Level Up Your Classroom: The Quest to Gamify Your Lessons and Engage Your Students

In this lively and practical book, seasoned educator Jonathan Cassie shines a spotlight on gamification, an instructional approach that's revolutionizing K–12 education. Games are well known for their ability to inspire persistence. The best ones feature meaningful choices that have lasting consequences, reward experimentation, provide a like-minded community of players, and gently punish failure and encourage risk-taking behavior. Players feel challenged, but not overwhelmed.

A gamified lesson bears these same hallmarks. It is explicitly gamelike in its design and fosters perseverance, creativity, and resilience. Students build knowledge through experimentation and then apply what they've learned to fuel further exploration at higher levels of understanding. In this book, Cassie covers

• What happens to student learning when it is gamified.
• Why you might want to gamify instruction for your students.
• The process for gamifying both your classroom and your lessons.

If you want to see your students engaged, motivated, and excited about learning, join Jonathan Cassie on a journey that will add a powerful new set of ideas and practices to your teaching toolkit. The gamified classroom—an exciting new frontier of 21st century learning—awaits you and your students. Will you answer the call?

Jonathan Cassie is head of the senior school at Sewickley Academy, just outside Pittsburgh. He has taught history, English, Latin, and game design at schools in Dallas, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. Throughout his 20-year career in independent schools, he has been a student and practitioner of innovation and change in education. He earned an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership from UCLA, has five level-100 toons in World of Warcraft (as of this writing), contributed to the first Game of Thrones roleplaying game, and has written two books on topics related to building meaningful roleplaying cultures and experiences for players.