Educational apps: teach more efficiently with learning games
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In the modern classroom, educational apps offer teachers new ways to engage students, and gives them the ability to keep multiple groups of children involved in productive learning experiences. This use of gamification can allow teachers time to take a step back and assess the class as a whole, or even to prepare other learning materials.
By using an online educational app to create educational games, you can tailor interactive activities to specific fields of learning, and to specific levels of ability. While these can be great to liven up a classroom, they can also deliver exceptional results when applied to homework and revision purposes.
What are educational apps and how do you use them?
An educational app could be defined in a few ways, but in the context of this article, an educational app is a web-based platform that allows someone with no coding experience to easily create an online learning or educational game. You can use them to create and tailor educational games to suit your students and programme of teaching. You choose the topic, decide on the questions or content, and customise the game’s appearance to best serve yours and your learning institution’s requirements.
For example, after carefully considering desired learning outcomes, you could customise a Quiz. This example of gamification is one way to help reinforce what you’ve taught your students, and allows you to assess how much information has been retained in a lower pressure environment than in an official test. You could also consider adapting the Personality Test to famous historical figures, or for another example, even specific animals if you were teaching about the natural world. This can be a fun and engaging way to get children thinking about certain aspects of different subjects.
To create a more immersive, longer form learning experience, you could look at creating a Dynamic Path™. This gives you access to Drimify’s entire catalogue of games and experiences, allowing you to create multiple interactive modules. This could be a combination of learning games, with some levels of text, images, animations, or videos of educational value. The levels of pure content could carry information which will help the player on the next level or module of the Dynamic Path™ experience. The educational aspect of the game can feed into the gameplay, and vice versa.
How can they help make teaching more effective
Running a classroom full of children is not an easy task. Class sizes can bloat with logistical realities, and student motivation and ability can vary significantly across a group of 20 to 30 students.
Introducing mini-competitions, and awarding badges or points – elements of gameplay – has long been a go-to teaching method, and is a great way to start gamifying the process. However, this style of game can require an umpire of sorts to participate (the teacher), and doesn’t necessarily guarantee or allow all kids in a class to participate at the same time.
Utilising a web-based learning app to create interactive learning experiences offers a really innovative solution. They allow every member of a class to participate, can be tailored to ability levels, and don’t require the same level of attention from the teacher. Attention which may be better spent with students who might need more help, or preparing other learning materials.
Bring subjects to life by teaching in the medium your students are most comfortable in
Children in modern society are – in most cases – digital natives. They probably like playing video games at home, and they’re used to screens, digital interaction, and quick feedback cycles. By using educational apps to create educational video games as part of how you teach, you can tap into what they like and that conditioning to engage kids in subjects where traditional methods might have proved ineffective.
Help your students get more out of themselves through more engaging homework
Gamification through educational apps gives you the opportunity to create more fun, more immersive homework activities. Because you’re not supervising the kids when they do their homework, making it into a gamified experience can foster better, less distracted engagement than working through text books in less optimal environments.
Web-based apps, such as the Drimify platform, allow you to create learning games and experiences which your students can play on any device. As all our games are built on a mobile-first platform, they can be used on all modern devices, be that a smartphone, a tablet, or a home computer, so you’re not limited to only using them in the classroom. The likelihood is that all of your kids will have access to some form of device at home on which to play any educational games you create.
Use a platform like Drimify to help bring your lessons to life
All human beings are naturally curious and on some level wish to learn and make progress – and perhaps never more so than as children. Tapping into those internal motivators through engaging gameplay is another medium through which you can get kids committed to their education.
Online educational apps can give all teachers the ability to make their own interactive learning games that are easily adaptable and customisable to any subject.
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