Little over a year ago I started to work on my gamified classroom. When I started, I had little idea of what that word even ment. I spent a ton of time finding tools, apps, and really anything that help make my course gamified. I thought I would share the apps I have found.

Ipad Apps:

Score Keeper App

Cost: Free

I like this app to display the scores for my in class competition. I use my Apple Tv to display scores so that students can get into the game a bit more. Grade-level games, games where you are adding points all day throughout the day, is another fun way to use this app! Students will be dropping by to see the scores all day!

30/30 App

Cost: Free

This one is awesome. It is a powerful timer app. It allows you to create a playlist of timers which move from one timer to the next. I have used this to put up a schedule for a power-packed day. Showing that we have 5 min mini-lesson, 15 minute practice, and 10 minute discussion on the activity. Another way I have used it was for a team challenge. Students and their teams would move through an activity where the app would show them when they could talk and when they couldn’t. This was just a nice way to spice up the class and keep the students on their toes. This cycle would repeat over an over throughout the class. This app made it possible and elevated the experience for my students.

 Too Noisy Pro

Cost: 1.99 or Free

This app watches the noise level in your classroom. The students see the meter raising higher and higher. If it stays in the red for 3 seconds it sounds an alarm and adds a number to a counter. I challenge my classes to have the lowest number during some work days. The pro app allows you to set some features like tolerance. In your gamified class, this is a fun side challenge that will require very little input from you. Low overhead and high on the students fun factor. This app is just plain old fun!

 Aurasma

Cost: Free

This is app works like a QR reader, however with this app you can turn anything into a link, picture, video just like a QR code. This is awesome for a school scavenger hunt. While in the app if students point at something you have made an activity for this app and it will start right up! So imagine you have a painting of Andrew Carnegie in your school library. You could set it so when students point the Aurasma app at the painting and it comes to life. The painting could give them the directions for the scavenger hunt. This makes the idea of QR code scavenger hunt much more like the movie National Treasure. They will love it!

Aris

Cost: Free

Now this app is robust! If you feel up to the challenge you could make some sweet challenges with this app. Aris makes a location specific quest. You can create items that need to be “picked up” and with your ipad/iphone’s GPS by having the app know when you have arrived at a location and gives you the item you seek. Ok, what does that all mean, quick example. You set that students must first go down town to a park to talk with the ranger. When they get there The Aris app and the character you created will pop up and give them what they need. Now if you don’t want them to have to walk to the park you can enable their fly to feature for student to be able to skip to a location. Some many cool things you can do with this app, however it does take time to setup. Very powerful!

There are so many great apps out today that could help you gamify your class. Another one to check out is Class Dojo. The list could be endless, I thought I would just share a few I have picked up along the way. I hope you enjoy and as always feel free to comment below.

Take care and happy gaming!