An AI coach can help teachers gamify their lessons

Incorporating play into learning has positive effects on student engagement. This AI tool can help teachers bring research-based principles of play into their classrooms.

At a Glance

• Using strategies of game design can help teachers create learning opportunities that are engaging and motivating to students.
• The most effective forms of gamification go beyond the common strategies of points, badges, and leaderboards, which can be demotivating for some students.
• Gamification works best when teachers understand some of the principles behind what makes a good game.
• The Playful Learning Designer tool, available on Chat GPT, can coach teachers through creating gamified learning experiences that meet the teachers’ specific needs.

Multiple sources point to the importance of student engagement in their learning, yet recent data suggest that students as a whole are not engaged with school. We can see this not only through achievement data, but through the lens of chronic absenteeism.

In surveying students and parents about engagement with school, a 2025 Brookings report found that only 26% of 10th-grade students say they love school, only 29% report learning things they are interested in, and only 39% report feeling as if they belong in school. A 2019 Gallup study focused on schools in Texas demonstrated high correlations of student engagement levels with student academic success, leading to postsecondary readiness. 

A 2024 Gallup poll reported that students are most excited or interested in school learning when:

• The topic was something they wanted to learn more about.
• The teacher made it exciting and interesting.
• They were able to learn in a hands-on way, such as doing an experiment, simulation, or demonstration.

While there are likely multiple reasons for student disengagement, it seems like common sense to empower our teachers, as instructional designers, to incorporate the powerful psychology of play — specifically, playing games — toward learning. James Paul Gee (2005) said as much 20 years ago:

I believe that we can make school and workplace learning better if we pay attention to good computer and video games. This does not necessarily mean using game technologies in school and at work, though that is something I advocate. It means applying the fruitful principles of learning that good game designers have hit on, whether or not we use a game as a carrier of these principles (p. 6).

What can we learn from the motivation and engagement in playing games to help us design learning experiences that truly engage our students?

Fun and games in school?

The seminal book Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal (2011) provides a strong argument for the value of games. McGonigal believes games provide a powerful response in us that lead to “key emotional states that correspond with overall well-being and life-satisfaction” (p. 32). Games, she continues, engage us in “hard fun,” the same term Seymour Papert used to describe students who are highly engaged in their learning.

What can we learn from the motivation and engagement in playing games to help us design learning experiences that truly engage our students?

Of course, not all games have the same design, and many game designers have identified different types of game personalities, suggesting why one kind of game may appeal to us and others do not. Nicole Lazzaro (2004) has posited that there are four keys to what makes games fun:

• Hard fun. Overcoming frustration and achieving the win state; this inspires fiero — a type of pride.
• Easy fun. Doing interesting activities where you don’t need to try very hard and can simply enjoy the relaxing and playful experience; this inspires excitement.
• Serious fun. Making a real-world difference, such as improving one’s self, making more money, or helping the environment; this inspires personal fulfillment or naches.
• People fun. Interacting with other people and forming relationships; this inspires amusement.

Taking the psychology of what makes games fun and applying those to learning as a means of motivating our students is called gamification.

Why gamification?

“Motivating, enjoyable game experiences arise from players pursuing and eventually overcoming well-balanced challenges constituted by a system of goals, objects, rules, actions, and feedback,” writes Sebastian Deterding (2015). Gamification is about taking these types of experiences out of the magic circle of a game and placing them into everyday life. Today, gamification is all around us. If you use a fitness tracker or smartwatch to capture your daily exercise, if you participate in a wellness contest at work, or if you use a rewards card at your favorite cosmetics store, you’ve been exposed to elements of gamification.

One of the first ways many engage in gamification is through the embrace of points, badges, and leaderboards. While potentially important in providing game feedback and accelerating our feeling of accomplishment, these aren’t meaningful to all players. Collecting points or competing with others in gamified learning systems, such as Khan Academy or Kahoot!, encourage and motivate some learners, but not others. In fact, if the challenge in these activities is at the right level, slow progress or being listed last on the leaderboard could become demotivating. Therefore, we should look beyond these methods for other ways games are motivating.

Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter (2012) offer a more nuanced definition of gamification: “Gamification requires a fusion of art and science. On one hand, it involves emotional concepts such as fun, play, and user experience.” And when it comes to fun? “If users perceive the gamified system as fun, they are likely to come back. It behooves you to constantly assess the aesthetic appeal of your system and consider whether it’s fun to play.”

Thinking about gamification from the start of your design may make it easier to strike the right balance between fun and learning. Middle school educator Michael Matera (2015) designs his instruction to focus around “the three Cs”:  content, choice, and challenge. “We must remember,” he writes, “that it was exploration, not memorization, that expanded the worlds of early learners and mapmakers alike” (Chapter 4). He has found that intentionally designing his curriculum into a gamified structure offers more freedom and flexibility for learners, produces students who are better risk-takers, develops student confidence, and inspires a sense of wunderlust, spirit, and passion. In his classroom, he advocates for the power of play, which “brings back the natural yearning that exists inside of all of us to learn” (Chapter 3).

What drives us

As part of a theoretical system around gamification he calls Octalysis, Yu-Kai Chou (2019) identifies nine different drives that draw us to games. One of these is “ownership and possession,” which speaks to our desire to receive tokens of value. He identifies more than 100 game techniques, such as avatar, build from scratch, and collection sets for how designers using gamification can activate the associated drive within a player.

While his background is in game design and not gamification, Jesse Schell’s (2020) game lenses, which are available as a downloadable app for Android and iPhone, provide multiple ways to tailor your instructional design with the qualities that encourage better games. For example, “the lens of help” encourages us to think about how the game player (in our case, the learner) feels they are helping others, whether that’s their peers who are also playing the game or through an imagined background story.

The best way to design gamified learning might be to apply our experience as game designers. However, many educators are not, in fact, game designers. The next best approach might be to have a savvy game design expert as our coach

Both of these resources dig into the psychology of a game and what inspires us to play, the emotions we experience while playing, and why we come back to play again. These perspectives are missing in a lot of instructional design (ID) models.

The ARCS model developed by John Keller (1987) embraces human motivation. The design process for ARCs includes four major steps:

• Define: classify the problem, analyze audience motivation, prepare motivational objectives.
• Design: generate potential strategies, select strategies.
• Develop: prepare motivational elements, integrate with instruction (and other potential instructional design models).
• Evaluate: conduct developmental try-out, assess motivational outcomes.

The four conditions for motivation in ARCS (Keller, 1987; Faryadi, 2007) are:

• Attention: strategies for addressing the learner’s interest and holding attention
• Relevance: strategies that show the usefulness of the content
• Confidence: strategies to develop the expectation for success among learners
• Satisfaction: strategies that marry motivation with satisfaction about their process of learning

Gamification for instruction is not about entertainment because “Motivation is the length and direction of effort expended by the learner in pursuit of achievement. One cannot rely strictly on the presumed entertainment value of the instructional materials to provide motivation” (Huett, 2006). Whether you adopt an ID model like ARCS, or start building your gamification plan using a tried lesson or project-based learning unit that has solid bones, Michael Matera and John Meehan (2021) advocate for thinking about gamifying learning like seasoning a recipe with salt. Food with no salt is bland, food with too much salt? We’d push it away.

Designing playful experiences

Put simply, to design learning experiences that capitalize upon motivation we should provide our students with opportunities for play. Researchers from Project Zero (Mardell et al., 2023) assure us that incorporating play into learning is grounded in research:

However, research from fields as diverse as ethology, developmental psychology, education, and neuroscience has helped create a map. With this map, we can no longer say that play has no purpose. Play offers a motivating and efficient place to learn. Motivating because learning certain skills helps keep the play going, makes it more interesting, and offers more opportunities to connect with friends. Efficient because in play, children learn in many different directions at once — gaining information, understanding disciplinary concepts, developing skills, thinking critically and creatively, and collaborating to build knowledge. Play is a good place to get some thinking done (p. 40),

They go further to define playful learning as more than exercising choice and having autonomy; they tell us that playful learning occurs when students can explore the unknown and experience feelings of delight and enjoyment (p. 49).

The best way to design gamified learning might be to apply our experience as game designers. However, many educators are not, in fact, game designers. The next best approach might be to have a savvy game design expert as our coach. My approach was to build a custom GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) that knows the theory behind games and gamification that could then help lead a teacher toward designing a gamified learning experience for their students.

Toward the playful learning designer

ChatGPT specifically allows you to develop specialized GPTs, which you train on how to interact with a human while referring to a body of knowledge when constructing their responses. I developed a GPT called the Playful Learning Designer to act as a guide to a teacher looking for advice on how to gamify a specific lesson.

To develop this GPT, I shared my own research into gamification, along with some important references, such as Chou’s Octalysis game techniques and James Paul Gee’s theories about game design. It has also been trained with Keller’s ARCS instructional design model, project-based learning, and different technologies available in today’s schools to foster learning. Finally, I prompted it to ask questions of the teacher to get as much information as possible in coming up with a good gamified instructional design. Because it’s a chat-based model, teachers unfamiliar with particular aspects of the design can ask clarifying questions or ask for changes once a design is developed.

Using the playful learning designer

To try it out, visit the Playful Learning Designer at ChatGPT (available at https://bit.ly/PlayfulLearningDesigner or using the QR code).

Tell the designer about your needs: include the subject, the amount of time you want to devote to the lesson or unit, and details about your students and the standards addressed in your lesson. You can also include details that are important for your classroom or students (i.e., availability of a learning management system or specialized technology, student interests outside school, or any germs of ideas you have for gamifying this lesson).

The designer knows that it’s easier to apply gamified approaches to longer learning experiences, such as project-based learning units. In this case, you may want to target more than one learning standard, even incorporating standards from other disciplines (i.e., writing in the context of a science class).

Rather than taking output from the GPT into your classroom, the intent is for you to have a coach as you begin thinking about gamifying your classroom and embracing the obvious benefits of play on learning.

Following Keller’s ARC model, you can also provide the GPT your own motivational goals for students alongside learning goals. It knows how to approach these with gamified experiences. It can also provide you with rubrics that assess both motivation and the stated learning objectives.

While the output from the designer likely won’t be specific enough to provide you with a complete bespoke lesson plan, it can help you see how and why you might include gamified elements into your lesson. You can ask questions about its choices to learn more about how to apply gamification and request modifications to the design (e.g., expand this lesson to a three-week experience and incorporate these two additional standards). And after you’ve implemented the lesson, you can provide feedback, enabling the GPT to learn from your experiences to further modify the design.

My ultimate goal in developing this designer is to provide you with a real-world environment to explore how to include elements of play and games into your own instructional design. Rather than taking output from the GPT into your classroom, the intent is for you to have a coach as you begin thinking about gamifying your classroom and embracing the obvious benefits of play on learning.

The obvious benefit is that as an educator, you add to your instructional design toolkit a personalized methodology toward developing playful, motivating learning experiences for students.

 

References

Chou, Y. (2019). Actionable gamification: Beyond points, badges, and leaderboards. Octalysis Media.

Deterding, S. (2015). The lens of intrinsic skill atoms: A method for gameful design. Human-Computer Interaction, 30 (3-4), 294-335.

Faryadi, Q. (2007). Instructional design models: What a revolution! [Monograph]. Universiti Teknologi MARA.

Gallup. (2019, October). Engagement and hope positively influence student outcomes.

Gallup. (2024, August). K-12 schools struggle to engage Gen Z students.

Gee, J.P. (2005, March). Learning by design: Good video games as learning machines. E-learning and Digital Media, 2.

Huett, J.B. (2006). The effect of ARCS-based confidence strategies on learner confidence and performance in distance education. [Doctoral dissertation]. University of North Texas.

Keller, J.M. (1987). Development and use of the ARCS model of instructional design. Journal of Instructional Development, 10 (3), 2-10.

Lazzaro, N. (2004, 8 March). Why we play games: Four keys to more emotion without story. XEODesign.

Mardell, B., Ryan, J., Krechevsky, M., Baker, M., Schulz, T. S., & Liu-Constant, Y. (2023). A pedagogy of play: Supporting playful learning in classrooms and schools. Project Zero.

Matera, M. (2015). eXPlore like a pirate: Engage, enrich, and elevate your learners with gamification and game-inspired course design. Dave Burgess Consulting.

Matera, M. & Meehan, J. (2021). Fully engaged. Dave Burgess Consulting.

McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. Penguin Press.

Schell, J. (2020). The art of game design: A book of lenses (3rd ed.). CRC Press.

Werbach, K. & Hunter, D. (2012). For the win: How game thinking can revolutionize your business. Wharton Digital Press.

Winthrop, R., Shoukry, Y., & Nitkin, D. (2025). The disengagement gap: Why student engagement isn’t what parents expect. Center for Universal Education at Brookings.

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This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Kappan, Vol. 107, No. 3-4.