‘Gamification’ and games have become a popular trend in education, and have thus been given much attention in sessions at education conferences all over the world. But their rather rapid spread has also led to some misunderstandings about what they are and how they can be used in a classroom, largely owing to the wide variety of gamified courses and GBL-based classroom activities that have been popularised by educational media. Rather than serve as a panacea to fix classroom problems, however, gamification and GBL should be considered as just one of many tools, albeit quite powerful ones grounded in cognitive psychology, which can be used to create engaging and dynamic learning environments. After a short introduction to the ideas behind gamification and GBL and the brain science that makes them so powerful, an example of a gamified middle-school level Latin course will be described in detail.