Gamification in Education: Theory and Practice

Teachers and educators in today’s education landscape face major problems around student focus and engagement. Because learning is all about engagement, it’s become increasingly important that schools find new innovative techniques and strategies to manage student behaviour and keep students engaged and motivated.

Today’s students (Millennials and Gen Z) are technology native, from a very young age they grew up with technology, tablets, laptops in their hands. One approach schools are adopting to adapt students’ needs, preferences and requirements is gamification or known as gamified learning. In this article, we are going to address gamification in education, what it is, how it functions, potential benefits, and how to integrate it into your teaching process.

What is gamification?

According to Oxford dictionary, gamification is the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.

Figure 1.0

In other words, gamification is adding game elements into a non-gaming context, like online community, learning or school management system or business’ intranet to increase participation. Gamification in education has grown in popularity in the last 10 years, due to the requirement and the new challenges in teaching the new generations.

Although gamification is a relatively new word as in Figure 1.0, it has so many applications in our business and personal life.

Gamification has many applications in business and education, for example, you can use gamification in teaching and learning to enhance learner engagement in a business training, improve sales staff performance, offer rewards for completing tasks, and

One more and most important application of gamification is gamification in education. Gamified learning is proven to enhance the learner’s ability to contemplate on difficult topics and increase motivation for students to study boring material.

Many school management systems out there have taken this into mind, offering a gaming elements to students and teachers. One example is Shams Edu, Shams Edu is a school management system that offers many neat feature to improve your student performance, and increase their engagement.

Gen Z: Education is boring

“To understand a generation is to understand an era. When you understand an era, you get rid of being stuck in the grip of the paradigm. And you will be able to see those who are not like you, not within your own judgments, but with their own truths.” (Kuran, 2019)

Generation Z, or GenZ for short, a demographic name for people born between 1997 and 2012.The oldest of this generation are reaching 25 years, meaning they just graduated or are seeking a job, and majority of them are in their high schools. It’s considered the first social generation to have grown up with access to the Internet and portable digital technology from a young age.

It’s obvious that each generation has distinctive teaching and learning styles. Growing in such digital environments where information is made as easily accessible as a mouse click, students have become less interested in old-fashioned teaching techniques.

Games have been an integral part of Gen Z childhood and adolescence, real-time data and instant feedback, recognition and rewards for their efforts all these are instilled into them,

A survey performed with GenZ students determined that this generation prefers to use electronic study material and is more encouraged to learn with access to high tech.

Researchers suggest that educators should ﬁnd creative ways of incorporating technology in the teaching–learning process. Podcasts, websites, simulations, interactive tutori-als on YouTube, and Internet-based educational games are some of the technologies that can capture the attention of GenZ.

One thing that can change how students see their school is through their system. Of course it isn’t the only factor, but a tech-based school management system is crucial to any school or institution success. Read this article about reasons to have a school management system, Top 7 Reasons Schools Should Use Student Management System

How can gamification make education more interesting?

The education landscape has been going under unprecedented change at a very high rate, especially after the pandemic, which required institution, teachers, and parents to adopt new approaches for learning rather than the conventional ones. When it comes to learning a new topic, master a new skill, or getting acquainted with a branch of science, it’s all about engagement and inspiration.

Gamification, which is using games in a non-gaming paradigm or context, helps students focus and retain information than the traditional style of learning. The thing with games is they draw students’ attention, and this concept can help students of Gen Z who tend to have
short attention span while learning a hard subject.

Instant gratification and feedback is also another aspect that makes gamified education more rewarding. Gamification not only increases motivation and promotes students interactivity, but also helps builds more robust understanding of a particular subject through loops of instant feedback. Going from a level to level by trial and error promotes active learning and enhances the ability to learn more complicated and sophisticated topics.

Instant gratification and feedback is also another aspect that makes gamified education more rewarding. Gamification not only increases motivation and promotes students interactivity, but also helps builds more robust understanding of a particular subject through loops of instant feedback. Going from a level to level by trial and error promotes active learning and enhances the ability to learn more complicated and sophisticated topics.

Another thing about gamification is the ability to adopt new technologies, and integrate with more tools, and this is what makes gamification the most important trend in education. Since gamification is a technical concept, the advent of AI (Artificial Intelligence), AR (Augmented Reality), and VR (Virtual Reality) in the technology sphere would by extension span to include gamified learning which opens the door to more interactive, and innovative learning
techniques.

Want to know how to increase student admission to your school, read this article: 5 Ways to Increase admissions in schools

How to integrate gamification in your teaching process?

People are normally drawn to games. If you’re a parent or teacher, you can notice or even be bothered with your children being so into games, spending most of their time playing games, and winning trophies. Which encouraged researchers to look deeper into this area, and try to employ and use gamification in education, and promote gamified learning.

Gamification in education has proven useful and successful by far, that’s because it takes advantage of the human psychology that causes kids and adults to be drawn into games.

Learn more on how to increase student performance on this article: 3 Ways to Improve Student Performance.

We, as humans, have a natural tendency for peer competition, a sense of achievement, team playing, making strategies, building things, and enjoying winning. All these elements are employed into game design and development. Same concepts can be transferred and applied into education. Here are some gaming elements that you can use in your teaching process to keep your students motivated and encouraged to go through the material.

Points

Points and score are basic elements of games and gamified learning. Gamification in education uses points and scores to make for a successful accomplishment of some goals in a gamified learning environment.

You can make some points, points that account for exam results, attendance, and behavior, and aggregate all these metrics for each student and create a point ranking system for your class or school.

End Goals

Having a mission to accomplish during a game helps keep people motivated and makes their minds focused on the outcome and the keep the results in mind.

Having a school management system in place can decrease the amount of workload required to set end goal for each term or each month. You can request your demo now from Shams Edu, a comperhensive and advanced school management system.

Leveling-up

The sense of accomplishment and progression motivates a continued effort. Making your teaching and organizing the learning material into milestones with rewards down the road.

Rewards and badges

Competition is human nature, as much as working and playing in groups. Giving rewards and gadgets to your students helps motivate them and keep them in the game of learning. You can have a grading system for students who achieve certain goals and earn some badges.

You can do this more easily by using your school management system, offering rewards and badges to top students can create a healthy environment of competition among student.

Instant gratification and feedback

Instant gratification, and feedback is another essential element in gamified learning. Feedback either positive or negative can help direct and rectify the path a student takes towards a certain goal.

Learning Groups

Building teams, creating communities, and collaborating for a common goal are found in most games. Gamified learning imports these concepts from games; many research papers have been published on how collaborative learning environments can help students get the most out of their learning.

Timeline

A very basic element of games is scheduling or operating within a timeframe. All these elements combined create the gaming experience and help you incorporate gamified learning into your teaching process.

Final Notes

Games by nature draw attention. Gamified learning and using gamification in the context of education can get your students or your children into the state of flow where they are fully concentrating and their attention at its max. Engagement, motivation, and the low attention span are real challenges for teachers especially with the Gen Z or the following generations due to instant and within-a-click access to high end technology.

Having a robust school management system for your students to access their material and follow with their teachers greatly impacts their in-class engagement and their experience with your school.

Shams Edu is a school managment system provides you and your students with many modules and functionalities that makes use of gamification techniques to make learning more fun and appealing for student.