Gamification of learning for a better educational experience
Games are the most engaging form of interaction. When this enters the field of education, learning is given a different definition altogether. What is gamification you ask, it is the use of game elements in a non-game related context. It, however, varies depending on the personality of individuals and helps enhance motivation in young learners. Let’s look at how adding the gamification factor to learning strategies has a different effect on different people.
Research on gamification and its effect on learning
Research conducted in School of Computer Science in University of Birmingham reveals that student motivation in online courses starts fading away after a few weeks. Adding gaming factors to learning increases participants’ involvement, which reduces fear of failure.
Gamification interacts closely with personality traits of an individual. Personality traits like openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism play a major role in how a person learns and understands concepts. Creating an avatar, for example, brings a meaningful frame. It not only makes the online assignment adaptable to a learner’s needs and goals, but connects with his/her personality traits.
Gamification enhances student engagement
When learners get control over what they can do, the understanding is better. Including gamification in learning provides this facility. One-sided flow of information or a non-interactive classroom lecture causes a drastic decrease in students’ interest. Learners understand better when they explore, compete, collaborate and discover. The dynamics that evoke learning interest through gamification are constraints, emotions and narratives.
Learners connect better with an assignment when they understand the rules to be followed, emotionally connect to the activity and there is a story taking them through. The quality of the knowledge acquired through gamification is better than the knowledge of the non-gamified learners.
A positive impact on learning
Various edtech tools allow teachers to integrate games into the classroom. For creative writing projects, teachers can ask students to use the software and come up with creative storytelling. This way, they will explore more scenarios than they otherwise would. Gamified learning taps the lateral thinking in children. It will get them into the habit of thinking differently not only in the classroom but in life in general.
Gamification enhances learning by bringing various concepts to life. A learner’s interest in the concept being taught is stimulated with gamification. While acquiring knowledge through gamification, an individual becomes a self-learner. His/her curiosity increases and they develop a love for learning and look forward to a healthy competition. Learners also start applying the logic in many real-life situations, which will make them approach problems differently.
Understanding the needs of the contemporary learners, we, at Next Education, have incorporated gamification in the form of exciting features like Quizzer, where the entire maths and science syllabus is covered, and included as an offering in our Next Learning Platform as well as our K-12 learning App, LearnNext+. Here, you can challenge your classmates, win badges, collect points, learn from a wide range of interesting audio-visual content and do a lot more fun things. Click here to know more.
