Online GAMIFIED classroom

In the age of rapid changes and development in educational technology, there are limitless possibilities to explore how we can approach the online classroom. Yes, the classroom has now evolved and it keeps evolving and this is attributed to big changes brought about by major events in our civilization. In this case, the Covid-19 pandemic. Although there are great challenges, but the human spirit to learn and educate seem to have become more resilient than ever. Now educators have discovered many approaches to e-learning which used to be a novel approach prior to the pandemic. Now There is a paradigm shift in the way educators perceive the classroom.

The classroom seem to not be geographically dependent and has become the classroom of the world thanks to broadband technology and innovative new online collaborative applications. However the need is real! Students need to be reached out and they need to see and hear their educators. No amount of online sessions are substitute for human interaction. Whether on screen or off screen, we need to see each other eye to eye, face to face and heart to heart!

In my own teaching and learning practice, I have always seen more advantages of applying games in the classroom. I have applied Simulations and designed educational simulations which was also gamified to make learning exciting. Then, looking at the boom of the gaming industry and the immersive qualities of gaming, I have learned to understand its framework and applied them in my online classroom. It started with using an existing gamified LMS called Classcraft (www.classcraft.com) then I decided to create my own system, learning from the functions of google sheets and multi-platform streaming applications. My classroom since 2020 has transformed into an Online Gamified Classroom.