AhaSlides Wins 2026 Training Magazine Award for Gamification
AhaSlides wins the 2026 Training Magazine Network Choice Award for Gamification & Game-Based Learning, driven by high audience engagement.
AhaSlides, the interactive presentation platform used by millions of presenters globally, has been honored with the 2026 Training Magazine Network Choice Award in the Gamification & Game-Based Learning category. The recognition comes as the platform continues to revolutionize how trainers capture attention in an era of shrinking focus spans.
Voted by L&D Professionals
Unlike traditional awards, the Choice Awards are a crowd-sourced solution provider award within the Learning & Development (L&D) sector. Winners are selected by the Training Magazine Network members—a massive community of over 100,000 trainers, instructional designers, and L&D leaders. This year, the competition was fierce, with 2,207 voters casting 11,692 votes across 296 companies.
Combating the "Attention Drop"
The award highlights AhaSlides' success in addressing a critical modern challenge: the decline in human attention spans. Research from Dr. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine indicates that focused attention on a screen has plummeted from 2.5 minutes to just 47 seconds over the last two decades. AhaSlides tackles this by making live participation the default experience.
By allowing learners to compete, vote, and react in real-time via their smartphones, the platform ensures high levels of interaction. Data from the AhaSlides platform reveals impressive engagement metrics:
- 80.9% of audiences actively engage with presentations.
- 44.6% engage with every single interactive slide.
A Year of Game-Based Learning Innovation
AhaSlides has spent the last year focused on making training engagement effortless for facilitators. The platform now offers over 30 ready-made interactive activities that require no background in game design to implement. These activities range from light-hearted breaks to intense skill-building exercises:
- Duck Race: A quick, fun break to lighten the mood between learning blocks.
- Calm: A full-screen breathing pause with ambient sound to settle a group before or after intense topics.
- Draw on Image: A professional tool allowing specialists, such as medical trainers, to have participants mark directly on shared images.
Looking ahead, the platform is set to launch an Escape Room game in October 2026. This new feature, which won top honors at the company's September hackathon, requires teams to solve clues hidden within a scene to escape, directly applying the knowledge they have learned.
The Future of Engagement
Beyond live sessions, AhaSlides is expanding its toolkit to include enhanced reporting and surveys to help trainers track learner progress. The roadmap also includes the development of self-paced e-learning to ensure education continues even after the live session concludes.
"We're grateful for this one, because trainers voted for it," said Dave Bui, CEO of AhaSlides. "Our job is to make engagement easy: a trainer shouldn't have to design a game from scratch to get a room involved."
Engagement expert Kassy LaBorie, a recipient of the ATD's 2026 Talent Development Outstanding Professional Award, echoed this sentiment, noting that the platform's strength lies in making participation the core of the experience rather than the game itself.