I had never heard the phrase “gamify education” before I joined the Tech4Good team at Salish Kootenai College.

Gamifying education is a trendy term for efforts to create immersive, engaging experiences as opposed to traditional lecture or classroom learning and it’s something I continue to enjoy implementing into our various programs at. Another term commonly used to describe the practices in place at Tech4Good and in the Digital Design Technology department is “experiential learning”.

Our keystone program at Flathead Tech4Good, now in its third year, is called Gaming the Future. The goal of this yearlong project is to gamify our educational opportunities and help students realize interests they may otherwise have not known existed by introducing various technologies and practices often reserved for those working at a more advanced level of study than the 6th thru 12th graders we recruit for our programming. 

Halfway through my tenure with Tech4Good, I now believe in the concept of gamifying education as strongly as I believe in the facts like reading for pleasure and practicing music increase your ability to learn and retain information, or that learning a second language has endless benefits.

In past years, the output from our Gaming the Future program has been collaborative board games based on issues stemming from food sovereignty on the reservation to preventing aquatic invasive species in Flathead Lake.

This year, our challenge theme is community health and we’ve taken a different approach to our student projects by working off of a “data jam” model we were introduced to by our partners at Flathead Lake Biological Station.

Implementing datasets and asking students to interpret them has been a challenge, but it’s a challenge I have enjoyed facing and I’m looking forward to the output projects we will see produced by our students throughout the course of the academic year.