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Gameful Learning Playground

Gameful Learning Playground

Join us on March 6, 2026, 12-1pm ET, for an engaging, faculty-focused virtual event designed to spark ideas and collaboration around gameful pedagogy.

Whether you're a seasoned professor or a lecture-hall legend in the making, this online event invites you to experience and be inspired by gameful learning strategies. Come away with strategies to better engage students and ensure course outcomes are met with enthusiasm and intent.

This dynamic session features multiple "Side Quests" (breakout rooms) where you can explore three practical "Power-Ups" for your teaching toolkit. We'll start with an introduction to the core mechanics of gameful design, then dive into demos of examples that have been implemented by IU faculty. The event concludes with a five quick, ready-to-use ideas to build your own gameful experience without overhauling your course.

The event map

The Tutorial (Introduction): Defining the core mechanics of gameful learning and how they map to student success
Side Quests: Three rotations in breakout rooms to showcase specific engagement strategies
The Loot Drop: Concluding resources to ensure you leave with a practical toolkit ready for your class

Speakers and topics

Terence Govender: Gameful Foundations

This session will be a rapid primer on gamification and game-based learning. Understand the basic principles behind why these strategies work and why they should be incorporated more often into higher education. Be inspired by a set of design changes that you could implement today to boost persistence without requiring much effort.

J.D. Mendez: Incorporating Games into a Science Class

Who doesn't want to play games in class? We are going to look at two examples of incorporating games into an introductory chemistry course:

A Dungeons and Dragons-style RPG (role playing game) called Chemistry and Chaos: Students take on the role of adventuring chemists, solving problems with their knowledge of chemistry rather than swords and spells.
A more traditional board game called Periodic Pipes, in which players travel along a path corresponding to the periodic table.

The goal for both games is to present the material is a way that is both engaging and fun.

Zachary Carnagey: Choose your own (learning) adventure

Inspired by the classic Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 1980s and 90s, this hands-on session explores how to design branching scenarios for learning. Ideal for complex problem-solving and high-stakes skill practice (e.g., patient care or lab simulations), branching scenarios create a safe, immersive space for students to think, decide, and learn from the consequences.

Gary Maixner III: Making Searching Engaging

Search&Destroy is a card game designed to teach students how to search in library databases. It has been available commercially for almost 10 years and recently expanded into a BioMedical version. This session will introduce the game to attendees and discuss its design and outreach in the library world.

Chongning Sun: Gamification Strategies to Motivate Student Engagement

Explore the impact of gamification through the lens of a real-world online accounting course. This session breaks down the strategies used to boost student engagement and examines how specific design choices influence both motivation and final performance outcomes.