Visit of Natalie Rouphael – Ludo Pedagogy & AI in Education Workshop

What happens when you put play and AI in the same classroom? Over four days at the Administrative Building, Natalie Rouphael—international practitioner in ludo pedagogy and gamified learning—worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Galala University faculty to answer that with lesson plans, not slogans. The workshop moved from ideas to implementation: prompt-driven lesson design in the morning, game mechanics in the afternoon, and live micro-teaching to close each day.

Faculty began by reframing AI as a co-teacher rather than a shortcut: participants practiced prompt engineering for formative assessments, rubrics, and scaffolded hints; they stress-tested outputs for accuracy, bias, and level-appropriateness; and they built “guardrails” into their prompts to protect student privacy and academic integrity. In parallel, ludo pedagogy sessions unpacked mechanics that matter—progression, feedback loops, time-boxed challenges, and cooperative play—and how these translate into accountable, standards-based learning rather than distraction.

Hands-on blocks & deliverables

• AI for planning & feedback: faculty created banks of Socratic prompts, question variations by Bloom level, and automated, criterion-referenced feedback that still sounds human.

• Gamified lesson blueprints: teams prototyped modules such as “boss-level” capstones, classroom quests, and badge-earning evidence tasks mapped to course ILOs.

• Personalized pathways: simple analytics dashboards (from LMS exports and AI-assisted summaries) routed students to remediation or enrichment, with transparent rules they can see and trust.

• Ethics & safety: checklists for consent, data minimization, hallucination detection, and plagiarism mitigation; policies for responsible tool use in class and assessments.

• Edutainment sequences: short, high-energy activities that keep rigor intact—time-bound debates, design sprints, and peer-review “trading floors”—all documented with alignment to outcomes.

“Play is not the opposite of rigor,” Rouphael reminded participants during a debrief. “It’s how we practice rigor—often, faster.”

The workshop’s final showcase featured micro-lessons from engineering, health sciences, languages, and business. Colleagues rotated as students, critiqued the mechanics, and iterated prompts in real time. Several cohorts left with ready-to-run units for the coming semester, plus a shared repository of prompts, badges, and assessment templates that will live inside GU’s LMS.

Why this matters for GU

• It advances student-centered teaching with measurable gains in engagement and feedback quality.

• It builds Faculty capability in responsible AI use—clear documentation, audit trails, and reproducible instructional flows.

• It strengthens cross-department collaboration, seeding co-taught, project-based modules where game mechanics reward teamwork and reflection.