AhaSlides wins 2026 Training Magazine Network Choice Award for Gamification & Game-Based Learning

Voted by L&D professionals, the award caps a year in which AhaSlides went all in on game-based learning, with more training games on the way

SINGAPORE, Oct. 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- AhaSlides, the interactive presentation platform used by more than 4 million presenters across 142,000+ organisations and 24 million+ participants, has been named a winner of the 2026 Training Magazine Network Choice Awards in the Gamification & Game-Based Learning category.

The Choice Awards are the only crowd-sourced solution provider awards in Learning & Development. Winners are chosen by Training Magazine Network's 100,000+ members: the trainers, instructional designers, learners and L&D leaders who use these tools every day. This year, 2,207 voters cast 11,692 votes for 296 companies across seven categories between April 28 and June 30, 2026. Winners were ranked on total votes and a weighted score for effectiveness. Training magazine Editor/Publisher Lorri Freifeld announced the results on September 29, 2026.

Built for the attention span trainers actually face

Focused attention on a screen has fallen from 2.5 minutes to around 47 seconds over two decades (Dr Gloria Mark, UC Irvine). Trainers feel that drop in every session. AhaSlides' answer is to make participation the default: learners answer, compete, vote and react live from their phones, and the trainer sees what landed in real time.

On AhaSlides, 80.9% of audiences actively engage with presentations, and 44.6% engage with every interactive slide (AhaSlides platform data).

A year of building for facilitated training

Every release this year comes back to one goal: make engagement in training easier for trainers. Getting a group to participate shouldn't take hours of prep or a background in game design.

AhaSlides now has more than 30 ready-made interactive activities that a trainer can drop into a session and facilitate right away. They range from pure fun to serious skills training. Duck Race gives a group a quick, light-hearted break between learning blocks. Calm does the opposite: a full-screen breathing pause with a guided lead-in and ambient sound, so a trainer can settle the group before a heavy topic or after an intense session. At the serious end, Draw on Image lets a medical trainer share an ultrasound image and have nurses mark directly on it to show what they see. More are added every month.

The next one is Escape Room, a new training game shipping to all AhaSlides users in October 2026. Teams race the clock to find clues hidden in a scene and solve their way out, applying what they've learned to escape. It started as the winning entry at AhaSlides' September 2026 hackathon, taking both 1st place and Most Loved.

Beyond the live session

Making engagement easier also means less work around the session. This year AhaSlides made its reports better, so trainers can see more clearly how learners did and what landed after a session, and launched surveys, so they can gather feedback before and after training. Next on the roadmap is self-paced e-learning, so learners can keep going between live sessions.

What they're saying

"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. That's why we've spent this year building ready-made ways to play and compete. Escape Room, which our own team built and voted their favourite at our September hackathon, launches this month. And because learning doesn't stop when the session ends, self-paced learning is next."

Trainers who use AhaSlides see the same thing. "Game-based learning works when the game isn't the point. Participation is," said Kassy LaBorie, keynote speaker, author and engagement expert, and recipient of ATD's 2026 Talent Development Outstanding Professional Award. "AhaSlides gives me incredibly creative ways to invite people into the experience, and every time I use it, the crowd goes wild."

About AhaSlides

AhaSlides is on a mission to save the world from sleepy meetings, boring training and tuned-out teams, one engaging slide at a time. It's the easiest way to turn sleepy slides into engaging experiences with quizzes, polls, word clouds and training games. From global companies to small classrooms and conference halls, AhaSlides is used by more than 4 million presenters in 142,000+ organisations, reaching 24 million+ participants. Try it free at ahaslides.com.

About the Training Magazine Network Choice Awards

The Training Magazine Network Choice Awards recognise the solution providers that L&D professionals rate most highly, based on votes from Training Magazine Network's 100,000+ members. The full list of winners is available at trainingmagnetwork.com, and Training magazine's announcement is at trainingmag.com.

SOURCE AhaSlides