Student engagement and fun: Evidence from the field

How do you entice students to engage with the class, its content, and each other? Student engagement has been linked to deeper learning, making connections to topics, and improved course performance. However, engaging students can be challenging. Recent studies have linked fun in the classroom with engagement. Fun can be categorized as fun activities and fun delivery. While fun characteristics are identified, specific examples are not presented. This paper fills that gap by presenting two fun cases in business courses. The cases illustrate that fun activities can be developed for all types of courses: undergraduate or graduate courses, online or face-to-face courses, and various subject areas. The first example is a fun activity in a face-to-face undergraduate accounting class. The second example used a fun delivery method to introduce an exercise on brand relevance in an online MBA marketing class. In general, the projects increased student engagement and course performance. Implications for classroom application are provided.