In our course Creative Pedagogies for Active Learning we were asked by our students to share some active learning and teaching tools, we use or recommend. So that they could apply these in their own practice. So this is one from my teaching archives, the year is 2013. Although for the example I updated it to the latest pptx format.

Gamification with PowerPoint

Was something I tried out because I don’t have the ability to actually develop games, so I was trying to find a way of making do with what was available. This is an example of creating a game in PowerPoint. I had to strip all the content as I had used students previous work, which I can not publish. But I thought it would be helpful to have a presentation that works as a game so you can see how the hyperlinks act.

So first things first this can be created as a multiple choice quizz, we used written answers and then provided details of why these answers were good or not so strong. The emoticon or red cross out sign are for the student to vote if this was a strong or weak answer to an exam question.

You can use any shape or emoticon, smart art, graphic, or you can even place anchors in the presentation and then insert links to these. To insert the hyperlinks is really easy, simply click on the shape then go to ‘insert’ in the menu and ‘insert hyperlink’ at the very bottom of this menu you can go insert further, and under this last item you can link to different areas in the document.

So now if you want to try it out, open the presentation, click in present mode and click through, to see this in action. This is a really easy way to create interactive games, you can be as creative as you want to. Mind you the principle behind the hyperlink logic is a basic ‘if-then’ logic. If you want something more differentiated this will be a bit more challenging to achieve.

Just in case the embedding code doesn’t work, here is the link to the PowerPoint.