Ann Parfenova

Take a moment and think about the most memorable lesson in your life. Maybe it was in school or at corporate e-learning training. What was that thing that made this lesson outstanding? I’m sure it was the level of engagement. One of the ways to increase engagement is to make education fun.

91% of adult students value fun in learning, and strong positive emotions help people to learn better. So, why is it so important and how can you implement fun in your courses?

In this article, we discuss:

Fun learning has many positive effects linked to how our brains work. Let’s look at some of them.

Stress can make it harder for us to remember things. When we're feeling stressed, our brains struggle to create new memories and to keep those memories for a long time. This means that learning new information becomes tougher when we're under stress.

Stress impacts how we form memories and makes it harder to recall them later. For example, students who experienced stress performed just as well on a test as their peers who weren’t stressed immediately after facing a stressful situation. However, when both groups took the same test again after 45 minutes, the students who had been stressed scored lower.

Dopamine and endorphins are important in helping us learn effectively. These chemicals are linked to how we respond to rewards. To start, dopamine acts as a signal that helps us learn. It gets released when something good happens—something we didn’t expect—and it helps keep us motivated to continue our efforts.

Additionally, being in a good mood can make rewards feel even more valuable. This includes the satisfaction we get from learning something new or the joy of mastering a new skill. Simply put, we’re more likely to enjoy and appreciate our learning experiences when we feel good.

In education, there’s a concept known as “productive struggling.” This means that tasks should be challenging enough to engage students and spark their curiosity but not so difficult that they give up or feel discouraged. The idea is that the more effort students put into a tough task, the greater the reward should be for their hard work. If this balance is off, such as making tasks too easy or too hard, it can harm the learning experience and lead to poorer results overall.

Sometimes, people who create courses become so focused on the format and appearance of the course that they forget the main purpose of education: to help people improve their knowledge, skills, or performance in some way. While it's great to make learning enjoyable, the goal should be to achieve real improvement. We can use fun activities to enhance learning results, not just to keep students interested.

When designing these enjoyable experiences, we should either find ways to motivate students based on what is truly important to them or create tasks that inspire them to take on challenges. In doing this, students can learn important skills without even realising it.

Gamification and different interactive formats could be expensive. It’s always easier to create something simple rather than designing a complex educational game. Sometimes, it’s all about money and difficulties finding investments.

Many schools and educational systems today mainly judge students' success based on tests and scores. Because of this, some teachers might feel they need to focus more on getting high marks rather than making learning fun and enjoyable for students.

Some educators may worry that adding fun elements to their training programs could lead to chaos or loss of control. They might also be unfamiliar with modern tools and technologies that can make learning more enjoyable and engaging.

Customer development is a powerful tool for finding solutions that will work. You can learn what exactly fun means for your student. What is their motivation to learn, which formats work best for them, and how do they plan to learn your course? You can ask questions like:

There are various fun and modern ways to make a course more interesting and enjoyable for everyone. You can create videos, podcasts, games, brain rot clips, or even simulations. It's important to understand your audience — what they like and how they learn — so that you can choose the best format for them. Always keep in mind the main purpose of your course. Make sure that the fun elements help your goals rather than distract from them.

Gamification is the application of game mechanics to non-gaming environments to help incentivise activity. Gamification is a powerful tool, but you need to know how to use it. Simply giving points and rewards for skills that students find boring doesn't work. Instead, you should find ways to motivate them or creatively engage them in learning. For example, Minecraft grew in popularity in studying languages for kids. They are so invested in the gaming process that learning happens naturally and smoothly.

From our birth, we mostly learn socially by interacting with people and watching others. Teamwork and peer support are crucial for engagement, fun and success. Creating an effective social and knowledge-sharing culture gives your learners more opportunities to improve their skills and knowledge.

Many learning platforms now have features that enhance collaboration and communication. For example, Seturon offers team tasks and peer-to-peer reviews that can be created and set up to boost social learning.

You can’t hide from AI, so why not use it to your advantage? Earlier, we viewed how AI can help you create courses. But it could make them fun and more personalised. For example, AI could assist in learning languages. Or it could help you generate dialogue simulations on different topics. Also, it could analyse data from the platform and help you balance fun and struggle.