Educational games: top 5 tips to engage students

The classroom and school environment can carry negative connotations for students, and whether your school days ended 5 years ago or 50 years ago, it’s not a stretch to theorise how those negative connotations might come about.

Think it through as if you were a child, probably quite unprepared for the social, intellectual, and emotional strain of adjusting from home-life to your first day at school. You’re taken away from home in the early morning, sat in a class of 25 to 30 other children, and asked to concentrate for set blocks of time on numbers and spelling. This is 6 to 7 hours a day for 180 to 190 days a year. Milk breaks and story time aside, this can be a huge adjustment. The gap between being dropped off at the school gate and lunch can be a tough concept to grasp for some children, let alone when they’ll be able to go home again. The first day at the first school might be the single biggest culture shock that unites every single person in modern society.

But before this, how kids of preschool ages became walking talking miniature humans capable of communicating and contextualising the world around them, arming themselves with skills and rudimentary knowledge, was through experience: copying adults, trying new things, asking questions, and mostly, probably by playing.

What purpose do educational games serve?

An educational game is a product of gamification. In gamification there is a difficult or traditionally less fun task that needs to be completed, so game mechanics are applied in an attempt to make it feel more like play than a chore, and in doing so better the chances of completion. In the case of creating educational games, if you can gamify the learning process, and make study feel more like play, more students will be more likely to learn the required skills and knowledge.

In its simplest definition, an educational game is a game with the explicit intent of helping students or players better understand a subject by making it fun. An educational game – which could take the form of anything from a board game to a video game – could be customised to help pupils learn maths, language arts, science, critical thinking, or any subject a curriculum might call for. They really could be adapted to teach anything, as evidenced by the use of gamification not just in schools, but in a diverse range of corporate and professional training programmes.

Top 5 tips to engage students through educational games

The Drimify platform gives educators the toolkit to easily create online educational games without any prior experience. Here are our top 5 tips to make your learning games more effective:

1. Plan meticulously

It might be incredibly obvious, especially to educators, but like anything else, carefully planning your game ahead of time will make it a lot easier to customise, and also maximise its effectiveness when it comes to helping your students.

2. Ensure the game mechanics are applicable to the subject

The Drimify platform has a lot of games that can easily be customised, but some will be more suitable for making marketing games than educational games, and some games will be more suitable for teaching some subjects than others.

For maximum utility, the options on our Quiz will serve almost any subject if customised and implemented in the right way. However, while our Crossword and Word Search Games could be really well-suited to language arts educational games, they would be less suited to maths educational games.

3. Challenge your students, but don’t try to “beat them”

Nobody likes to feel as if they’re clutching at straws, and there’s not much sport in taking candy from a baby. Apply these idioms when designing your educational games if you want your students to succeed.

You need to provide the right amount of challenge if you’re going to keep your students engaged in an educational game and have it help them achieve their required learning outcomes. It’s important to consider what ages you’re dealing with and if there is a mix of ability levels within your class to cater for.

The right amount of challenge helps students work around their limits and grow beyond them, but if the challenge of your game is too great, you run the risk of rushing your students headfirst into those limits as if they were brick walls. Children may find this discouraging.

4. Combine multiple smaller games to make a longer, more engaging learning pathway

Smaller, standalone educational games can work well as part of a gamified learning programme, but combining those games into a longer-form, more immersive learning narrative offers the potential for much greater engagement levels. The Drimify platform allows you to use the Dynamic Path™ to combine any games in our catalogue to build a multi-level learning experience for your students. Some levels could use variations of the Interactive Quiz format, some levels could just take the form of video content or text and imagery to move the game’s narrative along, or even provide relevant information to help players on future levels. You could also incorporate some levels of more traditional game play for variation, like the Blocks Puzzle or Bubble Shooter, but customise them to fit the overall teaching theme of the game.

Ultimately, any Dynamic Path™ game travels across a customisable path, a bit like an online board game, which for geography purposes could take the form of a map of a country, or for historical purposes could travel across a timeline, giving you an inbuilt progress bar to appeal to a player’s sense of achievement. This format allows you to easily build a game across a longer narrative, and allows you to introduce a scoreboard with aggregate weighting to favour the game’s most educational elements, while also appealing to a player’s competitive nature.

5. Collect data: remember that you’re learning too

The class of students you’re teaching today is the most important part of your job today, but the class of students you’re teaching in five years time will be the most important part of your job in five years time. You’ll probably be a better teacher with another five years of experience under your belt, so surely your methods of teaching, including your educational games and how you use them, should evolve too? 

While there are already great examples of custom-built educational video games from which to draw inspiration and learn from, there are still a lot of untapped opportunities in the world of gamified learning. You could see an opportunity to customise an online educational game in a way nobody has before, or you could use a fairly tried-and-tested educational game, but utilise it for the wrong subject or in the wrong context. Collecting the data can help inform your ongoing gamification strategy as an educator.

Collaborate with the experts to engage your students in educational games

Educational games offer a modern solution when it comes to engaging digital native classes, and can be an innovative way to reframe a student’s relationship with their schooling. The Drimify platform allows you to make educational games easily without any prior experience, and gives you the ability to capture data in order to develop your approach to delivering gamified learning.

Introducing the opportunity to “play” subjects in their early education, alongside traditional methods, can be a great way to help them pupils in and make a good start to their education.

Want to know more?