Check out this super Autumn lesson plan covering the science behind seasons! With a captivating explanation of Earth’s tilt and the help of interactive Legends of Learning games, teach your students how the seasons change. Don’t miss out on this free downloadable educational resource. Let’s dive in!

Seasons Change: Autumn Lesson Plan

Autumn is around the corner! Making this a great opportunity to delve into the science of seasons. The tilt of Earth’s axis compared to its orbit around the sun is the key to understanding why we experience winter, spring, summer, and fall.

The following is an abbreviated lesson plan, excerpted from our Eclipses and Seasons learning objective, found on the Legends of Learning platform.

Objective

Students will be able to:
1. Explain why Earth has seasons
2. Draw a model of Earth’s location during various seasons

Teacher Preparation

1) Prepare a short lecture on Earth’s tilt and seasons.

Cross-Cutting Concept Tip: Consider adding a dash of photosynthesis since diminishing autumn light triggers trees to shed their foliage.

2) Create Playlist 1, a 30-minute playlist in Legends of Learning with the following games found in the Eclipses and Seasons learning objective:

• Seasons and Eclipses Adventures
• Science Fair: Eclipse and Seasons
• Temple of Seasons

3) Create Playlist 2, a 10-minute playlist in Legends of Learning with 5 assessment questions from the Eclipses and Seasons learning objective

4) Make copies of Eclipses and Seasons Worksheet

GET THE FREE AUTUMN LESSON PLAN

Deliver A five-minute discussion on Earth’s Tilt and Seasons

Deliver a short lecture on Earth’s tilt. Take any questions before playing the games.

Launch Playlist

Directions

While playing the first game in Legends of Learning called Ms. Rose & Eclipse and Seasons, use what you learn to complete the diagrams and answer the questions below.

Seasons

Label the seasons in the Northern and Southern hemispheres at each location. Circle the correct answer:

• Question 1: It is summer for the hemisphere pointing (away from, towards) the sun.
• Question 2: It is winter for the hemisphere pointing (away from, towards) the sun.
• Question 3: When a hemisphere points towards the sun, its rays are (stronger, weaker) on that part of Earth, making it (hotter, colder).
• Question 4: When a hemisphere is pointing away from the sun, its rays are (stronger, weaker) on that part of Earth, making it (hotter, colder).

Evaluation (10 minutes)

1. Launch Playlist 2 for your students. When they finish the assessment questions, any time left is free to play!
2. Analyze student results to determine what concepts need to be a focus for reteaching.

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Get more Free Lesson Plans for Educators!

• Lesson Plans: Three Clicks and Done!
• Our Solar System Lesson Plan
• The Sun, Moon, and Stars Lesson Plan
• Weather Prediction Lesson Plan

Weather on the Mind: A Timely Lesson Plan for Your Science Class

With the ever-present threat of extreme events, the topic of weather is likely top of mind for your science students. Use this engaging Weather Prediction lesson plan to address this timely matter and help your students understand weather patterns and how we predict their behavior.

This lesson plan is part of our Weather Prediction learning objective and includes eight exciting games that will engage your students while learning. It’s a perfect opportunity to explore how meteorologists forecast weather events and the impact these predictions can have on our lives.

Let’s turn this moment of heightened awareness into a valuable learning experience. Jump in and explore our Weather Prediction Lesson Plan below!

Learning Objective: Weather Prediction

Objective
Students will be able to:

• Describe the four types of air masses and how they interact to form fronts.
• Explain the causes of weather associated with different fronts.
• Describe how the meeting of certain fronts can cause extreme weather events.

Time Required: 90 minutes

Materials Needed

• Teacher computer with internet access and projector
• Student computers/laptops/tablets with internet access (preferably one per student but at least enough for small groups of 3 -4 students)
• Weather Map Practice handout (attached)

Teacher Preparation

• • Create Playlist 1, a 10-minute playlist in Legends of Learning with the following game found in the Weather Prediction learning objective: Forecaster
  • Create Playlist 2, a 20-minute playlist in Legends of Learning with the following game found in the Weather Prediction learning objective: Sunshine City
  • Make copies of the Weather Map Practice handout.

Download the free Weather Prediction Lesson Plan

Engage: 15 Minutes

• The teacher will play the following videos:
  • Air Masses and Fronts.
  • Weather Information Part 2 – Air Masses and Fronts (below)
• The students will take notes in their science journals on the different types of air masses and fronts described in the two videos.
• The teacher will ask the following questions to prompt discussion in the class:
  • a) Do you ever watch the weather report on the news?
  • b) What kind of information does the reporter show?
  • c) What is the weather today? Tell me your guess about the temperature and the likelihood of rain.

Explore: 10 Minutes

• Students will sign in to Legends of Learning and enter the teacher code.
• The teacher will launch Playlist 1. 
• Students will complete Forecaster as the teacher assists students as needed.
• Stopping gameplay to address the questions asked in the game may be needed.

Explain: 20 Minutes

• 1) Students will be given the Weather Map Practice handout. The teacher should also display the map on a projector/Smartboard so that the students can see the colors on the map.
• 2) Students will answer the following questions:
  • a) What kind of weather conditions do you think are associated with the blue line with triangles on it?
  • b) Based on your observations, which states and regions may be having severe weather on this day? Give your reasons why. Oklahoma, Arizona, and California; all of those states contain an ‘L”’(which designates a low-pressure system) which typically is accompanied by stormy weather. BONUS: Newfoundland (not a state; however it contains an ‘L’)
  • c) What kind of weather would you expect where the warm and cold fronts meet in western Canada? Why? Clear to partly cloudy. Where warm and cold fronts meet is called a stationary front, and weather along a stationary front is typically calm.
• 3) The teacher will discuss the answers to the handout with the students.

Elaborate: 25 Minutes

• 1) Students will log on to The NOAA National Weather Service Just for Kids website.
• 2) The students will first click on the tab labeled Forecast Maps
• 3) The students will describe the national weather on that day by analyzing the “Today’s Forecast” tab. They will do the same for the next two days by clicking on the tabs “Tomorrow’s Forecast” and “Day 3 Forecast”, respectively.
  • a) Students will write their weather forecast for each in their science journal.
• 4) Students will then try to forecast what the weather will be on Day 4.
  • a) Students will write their weather predictions in their science journals.
• 5) Using the “Today’s Forecast” Map, students will make a hypothesis about what the weather will be like in their hometown/city for the next three days.
  • a) Students will write their predictions in their science journals.
• 6) The teacher will discuss student predictions as a whole class.
• 7) Teach will display the NOAA National Weather Service Just for Kids page and will check the accuracy of their forecasts by entering their city name or zip code in the “Customize your Weather.gov” section on the top left of the screen.
• 8) If time allows, students may proceed to the Weather Information Display icon and make their own weather maps by customizing the parameters displayed.

Evaluate: 20 Minutes

• 1) Launch Playlist 2 for students.
• 2) Students will play Sunshine City and be assessed on their ability to answer the questions provided in the game correctly.
• 3) The teacher will analyze student results to determine what concepts need to be a focus for reteaching.

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Read our latest articles and news!

• Science Games to Explore This Summer & Back-to-School Season
• Math Games to Explore This Summer & Back-to-School Season
• Make It Bloom: New Science Games in May 2025
• Make It Bloom: New Math Games in May 2025
• Avoid Summer Slide With The New Awakening Update!

We’ve got great news! We mapped our games and assessment items to meet science standards for Texas and Georgia middle school students. This means we have two new interfaces into our product; one that is built for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and, one for the Georgia Standards of Excellence (GSE).

This interface is in addition to our standard Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) interface.

Interested educators from Texas and Georgia can access the new interfaces by contacting us and requesting their accounts be made TEKS or GPS compliant, respectively. Simply contact us and request your preferred interface.

“Cobb Schools are excited to be using the engaging Legends of Learning resources to teach our Georgia science standards,” said Sally Creel, STEM and Innovation Supervisor, Cobb County Schools. “Teachers are working hard to maximize every minute in the classroom. We don’t have time to waste on resources that do not align to our standards.”

If you haven’t checked out the Legends of Learning platform yet, give it a shot! All teachers can try LoL games for free. Create your account today.

In addition to TEKS and GSE, we are currently working to integrate our games with Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL).

“We know there is a shortage of quality classroom material that will help educators teach to these standards in the important subject area of science,” said Josh Goldberg, chief strategy officer, Legends of Learning. “We understand teachers in Texas and Georgia have been waiting for this news because they have been telling us for a long time that LoL helps their students master complex science lessons.”

Let us know if you have any feedback or questions relating to our curriculum-aligned games and interfaces.

This year, wow your class with game based learning by creating the perfect Legends of Learning playlist. Much like a DJ, teachers have the ability to deploy their “set list” of games and assessment questions to students. But playlists can do much more than that.

5 Most FAQs About Legends of Learning Playlists

To illustrate the power of this feature, we decided to answer teachers’ five most frequently asked questions.

1. How Can I Make Sure I’m Selecting The Right Games For My Student Playlists?

Selecting the right games based on student interest or academic level is easy with the detailed game modal window. Simply click on any game from within the learning objective screen and the game modal window displays a game overview, teacher ratings, curriculum suggestions, and the option to play the game yourself. When you’ve determined which games are the right fit, click the “Create a Playlist” button and drag the games into your new playlist.

2. How Do I Customize My Playlists?

There are several ways to customize playlists for your students. First, name each playlist and add it to your saved playlists section for future use. Next, try dragging games into your playlist and then moving the games around by clicking and dragging. Finally, use the time slider to shorten or lengthen the amount of time students can play.

Customizable Playlist: Name It, Rearrange It, Time It

3. How Do I Launch My Playlists To Students?

When you launch playlists to your students, you give them an engaging gameplay experience while following their progress in real time on your live teacher dashboard. You can even launch different games to different student groups and create a personalized gaming experience while ensuring they all master the same content.

Launch to Everyone

To get started, locate the dropdown menu under each playlist, which gives you the option to launch to everyone or to a specific group. To create a class or group, navigate to the students page and click the “+” button next to the word “class”. Type in the name of your class or group and press save. You can then click the dropdown next to each student and add them to their group.

Create Your Class

Click the back button on your browser to return to your playlist. The names of your classes and groups will appear in the dropdown menu at the bottom of the playlist. When you launch your playlist to a specific group, only the students in that group will have access to the playlist.

Launch to a Class/Group

4. How Do I Know Students Will Be Asked Questions During Game Play?

Assessment packs are valuable if you are playing games that are activity based and contain few questions. Click on the assessment icon next to the game list to add assessment packs to your playlist.

Assessment Pack Icon

You can control the number of questions in each assessment—from 1 to 99—by clicking the arrows. Then, click and drag to place the assessment pack before, between, or after the games. Use multiple assessment packs and create a pre-test/post-test to gauge student mastery.

Assessment Pack as Pre-Test/Post-Test

5. How Do My Students Sign In & Start Playing?

Students sign in to your playlist by navigating to login.legendsoflearning.com and clicking the students icon. Students are then prompted to enter your teacher launch code, located in the upper right hand corner of your playlist.

Teacher Launch Code

Students sign up using their first name and last initial, or sign in with their previously created username.

Student Login Page

Once you launch your playlist, each student’s dot appears in your live teacher dashboard. Individual student answers to game and assessment pack questions are recorded inside student dots.

Live Dashboard with Student Signed In

Create Your Perfect Playlist Today!

Legends of Learning strongly values the feedback of teachers and welcomes any questions you have on our playlist feature. Login today to create your perfect playlist. Have a great summer and happy gaming!

Earlier this morning, Legends of Learning issued a press release about the Vanderbilt University study “Substantial Integration of Typical Educational Games into Extended Curricula.” The following is a version of this research.

In the largest study of its kind, researchers found students boosted their test scores by the equivalent of over half a letter grade in three weeks when their teachers used digital games in the classroom. The new research, published by Journal of the Learning Sciences, demonstrates the benefits of game-based learning for students when compared to students who had no access to such games.

“Substantial Integration of Typical Educational Games into Extended Curricula,” was co-authored by researchers at Vanderbilt University and involved more than 1,000 students of 13 teachers in 10 diverse urban, suburban and rural schools in seven states (get the executive summary here). The educators integrated a standards-aligned set of 55 typical educational games into their curricula. Each teacher taught at least one class with the games and one class without.

The research found students in the classes with the games outperformed their peers on essay and multiple choice questions. It also found:

• Engagement increased. Teachers reported dramatic increases in engagement among students who learned with the games.


• Teachers enthused. Ninety-two percent of teachers who used the education games said they would like to use similar games again because of the impact on student performance and engagement.

Researcher and co-author Douglas Clark, professor, Vanderbilt University’s College of Education and Human Development, says, “The results highlight the potential of digital games for enhancing instruction, particularly in light of the teachers strongly positive experiences and interest in continuing to use games like these in the future. This study is important because it is based on data collected with a large set of games used by teachers in extended curricula across multiple school districts.”

Two of his co-authors, Dr. Vadim Polikov, a research scientist, and Aryah Fradkin, a former teacher, tapped into the results to launch Legends of Learning. The online platform is now home to thousands of curriculum-based education games and assessment items for middle school earth and space science, life sciences and physical science curricula. Teachers across the U.S. are using the same kind of standards-aligned games validated by the study to raise engagement and test scores. The games are available via the Legends of Learning site.

Dr. Polikov is presenting the findings next week at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference in San Antonio, Texas, on Monday, June 26. Legends of Learning will demonstrate its games and platform live at ISTE at booth 2632.

Some highlights from the Legends of Learning platform include:

• Short games (5–25 minutes) that align to middle school science curriculum standards to ensure content engages and helps students succeed in their studies


• An intuitive platform similar to Netflix and Amazon that makes games easy and natural to use in classrooms


• A dashboard that allows teachers to observe student comprehension in real time, create game playlists for classes and individual students, and assess content mastery


• A feedback loop that rewards game developers based on ratings given to their games by teachers and students, which allows the best games to rise to the top

The study was published in The Journal of the Learning Sciences (JLS), one of the top peer-reviewed academic journals for research on education and learning. JLS is ranked in the top 3 percent (5th out of 230) of all scholarly educational research journals as rated by Thomson Reuters, Journal Citation Reports®.

Let’s be honest. Summer school can be a drag for students. Why not liven up the classroom with middle school science content for free? Let’s play!

With Legends of Learning’s $100 in complimentary game coins and no obligations, teachers (and schools) have nothing to lose. In six weeks, a class of 30 students could play a game every school day and there would still be extra credits left over.

Science games offer kids an opportunity to enjoy summer school a little more and play games that facilitate learning and subject mastery. Teachers address NGSS and state standards while providing fun and engagement.

There are 900 games currently available in 90 lessons spanning Earth and Space, Life, and Physical Sciences learning objectives. If you are teaching any middle school science content, there is a game for you. Log in or create an account today, and explore our library.

Make summer school a more engaging experience than the average class. Your students will appreciate it, and their test scores will improve. Just press play.

P.S. If you are looking for more ways to make summer learning a fun experience, download our white paper, “How to Prevent Summer Learning Loss and Close Achievement Gaps.”

Excerpted from How to Prevent Summer Learning Loss and Close Achievement Gaps. Download it today.

By the end of May, everyone is ready for a break from the school routine. Students stop responding to the usual content delivery methods, and as a result, summer learning loss sets in.

So change up your methods.

Develop summer courses that meet learning needs and curriculum standards while providing fun and engagement. Fun and engagement can take many forms, from project based learning to field trips to digital gaming. For example, Legends of Learning science games provide an interactive learning experience for students with questions aligned to curriculum standards. The teaching methods vary but should be aligned with your district’s overarching academic goals.

To help you get started, here are six quick tips to add a little variety to your summer learning programs.

Six Tips For Your Summer Learning Experience

1) Focus on Individualized, Personalized Instruction. Limiting summer class size allows teachers and students to interact one-on-one more often. As a result, relationships develop; students are encouraged to learn and grow; and teachers guide students toward classroom lessons and activities that fit the individual student’s learning level and style.

2) Take Kids on Field Trips. Teachers demonstrate learning is fun through field trips. Such trips can occur within the community and range from the zoo to a local bottling company. If funds are tight, supplement off-campus field trips with digital ones. Google and Discovery, for example, offer digital field trips that take place in the Sahara, Antarctica, and other locations.

3) Invite Speakers to the School Campus. Students see how curriculum lessons translate to life skills when people talk about their day-to-day work. Teachers could invite civic leaders, parents, and other people into the classroom to talk about their work experiences and background. Microsoft also provides experts for the classroom via Skype. Kids can hear from environmentalists, coastal engineers, and other pioneers in the arts and sciences.

4) Turn Facts into Skills with Hands-On Projects. Students learn what they live, so teachers should find ways to turn basic concepts into practical skills. Some schools facilitate this idea with community projects, such as a garden or recycling center. Some schools, though, involve students in activities like building a greenhouse or small-scale wind farm. Others take their students to community partners where they participate in activities and projects.

5) Keep Kids Engaged Inside and Outside the Classroom with Digital Games. Kids like games. Teachers often do, too. Edgames offer chances to connect with students on their level. Kids play online games all the time, so giving them games that facilitate learning and subject mastery is a no-brainer. Plus, edgames typically allow teachers and district administrators to monitor student progress and, depending on the implementation, keep budget costs low.

6) Test New Teaching Models and Classroom Layouts. Summer provides a perfect time to pilot new teaching models, methods, and classroom layouts, says Gary Huggins, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association. Explore blended learning models, edgames platforms, and other ways to engage students and build digital literacy skills. Assess impact at the end of the summer and expand what works into an official instructional approach.

No matter which method(s) you employ, remember that students are drawn in by new experiences. If you surprise them each day with even a small tweak to your instructional methods you will see a huge increase in student engagement. Try Legends of Learning science games and you will see some very excited looks on students faces. Have a great summer and shake it up!

Excerpted from Eight Steps to Successfully Implement Blended Learning in Your Classroom. Download it today.

Having technology in your classroom can be a fantastic thing. It has the potential to expose your students to a world of information, hand’s on projects and game based learning, like our middle school science games. In order to maximize your classroom experience with blended learning it is critical to have a school culture that supports technology integration.

Getting Administrators & Parents On Board With Blended Learning

Making the shift from traditional learning to blended learning is daunting and impacts every stakeholder in a school community, including leaders, teachers, IT staff, students, and parents. As a result, the journey from old to new, from traditional to blended, must be a shared journey—one in which all stakeholders are engaged and all voices are heard.

For a blended learning initiative to be successful long-term, decisions cannot be top down or device driven. Instead leaders must carefully consider why they want to make a shift to blended learning and how that shift will benefit members of the school community. To get administrators and parents on board, use these two approaches.

Administrators

Administrators may hesitate to invest in blended learning because of cost or lackluster results. Overcome their concerns with detailed research and data that show blended learning’s past successes and your plans to implement the teaching model in the classroom.

Administrators also want hard numbers about projected academic performance. They prefer financial documents, implementation plans, and blended learning examples. The more data and documentation you can provide, the more likely your blended learning proposal will receive approval.

Parents

Parents care about academic performance on a more personal level—everyone wants their child to succeed. They want to know how their child is performing academically, and what you’re teaching in the classroom. They also desire to learn how to help their child improve test scores and study habits.

To reach parents, talk through how blended learning will motivate their student to learn and excel, they will back the initiative. Your conversation could prompt them to become advocates on your behalf and secure support from administrators, other teachers, and peer parents.

Establishing A Blended Learning Culture In The Classroom

Blended Learning Universe marks the importance of culture in blended learning success. The organization states:

Blended learning can sustain a bad culture or help create a new one. Culture is especially useful — or toxic — in blended programs because blended learning goes hand in hand with giving students more control and flexibility. If students lack the processes and cultural norms to handle that agency, the shift toward a personalized environment can backfire.

Start With Clear & Honest Communication

As such, your blended learning culture sets the tone for classroom instruction and assignments. It fosters the right attitudes in students, inside and outside the classroom. Culture can affect parents, too, causing them to encourage, rather than frustrate, their students’ blended learning activities.

To establish culture inside the classroom, begin with clear and honest communication with your students. Set expectations for your blended learning program, whatever it encompasses—classroom projects, edgames, student teams, at-home assignments, et cetera.

Use The “TRICK” Acronym

Also employ “TRICK,” an acronym suggested by Esther Wojcicki and Lance Izumi, authors of “Moonshots in Education: Launching Blended Learning in the Classroom.” The acronym stands for trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness. When your classroom embodies those five traits, students learn, grow scholastically and personally, and desire to help their fellow students.

Outside the classroom, you should also focus on communication, this time with parents. Just because you got their initial buy-in doesn’t mean your work is done. Let parents know how their kids are enjoying and improving thanks to your new blended learning environment. Remember that some parents may not be familiar with digital technologies and tools, especially if you teach in a rural or underserved area. Share basic information about blended learning with these parents, and offer opportunities for them to experience it in the classroom. Showing parents how blended learning works can better convince them than a letter sent home.

Spread The Culture Across The School Campus

Finally, aim to spread your blended learning culture across the school campus. Your own success with the initiative often sells itself, but you should talk about it, too. Sharing results and personal testimony invites other teachers to participate in blended learning and make a difference in their classrooms.

Learn More About Blended Learning With LoL

Our online educational games at Legends of Learning works perfectly with and seamlessly integrates into blended learning models. For more information, give us a call at 888.585.1317 or contact us online today.

You can download the whole white paper Eight Steps to Successfully Implement Blended Learning in Your Classroom here on the Legends of Learning site.

Tuesday, May 9th, is Teacher Appreciation Day (sponsored by the National Education Association (NEA), a moment in which we stop to honor the incredible commitment of our nations’ teachers.

The day coincides with the National Parent Teacher Association’s (PTA) National Teacher Appreciation Week, held during May 8th-12th.

Teachers should be recognized for their hard work and service.

Throughout the week, parents and students make cards and deliver candy. District administrators typically provide a catered lunch or breakfast for teachers and staff. This year, the PTA increases the fun and excitement with its #ThankATeacher contest. Federal, state, and local governments get in on the action, too, with teacher of the year awards like the one managed by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

Teachers Should Be Celebrated All Year Long

These things are wonderful. However, teachers should also be celebrated throughout the rest of the year. Teachers play a vital role in the lives of young people, imparting the skills and knowledge students need to reach a bright future. But teachers far exceed that role—they often are surrogate parents, therapists, sales people, and legends.

As Donald Quinn, a former educator, tells it:

If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs and some whom didn’t want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher’s job.

This year alone, more than 3.5 million teachers across the country will teach 55+ million students. That equates to billions of graded papers, lesson plans, student coaching, calls to parents, teacher-parent conferences, field trips, and more. A teacher’s job is never done, not even when the bell rings and school lets out for the afternoon.

The average teacher works 12-16 hours a day and spends about $500 of their personal earnings on school supplies every year. Their take home pay averages around $49,000. One thing is clear about the teaching profession: Teachers aren’t in it for the money.

Teachers Share How to Celebrate Them

So how can we appreciate teachers every day? Teachers provide an answer. They want to be listened and responded to. Teachers are the keys to success of any school. When they feel empowered by the district administration and supported by the community, they achieve the impossible in their classrooms.

At Legends of Learning, we know the theory as fact because we quite literally listen to teachers. Their feedback and ongoing conversations with our game developers and Ambassadors affect the games we publish. For us, listening is a way to simultaneously honor teachers, create a product that impacts the classroom, and change education for the better for everyone.

Here are some examples of the great things our teacher Ambassadors are doing with the Legends of Learning edgames platform.

Shanda Seibel, 5th Grade Teacher, Prarie Creek Elementary

Shanda gets her students excited about human impacts on Earth’s systems with games including The Big Picture Hosted by Zedd: Animal Agriculture and Skunk Dunk: Increasing & Decreasing Human Impacts. “Legends of Learning games give students the opportunity to learn their science skills and vocabulary in a fun and engaging way” says Shanda. “Students are in a generation of gaming. I found this year that Legends of Learning brought as much engagement as my science experiments.”

Kerrie Seberg, 7th/8th Grade Science Teacher, Walter G Byers School

Kerrie reviews the structure of the atom with her students in the game “Escape is Elementary.” “They love how the game is like Mario!!” says Kerrie. “Personally, I loved how they were overheard debating the definition of ‘subatomic particle!’”

Mariana Garcia-Serrato, 7th/8th Grade Lead Science Teacher, Adventure Program

Mariana discovers that students love test review, especially when it means choosing their own edgames. For test prep in 8th grade, I displayed the complete list of LOL learning objectives,” said Mariana Garcia-Serrato, a middle school science teacher in California. “Having that list of discrete learning objectives proved an easy way for them to decide what to study!”

You can log in and play these games today on the Legends of Learning platform. To become an Ambassador, visit our site and fill out this simple form.

We hope you have a fantastic Teacher Appreciation Day. Thank you for all you do inside the classroom and out!

Game Based Learning (GBL) and the blended classroom have become increasingly popular instructional options as teachers strive to improve teaching and learning. These two instructional forms complement each other well. Both serve the 21st century classroom by engaging students in their education and giving them opportunities to develop not only basic curriculum mastery but also critical thinking and problem solving skills.

GBL uses games to aid students’ learning. Although GBL can drastically transform instruction, as in the case of using World of Warcraft to teach humanities, GBL can be as simple as playing Jeopardy to review materials before summative assessment. Both applications involve games to complement or replace more traditional instructional methods, such as lectures, Q&As, and worksheets.

Most teachers employ some form of GBL. However, we must be careful not to confuse GBL with gamification. In gamification, a teacher incorporates the mechanics of game play and game design into the curriculum. Teachers who espouse GBL take a very different approach. They infuse the curriculum with games, and the games become primary methods to introduce, explore, explain, and reinforce material.

What Is Blended Learning?

Game Based Learning & Blended Learning In Practice

GBL fits seamlessly into a blended instructional model. Games can act as bridges between the physical, face-to-face environment and an online classroom in at least three ways.

Independent Game Play Outside Of Class

First, a student could play games independently, outside the regular class time and setting. Sites like Quizizz and Quizlet have popularized this method. For this to be successful, teachers must possess some way to track student progress and learning. This usually occurs in the form of tracking time spent on the game and assessing students’ answers and feedback to questions.

Teachers Meeting With Students Virtually

Second, a teacher could meet with students in a virtual environment. Examples of such environments include Minecraft: Education Edition and Second Life. With this method, the teacher schedules a time to meet in a virtual space within the game. Students and teacher are therefore in different places but meeting at the same time. The mode of instruction varies depending on the virtual environment and game limitations. A lecture is possible in Second Life, for example, but not Minecraft.

Students Meeting & Playing Together In A Game Environment

Third, a student could meet and play with other students in a game environment without teacher supervision. The situation arises when students are assigned collaborative Minecraft projects or asked to compete against other students in some games found on ABCya!.

Benefits Of Game-Based Learning In Blended Learning Classrooms

GBL perfectly suits a blended classroom framework. With it, teachers meet students’ expectations—today’s students already “game” with other students. Teachers also overcome challenges found with typical homework assignments and assessments.

Games can reduce testing anxiety and increase student motivation to engage and learn. In fact, some teachers see students playing games outside of class sheerly for the joy of it. For those reasons and many more, game based learning will become a more common mode of instruction that extends learning beyond the classroom.

Scott Beiter teachers science at Rensselaer Jr. Sr. High in Rensselaer, New York. Follow his blog, Full Sail Science, to learn more.