Understanding the global water cycle is fundamental to Earth systems literacy and fostering an informed citizenry; however, students often struggle with terminology, the role of key processes, and estimating the physical and temporal scales, leaving knowledge gaps that impair comprehension. The Hydrologic Cycle Game is a pedagogical tool for…

The economic theory of natural resource exploitation predicts that scarcity crises will not arise because forward-looking resource owners will smooth their extraction over time to maximize their profits. The model providing this result can seem opaque and technical to students, but its intuition can be learned from experience. The author shares a…

Cybersecurity education is becoming increasingly important in modern society, and hands-on practice is an essential element. Although instructors provide hands-on labs in their cybersecurity courses, traditional lab exercises often fail to effectively motivate students. Hence, many instructors desire to incorporate gamification in hands-on…

Despite an increased number of case studies simulating social problems in the classroom, due attention has been rarely paid to social dilemma games in light of teaching the key concepts of sociology. We propose a paper-and-pencil experiment designed for sizeable students to simultaneously explore various conditions of sustainable cooperation in a…

This article describes a game show-style classroom exercise that is appropriate for any management-related courses that wish to enrich students' understanding of a key phase of the hiring process. The activity introduces the importance of job descriptions and job specifications through a semiscripted unstructured interview patterned after a…

Organizational communication has concepts and processes that can be difficult to absorb. Using gamification as a pedagogical strategy, a semester-long project is developed to help students learn through application. The Bear Cave is a class-wide competition where students create an organization and seek a fictional investment of $1,000,000. In…

Purpose: Serious games and gamification are evidence-based forms of game-based learning that facilitate student/client instruction. Serious games are activities that directly incorporate educational content into games; gamification integrates characteristics of games into nongame activities. They both promote learning by increasing students'…

This article presents an experience in teaching mathematical thinking through games in a math course for non-science majors. The course described here has run twice on the campus of Sam Houston State University and is a combination of escape room pedagogy and game-based pedagogy. From these courses, I note an increased engagement of students with…

Responding to the call for embracing mêtis in the classroom, this piece puts scholarship on embodiment and emergent gameplay in conversation with one another to explore a potential means of cultivating "mêtic" intelligence in the composition classroom by empirically examining how the open world game "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of…

This article focuses on using the cooperative board game "Pandemic"® to teach management. In "Pandemic," players must work together to cure four diseases and save the world. In this article, we suggest how it can be used in the classroom to teach decision making and also give guidance on how the game can help students learn how…

A constant challenge for faculty is to gain and to hold student interest so that substantive learning can occur. One way to achieve this is through the use of games. This article describes an escape room activity for the classroom that is modeled after commercial escape rooms. This fun, single-session team dynamics exercise can be used in an…

For higher education, the question of how in-class activities can be supported in large lectures is of great relevance. This paper suggests a gamified flipped classroom approach to address this challenge. In an experimental study, N = 205 educational science students performed either gamified in-class activities using a gamified quiz with points…

This article reports on a classroom-based investigation into English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' views on lessons which integrated m-learning tools for assessment (Kahoot!) and collaboration (Padlet). 289 Chinese university students' views on such lessons were collected through open-ended questions posted on Padlet. The questions were…

Historically, classroom content delivery has relied on lecture, but recently there has been a call for educators to use active learning to promote student engagement and a deeper understanding of the material (Bonwell and Eison 1991; Erickson 1984; Cross 1987; Prince 2004; Bodnar and Clark 2014). According to Prince (2004) active learning is any…

In recent times, there has been growing disinterest by students in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). This trend is especially acute in those students who do not take STEM content during their secondary or high school education. This disinterest might be conditioned by negative emotions towards science developed…