Cognitive and affective perspectives on immersive technology in education

This research explains the rationale behind the utilization of mobile learning technologies. It involves a qualitative study among children to better understand their opinions and perceptions toward the use of educational applications (apps) that are available on their mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. The researchers organized semi-structured, face-to-face interview sessions with primary school students who were using mobile technologies at their primary school. The students reported that their engagement with the educational apps has improved their competencies. They acquired relational and communicative skills as they collaborated in teams. On the other hand, there were a few students who were not perceiving the usefulness and the ease of use of the educational apps on their mobile device. This study indicates that the research participants had different skillsets as they exhibited different learning abilities. In conclusion, this contribution opens-up avenues for future research in this promising field of study.peer-reviewe

Having Fun in Learning Formal Specifications

There are many benefits in providing formal specifications for our software. However, teaching students to do this is not always easy as courses on formal methods are often experienced as dry by students. This paper presents a game called FormalZ that teachers can use to introduce some variation in their class. Students can have some fun in playing the game and, while doing so, also learn the basics of writing formal specifications in the form of pre- and post-conditions. Unlike existing software engineering themed education games such as Pex and Code Defenders, FormalZ takes the deep gamification approach where playing gets a more central role in order to generate more engagement. This short paper presents our work in progress: the first implementation of FormalZ along with the result of a preliminary users' evaluation. This implementation is functionally complete and tested, but the polishing of its user interface is still future work

Gamification in higher education and stem : a systematic review of literature

In recent years, gamification, the use of game elements in non-game contexts, has drawn the attention of educators due to the possibility of making learning more motivating and engaging; this led to an increase of research in the field. Despite the availability of literature reviews about gamification and its effects, no work to this date has focused exclusively on Higher Education (HE). Next, worldwide there is an increasing demand for skilled Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professionals that meet the challenges related to scientific and technological innovations of the 21st Century. This lead to the need of strengthening STEM Higher Education. This brings us to the purpose of this work: presenting a systematic literature review of empirical studies about gamification STEM related Higher Education. This review study started from a systematic mapping design of 'Web of Science' articles, with following inclusion criteria: empirical gamification studies set up in HE, published between 2000 and 2016; focusing on undergraduate or graduate students; in the STEM knowledge field, and set up in authentic settings. An initial search resulted in 562 potentially relevant articles. After applying all selection criteria, only 18 studies could be retained. 12 additional articles were included by analyzing references from earlier literature reviews, resulting in 30 studies to be included. Analysis results show how a combination of game elements (e.g. leaderboards, badges, points and other combinations) positively affects students' performance, attendance, goal orientation and attitude towards mostly computer science related subjects. The analysis results also point at a lack of studies in certain STEM areas, a lack of studies that identify the particular game element associated with the positive differential impact on student performance; a lack of validated psychometric measurements, and lack of focus on student variables that could/should be taken into account as mediating/moderating variables clarifying the impact of gamification in the HE focus on STEM learning and teaching

Different Methods of Embodied Cognition in Pedagogy and its Effectiveness in Student Learning

The Mathematical Ideas Analysis hypothesizes that abstract mathematical reasoning is unconsciously organized and integrated with sensory-motor experience. Basic research testing movement, language, and perception during math problem solving supports this hypothesis. Applied research primarily measures students’ performance on math tests after they engage in analogous sensory-motor tasks, but findings show mixed results. Sensory-motor tasks are dependent on several moderators (e.g., instructional guidance, developmental stage) known to help students learn, and studies vary in how each moderator is implemented. There is little research on the effectiveness of sensory-motor tasks without these moderators. This study compares different approaches to working with an interactive application designed to emulate how people intrinsically solve algebraic equations. A total of 130 participants (84 females, 54 males) were drawn from a pool of Introductory Psychology students attending San Jose State University. Participants were placed in three different learning environments, and their performance was measured by comparing improvement between a pre-test and a post-test. We found no difference between participants who worked alone with the application, were instructed by the experimenter while using the application, or who instructed the experimenter on how to solve equations using the application. Further research is needed to examine how and whether analogous sensory-motor interfaces are a useful learning tool, and if so, what circumstances are ideal for sensory-motor interfaces to be used

Math empowerment: a multidisciplinary example to engage primary school students in learning mathematics

This paper describes an educational project conducted in a primary school in Italy (Scuola Primaria Alessandro Manzoni at Mulazzano, near to Milan). The school requested our collaboration to help improve upon the results achieved on the National Tests for Mathematics, in which students, aged 7, registered performances lower than the national average the past year. From January to June, 2016, we supported teachers, providing them with information, tools and methods to increase their pupils’ curiosity and passion for mathematics. Mixing our different experiences and competences (instructional design and gamification, information technologies and psychology) we have tried to provide a broader spectrum of parameters, tools and keys to understand how to achieve an inclusive approach that is ‘personalised’ to each student. This collaboration with teachers and students allowed us to draw interesting observations about learning styles, pointing out the negative impact that standardized processes and instruments can have on the self‐esteem and, consequently, on student performance. The goal of this programme was to find the right learning levers to intrigue and excite students in mathematical concepts and their applications. Our hypothesis is that, by considering the learning of mathematics as a continuous process, in which students develop freely through their own experiments, observations, involvement and curiosity, students can achieve improved results on the National Tests (INVALSI). This paper includes results of a survey conducted by children ‐’About Me and Mathematics‘

Applying gamification in student coaching industry : A competitive environment analysis

The purpose of this study is to explore if gamification can create competitive advantage in student coaching industry in Finland. Using “game-like” elements in services can engage and motivate customers, which leads to several other positive behavioral patterns. Lately, this phenomenon has attracted the attention of both academia and practice. The aim of this thesis is to explore gamification and its benefits in the context of student coaching in Finland and more specifically the high school students in Finland. To give a foundation for this study and to gain better understanding of the context a competitive environment analysis is conducted of the student coaching industry in Finland. Current state of the industry is analyzed, and different strategic groups are recognized. This analysis takes the perspective of how attractive the market is. The empirical part of the study was conducted by interviewing experts in the student coaching industry in Finland. The data was collected through semi-structured interviews from professionals in the industry, who worked in different companies, which provided different viewpoints on the object of this study. I combined the data from the interviews with secondary data found online and analyzed them together. The findings indicate that using gamification and executing it correctly in educational context it can create positive behavioral patterns in students and further competitive advantage in the market. When gamification is implemented the right way, it has the potential to improve educational experiences, increasing user engagement, activity, social interaction, and other positive behavioral patterns

A study of gamification effectiveness

Studies have shown that gamification increases motivation and user experience when it comes to a certain behavior or completing a process. Gamification is often deeply associated with naïve animations and stylized text. This paper addresses the effect that visual representation has on the motivation of a subject by measuring their motivation after completing a mundane process, with entertaining gamification elements as well as gamification elements presented in plain text. For the purposes of this study a within subject design was used to gather data. Participants completed a mundane task three times, once without any gamification elements, once with pragmatic feedback and once with entertaining feedback. After completion the participants filled out the same Likert scale survey. The results were evaluated using the Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks test method, indicated that there was not a significant difference in user motivation between the visually stylized and plain text feedback. If conducted on a larger scale, this discovery could lead to a reduction time and cost for gamification development

Elementary Educators\u27 Perceptions of Online Educational Resources in a Personalized Learning Classroom: A Phenomenological Study

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to understand the perceptions of elementary educators who had developed a personalized learning classroom through the use of virtual learning environments (VLE), an open educational resource (OER), as an instructional academic support for students. Guiding this study was Siemens’ 2005 connectivism learning theory, as it explains how students in the current era, the Knowledge Age, acquire knowledge and deepen understandings through digital learning. The central research question used to drive the study was: How do elementary educators explain their perceptions of the use of OER and VLE in personalized instruction for students? The data collection methods used in this study consisted of in-depth semi-structured interviews, observations, and document analysis of primary sources classified as instructional documents. The data analysis for this study included a conceptual framework used for coding, open coding, memoing, and final coding with winnowing. The data collected revealed that elementary educators perceived VLE as a supplemental support to their direct teaching and tutoring tool for digital learners in personalized learning classrooms. Educators felt that VLE was not able to meet the academic needs of students as a direct instruction tool. Findings revealed that educators perceived VLE to be inadequate and not appropriate when used with the special needs population of digital learning students

Data analysis and learning analytics for measure effects of gamification in a math online project

Nowadays the use of the information and communication technologies (ICT) is more and more common in the learning and teaching process. Modern forms of education have risen and these require the implementation of new learning paradigms: situated cognition, student-centred learning, distributed cognition, constructivism, and communities of practice, among others. However there is an important problem that concerns educators, the lack of student motivation and engagement in education, especially in the e-learning environment (Online Education, Online Courses), where the motivation and the active role of students are definitely the key. Therefore, the interest of researchers in the subject of gamification, which main pillars are motivation, progressiveness and instant feedback, has increased. Furthermore, influence of gamification, depending on utilized components (challenge, curiosity, competion, recognition, etc) may have different effects on students. Thus, there is a need of deeper understanding of dependencies between engagement and implemented gamification elements. The goal of such analysis could be personalization of an e-learning system based on a model that enables management of gamification process individually for every student. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how gamification affects a Mathematics Online Course that is using this model as a pedagogical strategy. It relates such strategy with active learning practices and discusses its effectiveness, investigating how gamification can motivate students to participate more deeply and even to change their self-concept as learners. Moreover, the learning analytics and data analysis shows that implementation of the gamification components contributes to the engagement of students in an e-learning environment, having a positive impact on the final grade.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Mixed gamification with virtual tools modify poor school performance

Currently, the use of gamifiers as teaching tools in virtuality is present due to the digital education that is developed in Latin America. The objective was to determine the effects of two methodologies: i) Mixed gamification; and ii) Usefulness of virtual teaching tools, in the cognitive processes of poor school performance. The methodology was experimental, quantitative. The evaluation was carried out on 150 Spanish-speaking schoolchildren, grouped into three comparison groups (8.5 years of age ±0.4). They underwent 40 learning sessions with the D-S-F methodology (dynamics, strategy, feedback). The validated instruments were three performance tests on the areas of mathematics, science and communication. Significant results were obtained in cognitive processes from the activities designed with mixed gamification, although the effects were not decisive in the area of communication. It is concluded that gamification reduces low performance to raise cognitive processes for logical reasoning, cognitive deduction in mathematics, skills to generate hypotheses in science; and those of reading and oral expression. It is suggested to develop experiments with variables that include a digital evaluation of text writing, to avoid the limitations presented in this research