment. There’s even a team game mode!

Mozilla OpenBadges
Create your own custom badges for your gamified classroom. Badges can be a great tracker of what skills have been mastered, and provide a physical incentive to students to perform and learn.

Khan Academy
Certain features in this video course platform make it easy to create both a flipped and  gamified classroom—badges, metrics, and easy tracking of how your students are progressing through a course.

Moodle
A great place to create your first gamified gradebook. Includes extra tools such as badges, and the ability to customize your gradebook to your classroom.

MangaHigh and PlayBrighter
To be fair, these two resources are both classroom tools AND content games—they’re a pair of platforms that mix an integrated gradebook with game-based assignments. MangaHigh focuses on math topics, while PlayBrighter will limit available choices to what you teach (mine shows me science and English games), but both use a bright, animated interface to add to the fun, and allow the teacher full control.

Gaming and Content

Learn With Portals
One of the most famous examples of a video game adapted to the classroom. Uses a popular game with realistic mechanics to teach physics, math, and more.

Steam’s Education Series
A series of games on the Steam Platform designed to be played in the classroom. Most of them are less than $10 for purchase, which for Steam-quality games is a fantastic deal.

Internet Archive
An increasingly comprehensive database of old-school internet content. All those great educational games of the 90’s are here—Oregon Trail, anyone?

Codeacademy
Codeacademy’s strength in gamification is in real-world application of all its content, and a student’s ability to easily track how far they’ve gotten in a course. Less flashy than other platforms for teaching programming, but it keeps kids engaged while demanding rigor.

3D Game Lab
Create a full gamified curriculum for your students and it’s great at providing student choice. Students get to choose what quests they complete as well as a number of built-in gaming mechanics that teachers can choose from.

GAMEUP
BrainPOP’s game platform. Features simple games on many popular topics, many of them relating directly to videos on BrainPOP. If you already have a subscription to BrainPOP, it’s an ideal companion, and useful even if you don’t.

The Radix Endeavor
A full-on MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) where all the missions are built entirely around STEM curriculum! While still in its pilot phase, the game is immersive and does great work at integrating realistic math and science content into every mission in ways that make sense. Teacher controls for assigning missions are also available.

Articles and Discussion

Extra Credits
A series of videos made by a group of dedicated gamers, game critics, and game analysts. Due to their expert understanding of what makes games engaging, their animated insights into the gamification of education have surprising depth.

Games for Learning Summit
Last April, the US Department of Education held a summit all about discussing the value of games. The articles and videos about the White House’s first-ever Game Jam alone are evidence that this format is finally being taken seriously!

Mr Gonzalez’s Classroom
Easily our least conventional resource here, this blog helps chronicle the successes, failures, and reflections of one teacher as he works towards improving his practice. All of his posts involving his thoughts on gamification are in one place, and his frank and friendly approach can help ground teachers who feel swamped in a lot of high ideals.

TED Ed
A TED Talk lesson about gamification. Succinct yet comprehensive, it can be a good introduction if you’re looking to bring this concept to your fellow teachers.

 Playing to Learn
One of the best summaries I’ve ever seen regarding the value of gamification in a classroom setting. It makes a point that many teachers have probably already noted: students who struggle with math and english in the classroom setting will often, somehow, learn much more complex patterns and algorithms all for the sake of a game.

Like the discussion, this list is incomplete. New tools are coming out all the time to help explore the possibilities of game theory in education. If you continue your research and find other tools that help you gamify YOUR classroom, please post them in the comments below!

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Pavlov and Classroom Management
Part 3: Rethinking the Grading Process
Part 4: Class Systems in the Classroom
Part 5: Games and Curriculum
Part 6: Conclusion and Resource List