TPACK Teacher Quest

The badges I received while completing my TPACK Digital Teacher Quest.

In our technology class, our professors aimed to gamify the course and make it based on a video game format in hopes that it would motivate us to finish all of the tasks we needed to do to complete the course. Each task that we did, we earned a badge to signify that we had completed it successfully. Gamification is a motivational strategy that could be used in our future classrooms as well. I can see how this type of strategy would be effective to use in an elementary school classroom, as it would encourage students to complete tasks to the best of their abilities, as each task they complete, they would receive a reward. They could collect rewards until they had collected all of them. This is similar to the reasons that many people are motivated to play video games - to achieve rewards for completing tasks and missions. As a future educator, I believe that gamifying your classroom would be extremely time consuming and may not be effective in motivating all students. Regardless of the pros and cons of gamification, it was interesting to see how it could be used with a class and I would be interested to observe it's effectiveness in an elementary school classroom to see if it would be worth using in my future class.