Classroom Games to Engage Our Students

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   After watching a webinar presented by Mrs. Randa Mikati who had presented games to be implemented in our physical and online classrooms. We will present these games here and add some more due to the magical reflections of gamification on students' motivation to engage in learning activities.

The first 2 games presented in the webinar had done on PowerPoint and their question type is multiple choice. They are the World Cup game and the Jeopardy game.

 In the world cup, we have to :

1. Divide the class into groups who will play against each other.
2. Each group has to choose the country they are cheering for.
3. Start answering the questions.

We can add sound to make the games funnier.

In the Jeopardy game which is a table of several questions which should be categorized and graded. After this student will choose a question, answer it, and get the score.

For groups, they should be heterogeneous and if we reward the winning team, students will be reinforced and hence engage more.

Online, some games are very interesting. We have a lot of quizzes, assignments, interactive videos, and images with questions on the Nearpod website. With the use of Nearpod games, students can go to the website and enter the code that the teacher gives to them then the teacher can monitor the presence of the players who choose characters to represent them in the game. Then the teacher starts with them the game question by question. Teachers can monitor the score of students during solving the questions one by one and at the end hence there will be a winner in these games. We have also that Genially free platform. On this platform, we can give the same questions to students at the same time and they can figure out if their answers are right or wrong by some selves. There are different forms of presentations, infographics, and many others and under each category, there are a lot of templates some of them are free which we use, and some of them we have to pay for.

There are quiz templates and there are some of these templates with content but we can change and modify their content. Also, we have an online game name escape room it's an online game it's similar to a physical escape room game. It is created using Google sites and includes Google Forms to go from one discovery to another.

Note that we have to publish the Google site before sharing the link with the students to start the game.

I had tried the Jeopardy game and world cup and I see that these are more engaging in physical classrooms.

I see that the games used on the Nearpod website and its Genially websites are more useful since they contain ready-made templates, we have only to fill them up but I think that the escape room needs a lot of work, time, and hard effort so I prefer to use Jeopardy, Genially gamification games and no paid website games.

We can add some other classroom games such as virtual music culture, alphabet chain classroom games, and virtual field trips.

For example, in the word chain game, we have to arrange participants in a circle and explain to them rules then we start the game by telling the name of the fields then the second person gives another example and move from one person to another with this until one of them broke the chain by a word out of the field. Here we can make brainstorming for a previous lesson to start a new one.