Your Gameful Learning Environment Awaits

Customize your players’ Gameful experience and manage your classroom more effectively. Like everything Gameful, we designed these tools for ourselves. They work.

You will be the administrator of up to 5 websites (we suggest using one site for each of your preps) with up to 5 GB of storage and up to 250 players (students).

You are free to focus on gamifying your curriculum while we take care of software updates, daily backups, and allocating ample network resources.

Experience Points, more commonly known as XP, is the default setting. As with all designators, you may customize the name to suit your storyline.

Gold, silver, and coppers are the default currency. As previously mentioned, you’re free to create custom descriptors.

REP (for Reputation) is this year’s default modifier. REP levels either nerf (reduce) or buff (increase) a player’s rewards. (A great classroom management tool.)

Multi-stage quests, quest chains, quest pods, optional quests, bonus quests, hidden quests, timed quests, locked quests, and so many other ways to deploy your curriculum.

Organize your quests within graphical unordered lists. Within maps (and map sections), quests are automatically color-coded to indicate availability, completion status, bonuses, and penalties.

What good is virtual currency if there’s no way to spend it? Hint: Include a few (expensive) forbidden fruits. (One kid saved up so he could bring his pillow and sleeping bag to class one day. Zzz.)

Locks are strategic methods of limiting access to game content. Keys can be simple (time, date, completing the prior quest), or complex (combinations of Gold, Level, REP, etc.). 

Besides acknowledging student achievements, badges can serve as keys to unlock maps, map sections, individual quests, or store items. Some players are intrinsically motivated to collect these awards.

Like badges, groups can serve as keys, but they can also be used to sort players, temporarily or permanently, into one or more teams, professions, or whatever designator you might conjure.

Come on, who plays a game and doesn’t keep score? Our scoreboard does that and more, like the leader for the past seven or the past 30 days. Motivational feedback for slower-starters.

Provide players with date and time-stamped records of questing, purchases, badges, messages received, and more. As an admin, you will have access to even more nuanced data. Priceless!

Each quest stage contains an option to require a blog entry. Required elements might include any combination of text, imagery, files, URLs, etc. Without the necessary items, a player cannot proceed.

Customize your game by crafting naming conventions to match your storyline. Quests become Missions; Gold becomes Credits; REP becomes Health. Set up canned feedback and messages, bonus loot, appearance, and more.

Gameful’s central nervous system. A hub for you to access and interact with players and player data. Sortable, filterable, customizable, invaluable.

Our newest feature is a powerful tool to access student blogs, provide feedback, and alter rewards using filters to sort results by date, topic, student, period, read, unread, etc. A real game-changer (pun intended).

Contact one or more players with date and time stamped entries. Evidence of extraordinary or egregious acts, kudos, warnings, bonuses, penalties—a permanent record for both you and your players.

Some lessons have a rhythm. If one type lends itself to, let’s say, an intro, an example, a challenge, and a deliverable, create a template and use it repeatedly to work faster and smarter.

Learn to utilize this staple of the gaming world. Mix low to high-value items with an inverse chance of receiving one to heighten engagement. Use default bonus loot settings to save time.

In addition to how-to videos, you’ll have access to strategies and techniques used to engage students (as well as pitfalls to avoid). Mike will also document the Gameful experience from his perspective throughout the year.

Nothing beats sitting down together in a casual, leisurely discussion of all things Gameful. Grab an adult beverage (if you’re so inclined) and let’s share our hopes, concerns, questions, and observations.

We’re a small community of adventurous educators helping one another create self-paced gameful learning environments.

Contact us if you’d like a temporary student account on Mike’s website to examine it from a student’s perspective.

We’ll roll out new features, blog posts, strategies, plans for the future, and new insights all year long.

Do you have an idea on how we might improve Gameful Me? Some of our most popular features have come from our community members. We listen.

If you are unsatisfied at any time in the first 30 days, let us know, and you will receive a full refund.

Absolutely. We only want satisfied customers.

Our users have ranged from elementary school teachers to graduate school professors.

Ah, the #1 question new users have. Provide an antidote to the toxic potential of a student ever uttering, “I’m done” so your self-paced learning environment is rich with choice and opportunity. Begin with more quests than you think necessary in the short term, and continue to add content so no one will encounter a stopping point. Create a few open-ended, repeatable, and optional quests to keep your extremely eager beavers engaged in meaningful learning.

Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Definitely. We have a long list of new features and aesthetic improvements to roll out this year. See the Gameful Blog for more information.

Absolutely. Our community members suggested many of our popular features.

To use our free plugin, users had to purchase a domain and hosting before installing and configuring WordPress and Game On. Performance hinged on the quality of the host and users often encountered bugs we couldn’t replicate.

Now, you choose a plan, sign up, and you’re ready to go. We are free to focus on providing the ultimate user experience rather than dealing with mysterious gremlins.

Our power users typically spent $700–$900 per year on beefy VPS hosting and bragged (rightfully so) about the responsiveness of their websites. Our goal is to provide a similar user experience on Gameful at a fraction of the cost.

Mike here. Mick and I are network administrators. We also have secondary user accounts. Our Gameful websites share resources with our community members—identical resources because all of us have identical accounts.

We want happy, engaged students as well as satisfied customers, so we’ll allocate more resources as community growth necessitates. We’re in the same boat as you, and we want smooth sailing!

If our video library doesn’t help, post a question in our Support Forum, and someone will get back to you ASAP.* You’ll find that our community members often step in to help as well. Before you know it, you’ll be one of the crew helping a peer. As Richard Bach wrote: You teach best what you most need to learn.

* We’re teachers, too. For us, ASAP means right after school.