5 Insanely Fun and Easy Ways to Award Stars in PowerPoint

Gamification taps into different ways students can learn in the form of a game. Despite the well-established fact that gamification is effective in teaching and learning, it may not be immediately intuitive on teachers can easily and effortlessly integrate gamification in the classroom.

This is where ClassPoint, the #1 student engagement tool in PowerPoint comes in.

ClassPoint seamlessly integrates gamification into PowerPoint, featuring a user-friendly reward system interface that enables you to award stars in PowerPoint easily!

In this blog article, we will share with you 5 different ways you can award stars to students in PowerPoint.

Why Gamification Works for Classrooms

Gamification has emerged as a powerful tool to enhance classroom engagement and create better learning outcomes.

By incorporating game mechanics such as challenges, rewards, and healthy competition, educators can rejuvenate traditional teaching methods, creating dynamic classroom and immersive learning experiences for students.

How so? Gamification in classroom:

• Increases interactivity in teaching and learning.
• Captures students’ attention and triggers intrinsic motivation.
• Enhances participation.
• Provides a sense of excitement.
• Encourages critical thinking.
• Allows greater retention of course material.
• Manage students behaviours through positive reinforcement.

How to Award Stars in PowerPoint with ClassPoint

If you haven't already, download ClassPoint and then follow the following steps to start awarding stars to your students right inside PowerPoint. 

#1. Awarding stars to individuals or all participants

Firstly, you can award stars in PowerPoint to a single or every participant in the class. The former is useful when you want to acknowledge individual effort, and the latter is useful when you want to encourage team achievement after a classroom game, or simply to build a positive classroom environment.

🤔 How to do so?

To do this, enter slideshow mode in PowerPoint and click the Class Code on the top right corner of your screen. The My Class window will appear with all the names of the participants who have joined your class.

Participants can join your class in two ways, either:

• Through visiting ▶️ www.classpoint.app using their own device, or
• By manually uploading their names via Class List.

Through the My Class window, you can select who you want to award stars to, and click the star icon next to the participant’s name.

You can also awards to all participants by clicking on the “Award Stars to All” button.

Try these popular American gameshows inspired PowerPoint games in your class: Family Feud, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune.

#2. Awarding stars to participants who responded to your questions

Now that you’ve learned how to award stars to individuals and all participants in PowerPoint, we would like to share with you another exciting way you can award stars to your students, that is, awarding stars when you are running interactive quiz activities in PowerPoint.

🤔 How to do so?

1. Turn Your PowerPoint Slide into an Interactive Quiz: Firstly, prepare your slides with questions and select from the 8 interactive quiz types from the ClassPoint tab in your PowerPoint ribbon during Edit mode. In our case, we we Short Answer quiz.
2. Start the Quiz in Presentation Mode: Once you have added the quiz button to your slide, enter slideshow mode and invite your participants to join your quiz through classpoint.app. Then, start the quiz by clicking on the quiz button. Participants will be able to respond to your quiz in real-time!
3. Award Stars: Close the quiz submission if the specified time has elapsed or when all participants have already finished answering, then award stars to everyone who participated by clicking on Award Stars to All.

Looking for classroom game ideas? Try these low-prep classroom review games in your next lesson!

#3. Awarding stars to participants who answered your questions correctly

So far so good. But let’s say you want to be more selective to who you award stars to, and you only want to reward those who answered your quiz questions correctly.

🤔 How to do so?

When inserting a Multiple Choice or Fill in the Blanks question, just like when you insert any other quiz question type, a side panel will appear at the right portion of your screen where you can customize your play options. Toggle on the box for “Has correct answer”.

And during slideshow mode while the quiz is live, easily filter through the correct answers by clicking “Show correct answer” from the response window. From there, you can award stars to all, ensuring that only those with the correct answers are rewarded.

🔐 Pro Tip: You can award stars to participants who answered Short Answer activities correctly by searching and typing the specific phrases or keywords to filter the responses and reward participants accordingly. 

#4. Automatically awarding stars in Quiz mode

To be able to grade automatically is many teachers’ dream. Next we are going to show you exactly how you can grade and award stars in PowerPoint automatically.

🤔 How to do so?

This can be done through ClassPoint’s Quiz Mode. Similar to how you set up Multiple Choice Quizzes above, the additional step you need to do is to toggle on the “Quiz Mode” button at the right panel and set the difficulty level.

How it works is that specific amount of stars will be automatically awarded given the ascend difficulty level of the MCQ.

Then, run your quiz as usual in slideshow mode, but this time, you’ll have an extra assistant to award stars to participants without requiring any action on your part!

Pro Tip: Use Quiz Mode to allow automatic grading during formative assessments.  

#5. Randomly selecting a recipient to award stars in PowerPoint

Finally, you can also select a participant at random to award stars to using ClassPoint’s popular Name Picker feature.

🤔 How to do so?

1. Enter PowerPoint slideshow mode.
2. Select the Name Picker icon from the ClassPoint Toolbar at the bottom of your screen.
3. Select a name either by spinning the wheel, picking from the deck of cards, or through auto-pick.
4. The name of the selected participant(s) will appear, and you can then award stars them! ⭐

Conclusion

That’s it! You have mastered the art of how to award stars in PowerPoint. By integrating game mechanics such as challenges and rewards, educators can rejuvenate traditional teaching methods, fostering dynamic and immersive learning experiences.

Awarding Stars in PowerPoint through gamification tools like ClassPoint as a reward for completing tasks or merely as further acknowledgement enhances the effectiveness of learning.

Through gamification, the classroom becomes a centre of enthusiastic collaboration, competition, and critical thinking, ultimately making the learning process not only enjoyable but also highly impactful in terms of knowledge retention and active participation. Embark on a gamified learning journey with ClassPoint now!