Teach Content with Games and Make Learning Fun!
TL;DR: Using AI to Turn Classroom Content into Engaging Learning Games
(Instructional Guidance, Transcript, and Prompts below)
Fun Alone Is Not the Goal
Enjoyment in the classroom matters, but the true purpose of education is building knowledge, skills, and personal growth. Games can support learning when they are intentionally designed to reinforce content rather than distract from it.
How AI Can Transform Standards into Games
Teachers can start by selecting a specific content standard or learning objective. AI can then be prompted to design creative, short learning games aligned directly to that goal.
Team-Based Small Group Games
AI can generate uncommon, engaging group games that take about 15 minutes and focus on mastering specific skills. Teachers can refine these games by requesting clearer rules, adjusted difficulty levels, or additional practice examples.
Individual Player Games
Single-player games allow every student to actively engage with the content. These can include multiple levels of difficulty to track progress and can double as formative assessment tools.
Gamified Multi-Day Learning Sequences
AI can design multi-day instructional game systems with achievement levels, competitions, rewards, and increasing complexity. These sequences culminate in a final challenge and an individual assessment to measure learning.
Key Takeaway
AI enables teachers to quickly create engaging, standards-aligned games that support content mastery through collaboration, independent practice, and long-term skill development.
Pedagogical and Instructional Implications
Designing Learning Games That Strengthen Instruction
Engaging formats only add value when they increase the amount and quality of student thinking about the learning target. When you use game-like structures (levels, challenges, rewards, timed rounds), treat them as a delivery system for rigorous practice: students must still interpret, transform, justify, and apply ideas in ways aligned to your standard. Gamified elements are most effective when they support clear success criteria, frequent feedback, and tasks that require meaningful reasoning instead of speed alone.
Balance Collaborative and Independent Cognitive Work
A consistent instructional risk in team activities is uneven cognitive participation. In any group task, some students may drive the reasoning while others become passive. Plan intentionally for both:
- Use collaborative tasks when dialogue improves learning (comparing strategies, evaluating errors, building explanations, negotiating meaning).
- Use individual tasks when you need each student to retrieve knowledge, practice procedures, or demonstrate independent competence.
This “mix” is not about preference; it is about ensuring every student engages in the target thinking and you gather accurate evidence of learning. Well-designed cooperative learning requires explicit structures (roles, interdependence, accountability, and teacher facilitation) so collaboration produces thinking rather than compliance.
Sequence Toward Independent Transfer
Students typically progress more reliably when learning experiences move through increasing cognitive demand:
- Recognition: noticing and identifying key features or structures.
- Transformation: rewriting, reorganizing, or manipulating representations while preserving meaning.
- Strategic use: selecting among methods, explaining choices, and applying learning in novel contexts.
This sequence supports transfer because students practice both “how” and “when” to use a skill. Build toward an individual performance task at the end of the sequence. Students can learn together, but durable learning requires that each learner can perform alone under authentic conditions.
Use Short Cycles, Distributed Over Time
If the learning goal is mastery, distribute practice across multiple days rather than concentrating all practice in one sitting. Spaced practice improves long-term retention, especially when each re-encounter requires students to actively retrieve and use learning rather than simply reread or repeat a routine. In practical terms, design multiple short rounds across days that revisit the same objective with varied representations and prompts. This produces better evidence of learning and reduces overconfidence from short-term success.
Build Formative Assessment Into the Activity Design
Games can double as formative assessment when they generate interpretable evidence of student understanding. To accomplish this, embed brief checkpoints that require explanation or justification, not just answers. Use results to adjust difficulty, provide targeted feedback, and assign follow-up practice. Treat “levels” as diagnostic bands: if a student stalls at a level, that is actionable information about what to reteach or scaffold.
References for Further Study
Agarwal, P. K., Finley, J. R., Rose, N. S., & Roediger, H. L., III. (2019). Retrieval practice & Bloom’s taxonomy: Do students need fact knowledge before higher order learning? Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(2), 189–209. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000282
Dichev, C., & Dicheva, D. (2017). Gamifying education: What is known, what is believed and what remains uncertain: A critical review. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 14, 9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-017-0042-5
Gillies, R. M. (2016). Cooperative learning: Review of research and practice. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 41(3). https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2016v41n3.3
Sailer, M., & Homner, L. (2020). The gamification of learning: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 32(1), 77–112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09498-w
Video Prompts
CCSS Standards: High School Algebra
Seeing Structure in Expressions: Interpret the structure of expressions, Write expressions in equivalent forms to solve problems
Prompt:
You are a specialist in mathematics curriculum development and instruction. I need to teach my students the high school algebra standard “Seeing Structure in Expressions: Interpret the structure of expressions, Write expressions in equivalent forms to solve problems”.
I would like to use a team game for students to learn this skill. Be creative and provide fun, uncommon games I can use. Games should be appropriate for small groups of students and take no more than 15 minutes each.
Prompt:
You are a specialist in mathematics curriculum development and instruction. I need to teach my students the high school algebra standard “Seeing Structure in Expressions: Interpret the structure of expressions, Write expressions in equivalent forms to solve problems”.
I would like to use a game for students to learn this skill. Be creative and provide fun, uncommon single-player games I can use. Games should feature up to 5 levels to indicate student ability and should take no more than 15 minutes each.
Prompt:
You are a specialist in mathematics curriculum development and instruction. I need to teach my students the high school algebra standard “Seeing Structure in Expressions: Interpret the structure of expressions, Write expressions in equivalent forms to solve problems”.
I would like to gamify the instruction, with small group competitions, achievement levels, and rewards for accomplishing each level. Be creative and provide fun way to gamify the instruction. Games should take no more than 15 minutes. We will play games for at least 3 class periods with a final challenge on day 4, plus an individual assessment.