P20 Conference

Students lead lives outside of the classroom, and sometimes those extracurricular lives can impact what happens in the classroom. Having spent time trying to sort out the validity, legitimacy, and relative importance of apples and oranges in students' lives, I have had that burden lifted by gamifying my classroom. Engaging student motivation is challenging, but there are ways to reinforce effort that can redirect students toward becoming more proactive learners. Although still enduring scientific scrutiny, gamifying has been shown to engage working memory and to deactivate the neural Default Mode Network, one of the obstacles to the academic learner.