Embedding gamifying elements to learning makes it easier and more fun to keep working for the goals. Rewards, positive competition and meaningful stories can make learning more engaging and help to achieve more. Even though gamification is often content-driven and takes thorough design to implement, some simple elements can easily be applied in everyday learning.

• When writing a thesis or delivering other lengthy work it can be useful to visualize the progress concretely. Progress can be made more visual by, for example, moving marble balls from a jar representing full workload to a jar collecting the accomplishments.
• Positive competition between study mates can help to motivate the whole group. Throwing small challenges - like gaining the highest points in tests, accomplishing a task fastest or remembering the largest number of words or concepts - can drive everyone to work harder and to accomplish more.
• While reading a laborious book or delivering difficult exercises it can be motivating to define small rewards for small accomplishments, like for each finished chapter or number of written pages. An element of surprise can be added if these rewards occur in random order, for example drawing lots.
• Meaningful stories help people to engage with learning and to remember things more vividly. Therefore it can be very useful to design the assignments in online courses or classroom training so that they include a meaningful story, for example solving a real-world problem, such as helping a human character with his struggle.

Applying gamification in real life requires imagination and creativity. If you enjoy competing with others it makes sense to take advantage of that drive.

How could you make your progress more visible to you?

What kind of positive competitions your team could arrange?