The quarantine “came out of the blue,” forcing schools to find innovative solutions to keep their activities going in an adapted format. This process has been—and continues to be—very challenging. However, many schools have found an approach that has proven very effective in engaging students and facilitating effective learning. That is what we will discuss in this article.

With the quarantine, one concept has become particularly important in education: hybrid learning. But how can we successfully introduce something so new at such a delicate time?

There are countless variables: teacher training, student adaptation, how to keep students engaged, the effectiveness of learning, and so on. This leads principals and coordinators to seek possible solutions.

When we talk about student engagement, hybrid learning, and gamification, we’re talking about developing the skills and abilities that our students naturally possess and bringing the reality of so-called “digital natives” into the classroom.

By bringing the classroom closer to students’ real-life experiences and making teaching more fun and engaging through playful activities with educational value—such as educational games—we transform what was once seen as a “chore” into fun, without compromising learning.

This is where the second key player comes into the picture: gamification. Simply moving students to a virtual classroom and having them watch hours of lectures hasn’t been very effective. How can we compete for students’ attention when they’d rather watch Netflix, YouTube, play video games, play, or sleep?

A private school affiliated with a large educational group in Rio de Janeiro turned to gamified, personalized, and adaptive activities through the Jovens Gênios learning platform to capture the attention and interest of its middle school students. And the results have been stunning!

At the Tijuca campus, for example, 7th-grade students answered more than 38,000 questions last month during the quarantine. That works out to 1,250 questions per student.

And that’s no coincidence. Personalizing learning through adapted questions reduces frustration and helps students make progress on the subject. But the real game-changer is gamification, as it allows for a new approach to the topics covered in class.

With it, we’ve been able to connect school to students’ everyday activities—such as non-educational games and streaming platforms—sparking their interest in class and, above all, making them more active participants in the learning process.

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