My name is Kate Saxton and I attended this session at the 2026 Educators Rising National Conference.

Whether or not you are having fun at this conference right now all depends on what type of fun you like. And the question of how you have fun is essential to using gamification in education.

Gamification is the process of adding game-inspired elements into non-game interactions. The purpose of gamification is motivation. This happens in everyday life whether you’re playing the Monopoly game at McDonald’s or riding on your Peloton or using the Starbucks app at the beginning of your day. Gamification is pervasive in society, and it is a technique that can be used in education too. But gamification is more complicated than it would seem at first glance.

Not everybody likes to have fun in the same way. We see this all the time in school when students join a club or a sport they thought would be fun, only to quit after a single meeting or practice when they realize it’s just not for them. So the strategy for designing effective gamification is to accommodate the four keys to fun. What are the four keys? Well, a study by a gaming expert Nicole Lazarro identified four ways of having fun: hard fun, easy fun, serious fun, and people fun.

To put it in the context of the Educators Rising Conference, hard fun is something like a speech competition; easy fun is a scavenger hunt; serious fun is something like chess in the hotel lobby; and social fun is—obviously—the lip-sync contest.

There is a vast array of game techniques that can be used to create each type of fun. For example, leaderboards through Kahoot or Blooket create the competition that hard fun students really enjoy.

To assist teachers in creating educational gamifications, Dr. Hendron created a Playful Learning Designer tool through ChatGPT. Basically, teachers can tell the tool what they want to teach, and it will create a gamification that can be incorporated into lesson plans.

The purpose of education, Dr. Hendron affirmed, is to develop skills and competencies to prepare for life and career. Being an educator isn’t always going to be fun, but the most effective teachers will learn to use fun to their advantage.