Games for motivation

Klein & Freitag (1991) found that instructional games enhanced the motivation of students in all four areas – attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction and that students learned as much with games as with traditional methods of instruction. Games add another method of instruction that can add to understanding as well as to motivation. I am currently trying to determine how this will work in my online course. When I am teaching a face-to-face course, this objective is much easier. For my f2f introductory accounting course, I used a monopoly game to teach the students accounting entries with great success. Students’ moves on the monopoly board resulted in purchases, sales, rent or miscellaneous income and expense. Students were then required to prepare the journal entry, post it to the correct general ledger account and then prepare a trail balance and statements when the game ended (after eight classes). Online monopoly is an option that I have been thinking about but have not yet been able to figure out a way to coordinate moves. I also use jeopardy style games for review before midterms and finals. For an online course, I am still working on how to implement this in a cost-effective manner for the students. There are programs that can create online jeopardy games for students for review and I am looking into these programs but they must be able to work with the LMS or have a separate website that students where students can logon.