Gamify Your College Classroom Strategies to Foster Critical Thinking and Life Skills Across Disciplines

Part 1: Gamification and 21st Century Life Skills

1. How Gamification Fosters Critical Thinking and Other Life Skills

Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa ápi

2. Game On! How to Incorporate Games and Gamification in Education

Daisyane Barreto and Jeff Ertzberger

3. Becoming an Influencer: Digital Badges and Leaderboards Incentivize Life Skills

Zarah Gayrama-Borines

Part 2: Storytelling and Escape Rooms

4. I Spy the Solution: A Meta Approach to Escape Room Design

Laura Geringer, Maddie Shellgren, Cody House, Colette Chelf, and Bucky Dodd.

5. Enhancing Learning Experiences Through Storytelling and Immersive Media

Drew Santorello

6. Elevate Empathy While Solving Problems: The Importance of the Scenario and Characters in Gamification

Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa ápi

7. Time’s Running Out! Escape Rooms that Promote Time Management and Cognition

Debra Luken and Florence W. Williams

8. To Escape You Must Communicate: A Mystery

Patricia Nill

9. Life Happens When a Case Study Gets Locked in an Escape Room

Dawn Taylor

10. Nailed It or Not: Failure Is Part of the Fun

Jennifer Culver

Part 3: Choose Your Own Path Games

11. Which Way Do I Go? Branching Case Studies Champion Decision-Making

Kinsey Wright and Lori Navarrete

12. Piecing the Puzzle Together: Conditional Release Mysteries

Adam Davi and Dorothy Loftin

Part 4: Role-Playing

13. High-Stakes Adaptability in a Gamified Role-Play Simulation with ChatGPT

Lynn Wahl

14. Let’s Role-Play: Critical Thinking Scenarios for the Classroom

Vanessa Mari and Rachel S. G. Bower

15. Tip of the Tongue: Incorporating Gamification to Bolster Real-World Interventions

Sheri Bayley

16. It’s AI, My Dear Watson! An AI Literacy Sleuthing Game

Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa ápi

Part 5: Gamify with Existing Games

17. Building From the Ground Up Takes Quick Thinking and Teamwork

Toni Picker and Celine Greene

18. From Case Studies to Game-Based Learning: Enhancing Ethical Sensitivity in Education

Kelly Richmond Pope and Roni Jackson

19. Pitch and Switch: Just How Adaptable Are You?

Brianne Taormina-Barrientos and Liz Galvez

20. What Happens When the Ends Don’t Meet? A Poverty Simulation to Teach About Poverty

Jessica Limbrick

21. Empower Tomorrow’s Leaders by Time Traveling to the Ancient World

Robert Stephan

22. Far from Trivial: The Benefits of Using TriviaMaker to Engage and Motivate Students

Chris Pilgrim and Michael Breazeale

23. BINGO! for Critical Thinking

Brenda Bien

Part 6: Semester-Long Gamification

24. Choose Your Own Learning Adventure: Designing for Student Motivation and Strengthening Life Skills

Chris Babits and Travis N. Thurston

25. The Senate’s Ethics Committee: A Course Narrative Promoting Decision-Making and Empathy

Nathan K. Silva

26. Scavenger Hunt for Cultural Artifacts: Fully Gamifying a Course

Roxanne Claire Farrar

27. A Collaborative Journey in Gamifying a Graduate-Level Course

Ashley Caudill and Anne Jewett

28. Conclusion

Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa ápi

Biography

Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa ápi is the instructional technologist for Nevada State University, USA.

When educators hear about the strong evidence supporting gamification's impact on learning, I suspect many immediately picture a favorite family or one that a faculty member used in a course helped them to learn in a way that lectures never could. Others might envision classic board game and wonder how it might be adapted to help students learn in their course. What likely doesn't come to mind? The wide range of game-based strategies already in use throughout education: role-playing, simulations, choose-your-own-path activities, discipline-specific escape rooms, and a surprising number of others.

When it comes to gamification in higher education, there is a lot more to consider than rolling dice and collecting tokens. Fortunately, Gamify Your College Classroom: Strategies to Foster Critical Thinking and Life Skills Across Disciplines brings clarity and creativity to the table. Edited by Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa ápi, this volume assembles 40 experts in the field of gamification. Together, these 40 contributors unpack a variety of game types, explain why they work, and—most importantly—show how you might use them in your own course, whether in-person or online, first-year course or graduate seminar, and in any discipline. This isn't just a book—it's a practical, thoughtful, and thoroughly useful handbook created by a coalition of gamification experts who know how to take the elements of a good game and move from novelty to meaningful pedagogy. If you are curious how to create more engaging learning environments, this book is where the game begins.

Todd Zakrajsek, Adjunct Associate Professor and Associate Director of The Faculty Development Fellowship, Department of Family Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, Director, Lilly Conferences on Evidence-Based Teaching

A very compelling and insightful book that offers a fresh perspective on the topic of using gamification in the classroom. The authors who contributed to this book provide a wide and diverse range of topics, such as using “Storytelling and Escape Rooms,” “Role-Playing,” and “Semester-Long Gamification.” Sierra Adare-Tasiwoopa ápi delivers a collection of meticulously researched chapters and engaging writing style that makes this book an essential contribution to the field of higher education. I encourage anyone interested in the fascinating topic of gamification to add this book to your collection.

E. David Moss, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Mt. San Jacinto College, USA

Into our doom and gloom world, with constant predictions that teachers are all going to be replaced by AI, comes this upbeat book to provide a cheerful antidote and start a fresh conversation. Whatever your discipline, it’s hard not to want to dip into this compendium and fantasize about how it might apply to your own classroom. The authors are thoughtful, knowledgeable, realistic, and more than a little inspiring. Whether you end up being an advanced practitioner in gamification, or just an armchair curricular dreamer, this persuasive volume provides new ideas for thinking creatively about how we engage students in meaningful learning encounters that can reinvigorate their futures, and ours.

Teresa Dawson, Teaching Professor in Geography, University of Victoria, Canada