This is the last Storm Report for the semester. We'd like to thank our readers and the many faculty who have written copy for the Storm Report. This summer we will be publishing three times--June, July, and August. Please keep records of all you do this summer so that you have something to share with us in the fall.

Teaching, Learning, and Global Engagement wishes you a happy graduation and a great summer! Please reach out to us if we can help you in any way.

A couple of weeks ago, Learning Design facilitated a workshop on Gamification. Building on that session, I thought I’d share another gamification strategy: the Weekly Challenge. This involves giving your students a weekly challenge that asks them to apply concepts they recently learned in your course to a real-world case scenario within a limited timeframe (eg, 24-48 hours) and then as they accumulate points they can use it towards some type of reward such as opting out of a homework assignment or quiz.

Beyond the appreciation students will have for connecting class concepts and ideas to the outside world, research has also pointed to cognitive benefits of incorporating problem-based challenges from real-world contexts; specifically, because the complex, ill-structured nature of real-world problems encourages students to negotiate among different perspectives and search for information that supports their proposed solutions (Lu et al., 2014). Overall, the combination of tackling a real-world, problem-based challenge within a relatively short timeframe can enhance the level of student engagement.

So how do you do it? Here’s one approach:

Have you tried some form of gamification in your courses? How did it go? Let us know and we can share it in a future issue of the Storm Report.

Bell, K. (2018, May 7). Gameful Design: A Potential Game Changer. EDUCAUSE Review. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/5/gameful-design-a-potential-game-changer

Bogost, I. (2016). Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. Basic Books.

Kapp, K. M. (2012). The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education (1st edition). Pfeiffer.

Lu, J., Bridges, S., & Hmelo-Silver, C. E. (2014). Problem-based learning. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, 298–318.