Project Requirements
The peer-reviewed project will include five major sections, with relevant sub-sections to organize your work using the CGScholar structure tool.
BUT! Please don’t use these boilerplate headings. Make them specific to your chosen topic, for instance: “Introduction: Addressing the Challenge of Learner Differences”; “The Theory of Differentiated Instruction”; “Lessons from the Research: Differentiated Instruction in Practice”; “Analyzing the Future of Differentiated Instruction in the Era of Artificial Intelligence;” “Conclusions: Challenges and Prospects for Differentiated Instruction.”
Include a publishable title, an Abstract, Keywords, and Work Icon (About this Work => Info => Title/Work Icon/Abstract/Keywords).
Overall Project Wordlength – At least 3500 words (Concentration of words should be on theory/concepts and educational practice)
Part 1: Introduction/Background
Introduce your topic. Why is this topic important? What are the main dimensions of the topic? Where in the research literature and other sources do you need to go to address this topic?
Part 2: Educational Theory/Concepts
What is the educational theory that addresses your topic? Who are the main writers or advocates? Who are their critics, and what do they say?
Your work must be in the form of an exegesis of the relevant scholarly literature that addresses and cites at least 6 scholarly sources (peer-reviewed journal articles or scholarly books).
Media: Include at least 7 media elements, such as images, diagrams, infographics, tables, embedded videos, (either uploaded into CGScholar, or embedded from other sites), web links, PDFs, datasets, or other digital media. Be sure these are well integrated into your work. Explain or discuss each media item in the text of your work. If a video is more than a few minutes long, you should refer to specific points with time codes or the particular aspects of the media object that you want your readers to focus on. Caption each item sourced from the web with a link. You don’t need to include media in the references list – this should be mainly for formal publications such as peer reviewed journal articles and scholarly monographs.
Part 3 – Educational Practice Exegesis
You will present an educational practice example, or an ensemble of practices, as applied in clearly specified learning contexts. This could be a reflection practice in which you have been involved, one you have read about in the scholarly literature, or a new or unfamiliar practice which you would like to explore. While not as detailed as in the Educational Theory section of your work, this section should be supported by scholarly sources. There is not a minimum number of scholarly sources, 6 more scholarly sources in addition to those for section 2 is a reasonable target.
This section should include the following elements:
Articulate the purpose of the practice. What problem were they trying to solve, if any? What were the implementers or researchers hoping to achieve and/or learn from implementing this practice?
Provide detailed context of the educational practice applications – what, who, when, where, etc.
Describe the findings or outcomes of the implementation. What occurred? What were the impacts? What were the conclusions?
Part 4: Analysis/Discussion
Connect the practice to the theory. How does the practice that you have analyzed in this section of your work connect with the theory that you analyzed on the previous section? Does the practice fulfill the promise of the theory? What are its limitations? What are its unrealized potentials? What is your overall interpretation of your selected topic? What do the critics say about the concept and its theory, and what are the possible rebuttals of their arguments? Are its ideals and purposes hard, easy, too easy, or too hard to realize? What does the research say? What would you recommend as a way forward? What needs more thinking in theory and research of practice?
Part 5: References (as a part of and subset of the main References Section at the end of the full work)
Include citations for all media and other curated content throughout the work (below each image and video)
Include a references section of all sources and media used throughout the work, differentiated between your Learning Module-specific content and your literature review sources.
Include a References “element” or section using APA 7th edition with at least 10 scholarly sources and media sources that you have used and referred to in the text.
Be sure to follow APA guidelines, including lowercase article titles, uppercase journal titles first letter of each word), and italicized journal titles and volumes.
Educational Games and Gamified Learning
Introduction
As an educator, being able to make my lessons more engaging and fun for my students is really important to me. One way that teachers can do this is by differentiating instruction and trying different things to give students something new everyday. Through my experience as a teacher, one thing that is engaging and fun for students is educational games. Whether it is for review, practice or learning new content, educational games seem to be something that get students more engaged and motivated. I find that when I have the chance to showcase an educational game in one of my lessons for my students, they end up getting the chance to have fun together and collaborate or compete while at the same time practice their knowledge of what they have learned. One example of this in my experience was when I played Blooket with my students and it became really competitive and fun for them. Finding ways to gamify learning is a topic that I want to research more into, since I want to make students have more fun while learning. There are a lot of benefits that come with gamified learning, which is why I chose this topic. I specialize in high school social studies, and so I will be focusing specifically within the context of gamified learning within high school social studies classrooms. Throughout this paper, we will look at the potential barriers that I may come across while researching, some of the benefits, how we can gamify learning well, some potential pitfalls that we need to avoid, some potential solutions to the barriers and pitfalls, as well as real world applications and practice with gamified learning in the classroom.
Potential Barriers
First of all, gamified learning is highly beneficial, however there are some potential barriers that teachers need to be aware of and overcome in order for us to even start with gamified learning. The first big issue is that there are a lack of educational games in the field of social studies, especially at the high school level. The biggest social studies educational games come from websites such as abcYa! and iCivics. However, one concern is that these websites are mainly targeting audiences within grades K-8. iCivics has a couple of games for grades 9-12 but they seem to be mostly better for middle grades social studies, since some of the games are on more basic concepts such as branches of power or the constitution. Due to this issue, teachers may have to be creative and either make their own games, try to come up with their own games, or they could use other platforms that cater to all subjects (ex. Kahoot). Making your own games may not be suitable. While you do get the chance to create a game that fits perfectly to your own vision, it is incredibly tedious and time consuming. These are probably the biggest barriers that may prevent high school social studies teachers from getting the chance to gamify learning for students within their classrooms. Additionally, there are a couple of critiques that come with educational games. For example, some educational games can become really repetitive and feel like fun is being forced. I will later talk more about critiques that come with educational games and will provide an example of a bad educational game.
Benefits of Gamified Learning
However, once we overcome these barriers, we can transform the classroom and learning into something much more fun, and there are many benefits that can come from gamifying learning. From my time in the classroom I have had the chance to see how educational games can benefit students’ learning. What I have seen is that students become more engaged and motivated when they are playing educational games. Research shows that educational games and gamified learning can “increase extrinsic and intrinsic motivation by getting learners involved in tasks through ludic activities, and this is particularly evident in the educational context, where gamification promotes student participation in the classroom and stimulates direct interaction between students and teachers” (Li, Ma, Shi, 3). It seems like a big benefit right? Educational games allow students to be both extrinsically and intrinsically motivated and also participate in the activity and interact more with students and teachers. However, one important question to think about is whether or not these educational games are effective when it comes to students’ learning and mastery of concepts. Many sources agree that when used correctly, “digital educational games help students better understand and master knowledge, resulting in a livelier and more exciting learning process. Furthermore, these games enable students to experience the learning content through realistic scenario simulations, stimulating their interest and motivation to learn” (Li, Chen, Deng, 3). This is a really interesting point, that games allow students to better understand and also master their knowledge of a certain concept. Also, through some simulations and very good educational games, students become very engaged since they are experiencing the learning content through a more realistic scenario or simulation. It is very clear that there are major benefits that can come from educational games, and so throughout this paper I hope to talk more about how we can maximize the benefits and avoid the disadvantages of gamified learning.
Math Blaster: An example of a bad educational game
However, one thing to keep in mind that is very important is that these benefits are only present for good educational games. Unfortunately, many educational games are repetitive, ineffective and boring. One example of a bad educational game that I had looked into is called “Math Blaster”, a game to practice math skills in addition intended for kids between the ages 7-12. You take the role of an astronaut in a spaceship who was sent on a mission to destroy trash that is polluting space with the spaceship’s blaster. When you answer a question right, you can use the blaster to shoot down trash. While at first, it seemed like a pretty fun game for kids of the target age when I was playing through it, it ended up getting boring really fast and there were several issues with this game. The first critique I have was that it only consisted of single digit addition problems, which when we think about the games intended audience, I believe this game would get very boring for students over the age of 9. Not only are the questions a bit too easy, lacking in variation, and repetitive, but the controls and game mechanics are horrible as well. It is difficult to understand how to maneuver your spaceship and when I had played through it I had just completely wasted all my ammunition.One way that this game could be made into a good educational game is by expanding the variation in problems, for example the game shouldn’t just be limited to single-digit addition. Adding more variation could allow for more engagement and differentiation. Another thing that could be added could be multiple scenarios, not just having one scenario in space where you're blasting trash but it could be another scenario, one example being that you could maybe be a superhero blasting criminals. Additionally, having power-ups could be a way to increase engagement as well, this way you can be rewarded for consistently doing well and be motivated to get hard problems correct. I also learned from this game that having more intuitive controls is really important, since if the controls and mechanics are bad, it can completely ruin the game.
Components of Good Educational Games
The reason why I mention all of this about “Math Blaster” is because we know that there are a lot of benefits that come from educational games and gamified learning, however it is important to know that these benefits are only present in good educational games. So, an important question to ask ourselves is what do good educational games look like? What are some essential components of good educational games? First of all, there are important elements that good educational games have. The first components that good educational games need are rules and goals. Rules set the framework for learning and keep students on track to meet learning goals, while goals also keep students on track to meet learning goals but also help boost motivation. Another important component of good educational games is their ability to test problem-solving skills and also give feedback. When students are given problems and get them correct, it boosts confidence and motivation, and when students get problems wrong, providing feedback to help them improve is essential. More important components include the ability to interact with others and compete, which helps students be engaged and motivated. Connected learning is a concept that relates to educational games and gamified learning. Games that allow for connections and interactions with their peers through connected learning is something that enhances the quality of those educational games. Playing educational games alone can sometimes be fun, but having the chance to play in a multiplayer game with your peers in real time is something that will be even more fun. Multiplayer games are an important positive component of educational games, since like I mentioned it relates to connected learning which adds a social component to these games. Additionally, with having this concept of connected learning in educational games, it allows for collaboration or competition but also unpredictability (Johnson, 2023). Like the important idea of connected learning, there is also the concept of personalized learning which can also be applied to educational games. Personalized learning is “an instructional approach that is learner-centered, flexible, and responsive to individual learners’ needs as they progress on mastery-based competencies” (Castillo, 2022). This concept of personalized learning can be applied to educational games as a way to help students master certain concepts. One great example of personalized learning in education would be the game Prodigy. Prodigy is mainly for students in grades K-5, who can practice math and reading skills while solving problems in order to kill monsters and dragons. They can customize their avatar and can get pets that will accompany them on their journey. This concept of personalized learning helps teachers address the wide gaps in skills between learners within their classrooms. It is really important since it can help fix this gap, of course there are other ways to address the wide gap in skills between learners, but when it comes to gamified learning, making it personalized can help students with their learning. These concepts are also very important when it comes to theoretical teaching and practice, since they are both ways to improve your classroom and student learning or progress as well. Although there are several components and concepts to remember, it is important that we think about these components and keep them in mind so that we know we are having students play through good educational games.
Pitfalls of Gamified Learning and Educational Games
However, even with keeping these components in mind, there are still pitfalls that can cause issues if we are not careful. The first issue that could happen is that the educational game ends up being more of a distraction rather than something that is helping students meet learning goals. For example, if an educational game is really fun but lacks the balance of meeting learning objectives, it is probably not the best idea to incorporate it into your lessons. This also ties into another issue of having purposeful integration. One of the main purposes of integrating educational games into your lessons is to help students review, and keep them engaged and motivated. However, if it is an educational game that lacks the ability to meet learning objectives, then there is not much of a point or purpose of including it in your lesson, especially if there are other alternative solutions. Some educational games have an issue with the lack of interactions between other students and peers. These games can be fun, however if students are not able to interact with their peers, it closes the door and removes the chance of students being able to share ideas, collaborate or compete with each other, which as we know are big components of good educational games. Therefore, the component about having the ability to interact, collaborate and/or compete with other students is essential, since it boosts engagement and motivation as well as it builds a sense of community within the classroom. Another important pitfall to be aware of is the way rewards are used. Whether you are using technology to gamify learning or not, rewards are an important part to motivating students. However, if you give students unappealing rewards or overuse rewards, the importance or significance of these rewards will diminish. One thing that is important to remember is that “rewards must be desirable and worth the effort” (Cypher Learning, 3). If you have rewards that are unappealing, it will cause you to lose engagement. Additionally, the rewards need to not be overused. Students should have to put in effort to gain rewards or have a sense of achievement. However, if students are getting rewards through points, achievements and badges with minimal effort, they are less likely to take the game seriously. One more issue but a very important one to keep in mind is the idea of making sure that the educational game or gamified resource is accommodating all levels of students. Usually, it is really easy to celebrate students who are doing well, but oftentimes we forget to pay attention to learners who aren’t as advanced and their attempts too. For example, one common educational game that has issues with this is Kahoot. After every question, we see the top 5 students on the leaderboard, however for students who are at the bottom, it can be very unmotivating and frustrating if they do not understand the content as well.
My one negative experience with educational games: Quizlet Live
It is clear that gamified learning and educational games are largely beneficial, and if we are aware of the pitfalls with gamified learning and the other negative perspectives of it, we can find ways to counter those critiques to make gamified learning solely beneficial. Personally, I have always seen gamified learning and educational games in a positive light. They have almost always made my lessons better and the kids seem to have a lot of fun because of these educational games. However, I do remember that there was one time in my teaching experience when gamifying learning and educational games were creating a negative experience for myself and for other students. We were playing Quizlet Live, which I think is a great educational game still and students were being paired up into teams. If you don’t know about Quizlet Live already, students are put together into teams and definitions are split up among them and they have to click on those definitions when the term to those definitions comes up on their screen. If one person makes just one mistake, the entire team starts over. I was teaching a lesson on immigration and decided to have students review through a fun game of Quizlet Live. The issue that I ended up having was that several students in the class had found a loophole to frustrate their teammates. What they ended up doing was intentionally and immediately clicking on the wrong definition as soon as the term had popped up. This caused other students to get frustrated and have absolutely no chance to practice what they knew and stopped their team from making any progress. Since students in the class were trolling, many students ended up becoming disengaged and doing their own thing. One thing that I have learned from this experience was that before playing, I need to remind students to not troll their classmates. If they end up ignoring me, I can remind them to not ruin the game for others and if they cause issues again after that then I would shut the game down and have them review in a less fun way since they ruined the game for their classmates. These are important steps to take, although it seems harsh if they were to continue trolling, it is important to show students as the teacher that it is unfair for other students when this is happening since they can’t even have the chance to play the game and review the content. This however, is one and the only one negative experience I have had with an educational game that I have used during a lesson. Thankfully, I have learned a way to prevent this from happening, through simply just reminding students to use the game in the way it was intended rather than trolling their classmates.
Alternate Perspectives / Critiques of Gamified Learning
I am obviously not the only teacher however who has had a bad experience with educational games or gamifying learning in their classroom. Even as a student, I remember some of my teachers having negative experiences with educational games. I remember that during a Kahoot, lots of students were finding an app where you could enter the PIN of a Kahoot and then thousands of bots would enter the Kahoot. One of my teachers had become so frustrated with this to the point that when it happened, she shut down the Kahoot and told us that she would not use it for the rest of the school year. Finding ways around these loopholes that students find is important, and although it is really difficult to find a way around the botting in this example, one solution could simply to remind students of the expectations, similarly to what I would do with Quizlet Live. However, some teachers still have some critiques and alternative perspectives of gamified learning despite the benefits. One of the biggest critiques that teachers seem to have is the issue with stress and anxiety that gamified learning can bring, especially with its competitiveness which can affect motivation in a negative way. “Leaderboards and competitive elements, while engaging for some, can become a source of stress for others. Gray et al. (2018) discovered that fitness apps with leaderboard systems often promoted unhealthy competition over user well-being. This constant pressure to perform and compare oneself to others can increase anxiety and decrease self-esteem” (Hure, 2024). To me, this makes a lot of sense, since when I go through educational games, some students who aren’t doing well usually check out. This could be because of stress or anxiety like the source is talking about, or it also could be simply they are less motivated after not doing too well.
Innovative Ideas in Gamified Learning
Educational games and gamified learning are things that while they do make the classroom better, they are very well known and so finding ways to become more innovative is really important in order to make things more exciting. Teachers are implementing plenty of things to try and gamify their curriculum to keep students more engaged and achieve learning objectives in an easier, fun way. Gamified learning has been around since the 1980s however, just recently after the pandemic things have started to pick up with gamification and educational games. A lot of the innovations that are taking place however are ones that are starting to pop up in under-resourced communities. Some of these examples of innovations in under resourced include Code Mitra, which is an educational technology application that “brings coding without computers to the gullies of India, aiming to increase representation from the less-advantaged in programming careers” (Voutilainen & Metsapelto, 2024). Additionally, another application called ‘The Loop and Fammi vedere la luna’ provides “juvenile detainees with an outlet for telling their own stories through an escape room game” (Voutilainen & Metsapelto, 2024), which is amazing for juveniles who are going through rehabilitation and receiving gamified learning to help their progress. So, right now some of the biggest innovations outside of the American classroom are in other places in the world where marginalized and under-resourced groups or communities need it. However, when it comes to modern American classrooms, the biggest innovations have been through uses of technology and mainly ones that we have already discussed throughout this paper. Some of the things that are being mentioned when it comes to innovations include “points and leaderboards” and “scenario-based learning” which respectively “introduce a competitive element to learning that can motivate learners” and also “present learners with real-life situations where they must make decisions and face consequences” (Logard, 2025). The reason why I decided to mention these two specifically, is because with the unfortunately lack of social studies games for high school students, these two new ideas in gamified learning can be used even without technology in my own classroom. For example, I could give points and leaderboards for homework or other activities, and I could use scenario-based learning when teaching about a certain concept to show an example of something. Therefore, these two new innovations that teachers are using are important ones to keep in mind, since they could be used in an educational game, or without technology and gamifying learning in your own classroom.
Conclusion
In conclusion, educational games and gamifying learning have plenty of benefits that allow students to become more engaged and motivated, however the gamification of learning has to be done in the correct way in order to gain these benefits. There are plenty of pitfalls and alternate perspectives about educational games and gamified learning that educators need to be aware of in order to make sure that they are using these resources in the correct way. Additionally, understanding what a bad educational game or bad use of gamified learning looks like and what components are needed for a good educational game are important as well. After a lot of research, there are still sadly not a lot of social studies educational games that can be used within my high school classroom. However, one good thing is that there are certain ideas and innovations that teachers have been using in different subject areas that I could use within my social studies classroom without even having to use technology for it.
Works Cited
Bastean, Joshua. “The Effects of a Gamified Curriculum on High-School Students” https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5871&context=etd
Bransford, John. “How People Learn: Chapter 9: Technology to Support Learning” https://canvas.illinois.edu/courses/57336/files/16739789?module_item_id=4210482
Castillo, Nathan. “Trends in digital personalized learning in low and middle-income countries” https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/media/896/file/UNICEF-Global-Insight-Digital-PL-LMIC-executive-summary-2022.pdf
Centrical. “Revitalizing Educational Experiences with Gamification for Learning”. https://centrical.com/resources/blog-gamification-for-learning/
Cypher Learning. “10 Gamification pitfalls to avoid when designing online training” https://www.cypherlearning.com/resources/infographics/business/gamification-pitfalls-to-avoid-when-designing-online-training#:~:text=Instructional%20designers%20might%20feel%20tempted,stop%20taking%20the%20course%20seriously
Hazdun Nazariy. “Gamification in education: Transforming learning through play”. https://geniusee.com/single-blog/gamification-in-education
Hure, Denis. “Negative Effects of Gamification What to Watch For” https://rewardtheworld.net/negative-effects-of-gamification-what-to-watch-for/#:~:text=The%20negative%20effects%20of%20gamification%20range%20from%20addiction%20and%20decreased,psychological%20impacts%20and%20ethical%20concerns
Li, Minzi. Ma, Suyi. Shi, Yuyang. “Examining the effectiveness of gamification as a tool promoting teaching and learning in educational settings: a meta-analysis. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10591086/#:~:text=Gamification%20was%20found%20to%20increase,the%20classroom%20and%20stimulates%20direct
Li, Youling. Chen, Di. Xinxia, Deng. “The impact of digital educational games on student’s motivation for learning: The mediating effect of learning engagement and the moderating effect of the digital environment. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10783726/#:~:text=By%20providing%20a%20contextualized%20learning,and%20more%20exciting%20learning%20process.
Logard, Frederik. “Gamification in Learning: 7 Best Examples of 2025” https://www.lingio.com/blog/gamification-in-learning