Gamably: The Origin Story

Adam, our founder, was invited to the Google Innovator Academy in Venice, CA in 2018. Adam saw a gap in the education, gamification landscape, and set out to create a software that could be a customizable user-friendly game manager that anyone can use for a simple one-off competition, or a year-long game with all of the elements the user could imagine (some examples can be found here). After bouncing some ideas around at the event Gamably was born and Adam has been working on improving it ever since. Read more about the origin story below!

In July of 2018 Adam was lucky enough to be selected to join 35 amazing educational tech enthusiasts in Venice, CA, for the #LAX18 Google Innovator Academy. It was an amazing experience, and out of that event his Innovator Project was born. It’s called Gamably, and it’s an app for teachers or parents or whoever to use to manage an extended gamified environment. Here’s what Gamably is all about.

The Formation of an Idea: Gamably is Born

At #LAX18 in Venice, CA, Adam and his colleagues were able to work through their ideas, bounce thoughts off of other like-minded folks, and talk to Google pros to develop our next steps. Adam left California with more questions than answers, but he had a clear path ahead of him, and he knew he had to learn how to code more stuff.

At the time of this post (the original post, from 2020), two and a half years had passed and by then Adam had already iterated about a million different parts, designed and redesigned just about every element, and renamed it like five times. At that point Gamably was still considered in beta, but there were teachers around the world using it, and they were/are kind enough to give us suggestions and ideas, so the iteration continues.

Gamably: The Inspirations

The inspiration for the app has come from a recent growth in interest in gamification in education thanks to people like Michael Matera, John Meehan, Carrie Bauchgum, Jon Spike, and more. You can imagine it’s like teachers running a really long board game or Dungeons and Dragons game in their class while still teaching all of the things they’re supposed to be teaching. To use a literary reference, gamification is for teachers like the Mississippi River was for Jim and Huck in Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s the element that keeps them moving from experience to experience. It’s not a vital part of every scene, but it’s a constant part of their adventures and it pushes them forward from one to the next.

The tough part about gamification in education is that there isn’t an established template or guide that works for every teacher. There are books that have been written on the topic, and some have amazing ideas. Specifically, Matera published a book in 2015 titled Explore Like a Pirate where he describes everything from using items and badges, to creating guilds and character types, to engaging in boss battles and using leaderboards.

All the while the class is functioning under the umbrella of a game that can constantly change as the students play. It’s all up to the creativity of the teacher and the students to determine where the game goes and how ingrained it is in the learning. It’s a perfect beginners guide to gamifying a classroom. 

Each person who gamifies his or her classroom uses their own unique platform for managing the game, whether it be through spreadsheets, paper and pencil, big poster boards, or pre-built online games like the now defunct, Classcraft. But there still isn’t a customizable user-friendly game manager that anyone can use for a simple one-off competition, or a year-long game with all of the crazy elements. So that’s what Adam set out to build.

Gamably Fills the Gap

Basically, Gamably is a web app that allows users (Managers) to create accounts, and within those accounts they create Games. Those Games then have Players who earn XP (experience points), currency, items or badges, complete challenges, find secret codes, shop at the store, and move up the leaderboards. All of the content is created by the Managers, and they control the game through the platform. Check out our other blog posts to learn more about what Gamably can do for you!