E-Mail Watch a group of teens immersed in a popular video game such as "Among Us" and you will see a textbook definition of successful engagement. Well-designed games -- ones with clearly stated goals, an emphasis on storytelling, an allowance for "productive failure," and an emphasis on supportive teamwork and inclusiveness -- can point the way to a better classroom environment, too, says University of Alabama at Birmingham's Lauren Rast, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Physics. Rast is a UAB pioneer in a mode of instruction called gameful learning. Faculty in the Department of Physics already have applied gameful learning in their increasingly popular online courses. And in a series of workshops for high school physics teachers inspired by her own work as a computational physicist, Rast has helped teachers share the benefits of gameful learning with teens around Alabama. Her Coding with Physics courses also promote self-efficacy and affinity for science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine in a way that particularly resonates with a diverse student population, she says.