AS many schools adopted online learning in the wake of the pandemic, teachers needed to adapt their expertise, teaching skills and strategies to ensure that online learning remained effective while using digital tools.
This can be observed more prominently in mathematics classes, where teachers must find tools that would be engaging students but are still effective in addressing the mathematical content and skills.
One of these popular approaches was gamification in mathematics education.
Gamification, as the name implies, involves establishing a system of scoring points and setting challenges or tasks to be completed to get these points. Not only is this approach engaging for students, but it also allows them to apply their mathematical understanding to solve these challenges no matter how simple or complicated they are.
There still remains a prejudice that mathematics is a ‘hard’ or ‘difficult’ subject that is exclusive for ‘smart’ people.
Gamification can challenge such beliefs and become a way to engage students in mathematical thinking and problem solving in a judgement-free environment, where it’s okay to fail because the teacher will be there to guide students to overcome their challenges.
Moreover, gamification can promote students’ active engagement in lessons because it includes non-routine tasks and requires students to actively participate in learning and solving the given challenges to score points.
Gamification of a mathematics lesson requires some preparation and critical thinking for teachers.
For example, the teacher needs to sequence the content in a way that would provide students with enough knowledge and practice to overcome the challenges and score points.
One of the most effective approaches in sequencing that teachers use is framing the tasks and lesson sequence within a story or a narrative to make it more engaging and believable for students.
For example, going through a sequence of challenges to return to a spaceship or a castle, and defeating monsters.
Aside from sequence, the teacher will also need to design engaging challenges that can gradually increase in difficulty to ensure students are developing their critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Digital tools have made this task quite easy, where digital tools like Wordwall, Kahoot, Quiziz and Classpoint incorporate both point scoring and feedback options to guide students in winning these challenges and learning from their mistakes.
Although many mathematics teachers used these tools in a limited manner in the beginning, there have been a shift towards creating more game-based activities and live quizzes that challenge students and develop their skills.
Gamification can be an engaging strategy to make mathematics more accessible and fun.
Mathematics teachers engage in designing more elaborate and well-structured activities as they continue to develop and enhance their practice in online classes.
Shaima Alaam
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