There is some controversy around the term gamification or gamified learning. Personally, I am all about it. Some argue that if we don't teach kids how to do things in a "normal" way then they will never learn. I vehemently disagree with this line of thinking. In my own life, when I am tasked with something I don't want to do I find a way to make it more enjoyable, why wouldn't we want our students to have the same thing? BreakoutEDU is a great way to gamify learning and teach soft skills like team work and communication. Most recently, I ran a math based Breakout in a 1st grade classroom. All the clues that students had to crack involved using their recently acquired skill of adding with regrouping. Students worked in groups of 4 and all the groups successfully broke out! The teacher was so impressed with the learning happening and the amount the kids enjoyed it that we are doing another Breakout next week on an ELA topic. They weren't easy problems the students had to solve and it wasn't an easy task to work in groups but they did it. Sometimes adding a game element to learning creates an even better learning environment than what would have happened in a more "traditional" setting.
I added this tweet to show just how excited these little scholars were to break out!
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