How to Make Homework Fun and Engaging

No matter how many times you hear that homework is supposed to help you learn, it probably still feels like a chore at best and like torture at worst. And you’re not alone: 89% of high school students feel stressed about doing homework, and 56% of high schoolers even go as far as to name homework the primary stressor in their lives.

While homework can be frustrating, stressful, and plain intimidating, you don’t have to just let it ruin your day. Here’s how to make homework fun in high school and beyond, all while avoiding its adverse effects on your mental health.

Spoiler alert: You can choose from five different strategies, all backed by the tenets of psychology and neuroscience.

Why Is Homework So Intimidating?

On the surface, homework is supposed to be nothing but useful. After all, its purpose is to reinforce the key concept you’ve learned in class, helping you transfer that knowledge from your short-term memory to long-term storage.

In practice, however, doing homework can easily become a daunting task. Here are the key signs you find it intimidating:

• You find excuses to avoid doing homework
• You get grumpy, moody, or angry whenever you think about it
• You keep thinking about homework somewhat obsessively
• You get a sense of dread when you sit down to work on your assignments
• You struggle with completing all tasks or maintaining concentration on homework
• You experience headaches or trouble falling asleep because of it

But why does it feel so bad? Well, reasons vary from one person to another, but the most likely culprits are:

• Striving to get it perfect. Perfectionism goes hand in hand with the fear of failure, and both can cause negative emotions whenever you need to do homework.
• Procrastinating. Your subconscious associates homework with negative emotions (boredom, anxiety, frustration), and so you delay it to avoid experiencing them. This isn’t laziness, it’s a coping mechanism for dealing with adverse emotions.
• Getting overwhelmed by the amount of homework. U.S. students are notoriously getting too much homework, in general. But even if it’s not your case, large tasks (e.g., writing a term paper) may easily cause you to feel stuck.

If any of that hit close to home, keep reading to find out how to make homework fun college!

Strategy #1: Use Game Mechanics & Elements

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If you’re unfamiliar with the term, gamification means using game-like elements and mechanics to foster motivation and make something more enjoyable. Think levels, XP points, rewards, and achievements integrated into your studying.

There are two main reasons why gamification works in education and beyond:

• It provides you with clear goals or tasks to complete to obtain a reward. This makes large tasks like term papers more manageable and less intimidating.
• It triggers a positive feedback loop: you complete a task and get your reward, which triggers the release of dopamine, which makes you feel good. This helps your mind associate homework with positive experiences.

You might think gamification is only valid if you don’t know how to make homework fun for kids, but positive reinforcement works on people of all ages.

Here’s how to get motivated to do homework by gamifying it:

• Come up with a point system. List your tasks or objectives and assign points to each of them (e.g., solving a math problem = 5 points). Make sure to break down complex tasks (e.g., a research paper) into smaller objectives.
• Define your rewards. Points are only as good as the rewards you can get for them. Just make sure these rewards are actually something you want!
• Switch up your vocabulary. Instead of thinking about doing homework, call it completing missions or quests. You’d be surprised how something as simple as changing a label can transform your perspective and attitude!
• Create a story around it. Come up with a character, setting, and narrative for yourself if you’re feeling extra inspired.

Strategy #2: Set Up a Proper Study Space

Your environment impacts your ability to concentrate. Your brain is great at making associations, and that applies to your environment. Put simply, being in a place you associate with studying will give your brain a signal that it’s time to concentrate and be productive.

There are two ways you can go about creating your study space: you can set one up in your room or go somewhere else to study (e.g., library, coworking space, etc.). Most likely, you’ll use a combination of both since going somewhere every time you need to do homework probably isn’t that feasible.

In either case, consider these four aspects when setting up a study space to boost your productivity:

• Lighting. German researchers found that warmer light (3000 K) boosts creativity and colder light (4500 K and 6000 K) improves concentration. That said, strive to have as much natural light as possible and avoid blue light in the evenings to avoid disrupting your sleep cycles.
• Distractions. Eliminate anything that might distract you from studying (e.g., your phone). If you use your laptop, install a website blocker to prevent yourself from wasting time on YouTube or social media. Make sure you’re unlikely to get disturbed by your roommates, family, or anyone else.
• Organization. You should have anything you might need at hand in your study space. So, declutter your desk and keep it clean and organized. Invest in an office chair with good support for your back and set up your screen at an appropriate height to prevent back pain and neck strain.
• Quiet. Most people need the quiet to concentrate. So, put on a pair of good noise-canceling headphones (just make sure your music isn’t distracting in and of itself). You can also listen to study mixes or ambient noises.

Strategy #3: Go Beyond Traditional Study Practices

It might have been drilled into your brain that studying is all about reading and writing. But these are just two methods among the many more.

So, if you’re not a fan of reading and writing for hours on end, you can spice up your study sessions with other activities. Besides being more fun and engaging, they could also help you do homework faster since you’ll gain a firm grasp of the key concepts that might be holding you back at the moment. 

Here are some activities you could integrate into your study sessions:

• Watch short educational videos on YouTube or social media to quickly wrap your head around a particularly challenging topic.
• Try rubber-ducking, which means explaining a topic, problem, or response to a question to a stuffed animal or any other inanimate object; talking it out will help you see gaps in the explanation or find the solution.
• Draw your own illustrations and diagrams to understand complex processes like metabolism or concepts like the U.S. government structure (bonus points if you can draw them from memory alone!).
• Get crafty by using blocks to visualize fractions or building models out of clay for molecules or star constellations.
• Create your own mnemonic devices, such as a song or poem, for revising vocabulary in a foreign language.
• Use flashcards or come up with custom quizzes by using online tools like Quizlet or crafting them on paper, old-school style.

Strategy #4: Make Your Learning Social

You don’t have to spend all your time doing homework on your own. Instead, you can bring together several friends and set up a study group.

Studying with your peers comes with a number of benefits:

• Procrastination antidote. Once you promise someone to come prepared to discuss a topic, you can’t procrastinate indefinitely. So, having a study group helps you maintain the self-discipline to get stuff done on time.
• Improved knowledge retention and recall. Asking someone else to explain a concept to you or help you with a roadblock will improve your understanding of the material. Plus, it saves you time! On the other hand, if you’re the one doing the explaining, you’re more likely to retain and recall the information later on.
• Good company. While your collaborative study sessions shouldn’t devolve into pure leisure, spending time together is still bound to bring some positive emotions into the process. That helps with positive reinforcement, too.

If you ever end up getting asked to explain a topic or concept to a fellow student, try the Feynman Technique. It involves four steps:

• Explain the subject in the simplest terms possible, all while assuming your peer knows nothing about it
• Offer examples, draw analogies, or use metaphors to drive the explanation home
• Analyze your explanation and identify where it’s shaky or uncertain; revise the corresponding material to close the gaps
• Refine and simplify your explanation further if necessary

N.B. You can use the Feynman Technique on a rubber duck or a stuffed animal, too!

Strategy #5: Take Breaks & Reward Yourself

Cramming all of your tasks and assignments into a single non-stop marathon session won’t make you more productive. Worse than that, it’ll actually undermine your ability to retain new knowledge long-term.

That’s because your brain needs time to process newly acquired information and move it to long-term memory. On top of that, you also will find your concentration slipping away if you don’t take breaks because your brain spends more and more energy to keep your prefrontal cortex working.

Of course, not all breaks are equally effective. Here are different types of breaks you can take, depending on what you want to get out of one:

• Creative break: Learn something new, doodle, or play a musical instrument to give your prefrontal cortex a break and engage the right brain instead
• Get-moving break: Get up and do a small chore, quick workout, or stretching exercise to improve alertness and attention
• Relaxing break: Drink a cup of coffee or tea, listen to music, or have a snack to let both your mind and body rest a bit
• Social break: Have a quick chat with your roommates or family to boost your mood by connecting with someone

Try to avoid doing anything that could be hard to stop when the break is over (e.g., social media scrolling).

As for the duration of the break, start with the famous Pomodoro technique: a five-minute break every half an hour. You can adapt your study rhythm with time.

N.B. To make sure homework is fun, use the break time to reward yourself for studying. Those rewards, of course, would have to be small; keep larger rewards (e.g., watching an episode of your favorite TV show) for after the study session.

In Closing

If you’ve been associating homework with anxiety, stress, and other negative emotions up until now, unlearning that cognitive shortcut might take some time. But it’s not impossible. All you have to do is teach your brain to associate homework with positive emotions, instead.

To do so, try any of our strategies on how to make homework fun. Start small to avoid getting overwhelmed with changes to routines, however. Experiment with those strategies to find what works for you, too: you might find having a study group more fun than watching YouTube videos, for example.

Before we leave you to it, let’s leave you with this: you might not be able to pick and choose your assignments, but you do have control over how you approach doing them. So, have fun!