Gamifying an M.Ed. Course: A Post-Mortem

This paper is about the collective experiences of a graduate level education course that had been partially gamified. A common model for graduate level Education courses uses a seminar approach where participants complete various readings and then respond to them in short editorials or blogs. This course gamified that component by requiring students to complete numerous small to medium sized activities that included these typical ones in order to accumulate points. These points contributed to their final grade. Students gave feedback on their experience with gamification throughout the course which included increased ownership and control of learning and grades, as well as unwanted competition, and onerous marking for the instructor. The paper concludes with suggestion

Games-Based Online Course Design: Prototype of Gamification for Online Tutors

With the ubiquity of interactive games in students’ lives and the rise of gamified experiences across the web and mobile applications, online tutors and practitioners of technology enhanced learning have been inspired to incorporate games-based elements. This paper introduces a prototype of an online application that helps online tutors to embed gaming to design their online course. We developed a framework for online course leaders which explains how Wikis (as an online learning platform) can support students’ learning, interaction, and sharing of knowledge in the online community. We are presenting a metaphor for the course design in a gameboard like “snakes and ladders”. This metaphoric game enables online tutors to elaborate online interaction among their students. The game methodological design approach for this metaphoric game merges different pedagogical theories such as (socio-constructivism) with practice in online learning (Wiki) and gives the online tutor an idea about what theory/approach is used when selecting any technological tool or moving forward in the game. This framework could help tutors, educational institutions and students to use a common language with students to describe their teaching and learning activities. Primarily, it helps tutors to make decisions about learning activities, facilitate, guide and support students’ communication and collaboration

Impact of Gamification on Student Engagement in Graduate Medical Studies

Rapid technological advances have created major societal changes, transformed business sectors, and revolutionized enterprises. In contrast, the curricular structure of medical education has remained unchanged for the last 100 years, and, for the most part, medical education has been reluctant to embrace the use of technology. The prevalent pedagogical model is reliant on rote memorization. The conceptual framework that informed this study was the user-centered framework for meaningful gamification. This framework\u27s components are organismic integration theory, situational relevance, situated motivational affordance, and the universal design for learning. This quantitative study focused on key research questions related to identifying whether significant increases occurred over time in cooperative learning, cognitive level, and personal skills \u27the dependent variables\u27 when using a gamified learning method-the independent variable. The validated Student Engagement Survey was used to collect data from second-year medical students in a Southern California medical school, with N = 64. A repeated measures MANOVA with follow-up univariate ANOVAs was used, and statistical results indicated that there were significant differences over time in cooperative learning, cognitive level, and personal skills when using gamified learning methods. This research was conducted over a period of 3 months, divided into 3 Time Periods (TP). For all three variables, significant increases were noticed between TP 1 and TP 2, followed by significant decreases between TP 2 and TP 3. These findings pointed to the fact that more studies are needed to better understand whether certain types of gamification implementations are detrimental to student engagement in medical education, or whether more sound design principles ought to be explored to produce effective gamified learning components that could positively impact student engagement in medical education

Socrative in Higher Education: Game vs. Other Uses

The integration of clickers in Higher Education settings has proved to be particularly useful for enhancing motivation, engagement and performance; for developing cooperative or collaborative tasks; for checking understanding during the lesson; or even for assessment purposes. This paper explores and exemplifies three uses of Socrative, a mobile application specifically designed as a clicker for the classroom. Socrative was used during three sessions with the same group of first-year University students at a Faculty of Education. One of these sessions—a review lesson—was gamified, whereas the other two—a collaborative reading activity seminar, and a lecture—were not. Ad-hoc questionnaires were distributed after each of them. Results suggest that students welcome the use of clickers and that combining them with gamification strategies may increase students’ perceived satisfaction. The experiences described in this paper show how Socrative is an effective means of providing formative feedback and may actually save time during lessons.S

Evaluating a tactile and a tangible multi-tablet gamified quiz system for collaborative learning in primary education

[EN] Gamification has been identified as an interesting technique to foster collaboration in educational contexts. However, there are not many approaches that tackle this in primary school learning environments. The most popular technologies in the classroom are still traditional video consoles and desktop computers, which complicate the design of collaborative activities since they are essentially mono-user. The recent popularization of handheld devices such as tablets and smartphones has made it possible to build affordable, scalable, and improvised collaborative gamifled activities by creating a multi-tablet environment. In this paper we present Quizbot, a collaborative gamifled quiz application to practice different subjects, which can be defined by educators beforehand. Two versions of the system are implemented: a tactile for tablets laid on a table, in which all the elements are digital; and a tangible in which the tablets are scattered on the floor and the components are both digital and physical objects. Both versions of Quizbot are evaluated and compared in a study with eighty primary-schooled children in terms of user experience and quality of collaboration supported. Results indicate that both versions of Quizbot are essentially equally fun and easy to use, and can effectively support collaboration, with the tangible version outperforming the other one with respect to make the children reach consensus after a discussion, split and parallelize work, and treat each other with more respect, but also presenting a poorer time management.We would like to thank Universitat Politecnica de Valencia's Summer School for their collaboration during the development of this study, as well as Colegio Internacional Ausias March for their support in the development of educational content.This work is supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) with Project TIN2014-60077-R. It is also supported by fellowship ACIF/2014/214 within the VALi+d program from Conselleria d’Educació, Cultura i Esport (Generalitat Valenciana), and by fellowship FPU14/00136 within the FPU program from Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and SportGarcía Sanjuan, F.; El Jurdi, S.; Jaén Martínez, FJ.; Nácher-Soler, VE. (2018). Evaluating a tactile and a tangible multi-tablet gamified quiz system for collaborative learning in primary education. Computers & Education. 123:65-84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.04.011S658412

Improving Remedial Middle School Standardized Test Scores

The purpose of this applied study was to solve the problem of low standardized test scores in a remedial class for a middle school in southern Virginia and to formulate a solution to address the problem. The central research question that data collection attempted to answer was: How can the problem of low standardized test scores in a remedial math class be solved in a middle school in southern Virginia? Data were collected in three ways. First, interviews of teachers and administrators of the remedial math class, called Math Lab, were conducted. These interviews were transcribed and coded, with the codes collected into themes and then displayed visually. Second, an online discussion board was conducted with current and former teachers of Math Lab, school administrators, and classroom math teachers. Third, surveys of teachers and administrators with knowledge of Math Lab and how it impacted students were completed. The quantitative surveys were analyzed by finding descriptive statistics of the data. After reviewing all data sources, a solution to address the problem was created that included designing a curriculum for Math Lab, requiring communication between Math Lab teachers and general classroom math teachers, and professional development of the Math Lab teacher about teaching remedial classes

Gamification as a Methodological Complement to Flipped Learning—An Incident Factor in Learning Improvement

Educational innovation is a reality that is present in learning spaces. The use of emerging methodologies such as gamification and flipped learning has shown great potential in improving the teaching and learning process. This study aims to analyze the e ectiveness of innovative mixed practices, combining gamification and flipped learning in the subject of Spanish Language and Literature against the isolated use of flipped learning. For this, a quasi-experimental design of descriptive and correlational type, based on a quantitative methodology has been carried out. For its development, two study groups (control-experimental) have been set up. The selected sample is of an intentional nature and was composed of 60 students of the fourth year of Secondary Education of an educational center in Southern Spain. The data has been collected through a validated questionnaire. The results determine that the complement of gamification in flipped learning has led to improvements in various academic indicators. It is concluded that the development of gamified actions in the face-to-face phase of flipped learning improves the motivation, interaction with teachers, and interactions of students

Motivation, basic psychological needs and intention to be physically active after a gamified intervention programme

The aim of the present study was to compare the possible effects of a gamified programme and a traditional instructional approach in secondary physical education at the level of intrinsic motivation, autonomy satisfaction, competence satisfaction, relatedness satisfaction, and intention to be physically active. A total of 54 year-nine students (14±0.1 years) enrolled in two classes in the same high school participated. The school administration (totally anonymous to the study) distributed all the students among the two classes and the research team randomly considered one the experimental group (n =27, 13 boys, 14 girls), which experienced a gamified learning unit, and the other the comparison group (n =27, 15 boys, 12 girls), which followed a traditional instructional approach. Both study groups had the same physical education teacher with training and experience on several pedagogical approaches, including gamification. The study followed a pretest, post-test quasi-experimental research design (the time lag between pre-test and post-test was nine weeks). The results showed significant differences at post-tests favouring the experimen tal group in all the variables assessed. In conclusion, the results from the present study provided support for the use of gamification in physical education since it was associated with increased levels of students’ intrinsic motivation, basic psychological needs and intention to be physically active more than a traditional approach. Therefore, gamification could be considered a positive pedagogical framework for secondary physical education. Nevertheless, more studies with larger variability in contexts, participants and content are needed