AhaSlides has been named a winner of the 2026 Training Magazine Network Choice Awards in the Gamification & Game-Based Learning category. What makes this one special is who picked us: the people who run training sessions for a living.
What are the Training Magazine Network Choice Awards?
The Choice Awards are the only crowd-sourced solution provider awards in Learning & Development. There is no judging panel behind closed doors. Winners are chosen by the votes of 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 28 April and 30 June 2026. Winners were ranked on total votes and a weighted score for effectiveness. Training magazine Editor/Publisher Lorri Freifeld announced the results on 29 September 2026, and you can see the winners in Training magazine's winners announcement and browse the categories on the Choice Awards 2026 page.
Built for the attention span trainers face
Every trainer knows the moment the room drifts. The research backs the feeling up: Dr Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine found that focused attention on a screen has fallen from around 2.5 minutes in 2004 to an average of around 47 seconds in her more recent research.
Our 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. It seems to work: 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.
- Draw on Image sits at the serious end. A medical trainer can share an ultrasound image and have nurses mark directly on it to show what they see.
More are added every month. Check out the AhaSlides community for the latest releases.
Up next: Escape Room
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."
Thank you, and try it yourself
To everyone who voted: thank you. We will keep building ready-made ways for trainers to get a room playing, competing and learning together.
AhaSlides is used by more than 4 million presenters across 142,000+ organisations, reaching 24 million+ participants. Try AhaSlides free and run your next training session with a quiz, a poll or a game.
