My first attempt at gamification has wrapped up. The Great Science Race was a science unit of work on experimental design, but had gaming elements integrated such as points for completing work, passwords to level up, achievement badges and leaderboards. For more details please see my previous post.

On the last lesson, my class completed a short survey to what they thought of gamification. Click here to see the survey questions. The sample size was only 21 students, but the results were overall very positive towards gamification.

Here are some of the results:

When asked what they liked most about the unit of work, students indicated the following:

• Working in groups/teams
• The topic fun and entertaining
• The competitive atmosphere
• Doing experiments
• Getting a prize at the end if your team wins

When asked about how to improve the unit of work, students indicated the following:

• More experiments/more harder experiments
• More organisation in handing in tasks
• More interactive activities
• Assigning everyone in the group with roles/tasks

The next unit of work this class is doing is Chemical Changes, a topic involving learning about atoms and chemical reactions. The class has indicated that they still like working in teams, getting points and having a leaderboard. However, I’m going to scale back on the passwords and the achievement badges.