M7: Using Gimkit and a Student-Created Board Game to Deepen Survival-Themed Literacy Learning

In my current literacy unit, my small-group students—who receive support in a resource-room setting—are reading a modified version of White Fang. Much of our work centers on understanding survival, character decision-making, and how individuals respond to hostile or unpredictable environments. To extend these ideas beyond the text, I incorporated Gimkit, an open-source game platform that blends quizzing with strategy, and paired it with a hands-on culminating task: students designing their own survival-themed board games using a blank game board kit purchased from Amazon. Together, these two experiences give my students multiple entry points into the same conceptual learning, while honoring their diverse processing, reading, and engagement needs.

  

Gimkit, originally developed by high-school students, is an interactive digital game environment where players answer questions to earn “currency,” power-ups, and advantages. Unlike traditional quiz platforms, Gimkit emphasizes strategy, pacing, and decision-making. This matters for my learners, particularly in special education, because it allows students who may not thrive in timed, high-pressure environments to engage on their own terms. I use Gimkit as an anticipatory set at the start of each reading block: students play a customized kit featuring vocabulary, character traits, and setting details from White Fang. The goal is not just recall but helping students internalize the language of the text so they can access deeper conversations later. Research on game-based learning suggests that digital games can strengthen motivation and increase both on-task behavior and content retention, particularly for neurodiverse learners who benefit from immediate feedback and multimodal reinforcement (Gee, 2007). For my group, the fast cycle of question → attempt → feedback lowers the cognitive load and builds confidence before we transition into the narrative.

While Gimkit supports knowledge acquisition, the board-game design project asks students to transform that knowledge into something creative, structured, and meaningful. After finishing each chapter, students identify survival obstacles the characters faced—winter storms, hunger, predators, or the unpredictable behavior of humans—and turn them into challenges on their own game boards. Because these materials are fully blank, students determine the shape of the path, the rules, the cards, and the progression system. This type of construction aligns with the idea that authentic, student-generated texts promote deeper literacy practices, because students must synthesize information, organize ideas, and make intentional design choices (Vygotsky, 1978). In many ways, they are composing multimodal narratives rather than simply retelling a story.

The implementation is intentionally scaffolded. I begin by modeling a simple “mini-game” based on a moment in the text, talking aloud through decisions such as: What makes this obstacle challenging? How might a player overcome it? What choices would the character realistically have? Students then use a graphic organizer to translate story events into playable mechanics. For learners who need additional support, I offer sentence starters, vocabulary banks, and pre-cut templates for cards and symbols so they can focus on reasoning rather than handwriting or layout. For students who need enrichment, I encourage them to incorporate probability, branching pathways, or resource-management systems that mirror themes of risk and survival in the novel.

Assessment happens at multiple points. For Gimkit, I analyze student accuracy trends and note which vocabulary or comprehension strands need reteaching. For the board games, I use a rubric that evaluates three dimensions: (1) understanding of survival concepts from White Fang, (2) clarity and coherence of the game mechanics, and (3) the student’s ability to articulate how story events became gameplay. Because many of my students demonstrate knowledge more effectively through discussion than writing, I also conduct short conferences where students “walk me through” their game—an approach supported by research emphasizing the value of oral explanation and multimodal output for diverse learners.

Together, Gimkit and the board-game project allow my students to interact with White Fang from two distinct angles: one focused on reinforcing foundational comprehension, and the other centered on creative authorship. For a resource-room environment, this blend of accessibility, engagement, and high-level thinking has been especially powerful. Game-based learning is not a novelty here; it becomes a pathway for students to demonstrate resilience, perspective-taking, and narrative understanding—core themes of the text itself.

Gee, J. P. (2007). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Palgrave Macmillan.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.