Apply gameful learning to your classroom.
With Gameful.me you can apply principles of game design to your curriculum, instruction, assessment, and classroom procedures.
You build the game that works for you.
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Zone of Intrinsic Motivation
Inspired by Bud Caddell’s “How to be Happy in Business” Venn diagram.
Modified with permission.
A well structured course is already like a well structured game—learners build mastery by overcoming a series of increasingly difficult challenges.
Like the best games, the best courses tap into what we know about motivation. People are more motivated when there is purpose, mastery, and choice.
Increase Motivation
- Set clear learning objectives
- Use a series of locks and badges to provide multiple paths to meeting objectives
- Provide optional scaffolds, supports and enrichment
- Improve motivation with increased purpose, mastery, and choice
Improve Behavior
- Reward for desired behaviors such as on time and on task with game loot
- Provide consequences for undesirable actions
- Students work toward rewards available in the store
Work Smarter, not Harder
- Collect student work on integrated blog
- Supports images, links, video embeds, short answer, and full essay with a WYSIWYG editor
- Simplified feedback with canned feedback.
- Provide messages, inline comments and adjust loot
Warning: you should only start using Gameful.me if you want to fundamentally alter everything about your classroom. In fact, “classroom” isn’t even the right word anymore. As I look around my room I see students creating projects that I could never have conceived in a rubric for them. They’re instinctively connecting multiple Quests to create work that shows their cumulative knowledge. They go above and beyond not because they’re being pressured to, but because they want to. Students want to achieve and do their best. They want quick, helpful feedback to improve. All of us want to do this without getting our hands dirty in a grade book. This didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t always easy, It started small and will continue to grow to create an absolutely engaged and motivated classroom full of students. If that’s not the definition of win/win, I don’t know what is
Gameful.me is the core of my personalized classroom. Students come in early and stay late consistently, are self motivated and self directed. To say this has significantly and positively changed my classroom environment, my interactions with students, and performance in the course is to radically understate the case. I can’t thank you guys enough!
This year, Gameful has evolved into its own site. I find it stable, flexible, and I can’t imagine teaching without it. I have all the data that I need for assessment at my finger tips. I have students showing up to class 45 minutes before the start of school. (These are teenagers!) They stay past their allotted class time. They come after school. They work like demons. They explore enrichment items when they are done with their own work. There is no down time. There are very few behavior issues. I have the best attendence record in the school. And I have only just begun. There is so much more I can do with the Gameful system to let my students fly in their own direction. I have so many ideas for how to improve the game, student buy-in, and educational richness. For the first time in many years, I can’t wait until next year.
Built by Teachers (and students) for Teachers
Gameful.me is the result of years of collaboration of teachers and students. What started in one classroom in California in 2011, has grown to support innovative teaching in classrooms all over the world.
Mick McMurray
Since 2016, Mick has been the primary developer of Gameful.me. He took over from Mike’s Mac Lab students for purely selfish reasons–he wanted to make it work just the way he wanted in his classes.
Mick holds a B.S. in History from UC Berkeley, a teaching credential from San Diego State University, and a M.Ed. in Educational Technology from the American College of Education.
He currently teaches Business and Art classes in Southern California.
Mike Skocko
To make learning more fun and engaging, Mike and his students began implementing gameful learning strategies in May of 2011. After Mick began hacking their code in 2016, things really got interesting.
Mike holds a B.F.A. from San Jose State University, a teaching credential from San Diego State University, and a Masters in Education Media Design from Full Sail University.
He currently has way too much fun teaching Digital Arts classes in Southern California.
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