Analysis of the applicability and utility of a gamified didactics with exergames at primary schools: Qualitative findings from a natural experiment

Abstract

One of the main objectives of Physical Education in elementary schools is to encourage motivation so that the subject enhances academic performance and the practice of physical exercise. Didactic research should evaluate the effectiveness of educational methods to know if they are applicable, useful, and in what sense. Exergames are digital motor games that aim to stimulate players' motor skills. Gamification refers to the use of game-based elements in nongame contexts to motivate actions. This research evaluates a gamified exergaming intervention, designed to improve children's academic performance by focusing on understanding applicability and usefulness. A natural experiment was set up in schools according to a mixed methods design. The qualitative data herein reported were collected during a natural experiment with a nonrandomized controlled design. The qualitative research design was used with field notes, an open-questions questionnaire, individual semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews. Eight teachers and 417 students took part. A content analysis was chosen as the methodological orientation. The facilitators were the realism of their didactic design and their adaptability to different educational contexts. The main barriers were the required materials and facilities. Teachers and students' attitudes were very positive, although future use was inconclusive. These findings may imply that this study is one of the few to provide positive evidence for educational gamification. The "Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics" gamification model and the "Just Dance Now" exergame may be applicable and useful for didactics in Physical Education, but all the participants' suggestions need to be considered to improve teaching interventions.

Teachers’ Perception towards the Use of Quizizz in the Teaching and Learning of English: A Systematic Review

“…After the four phases of selecting the eligible articles for review, 45 were found to be suitable to be used in this systematic review due to the nature of the respective studies. From the articles, four main aspects of teachers' perspectives on the use of Quizizz could be seen, mainly, effectiveness , feasibility [14,15,19,20,22,23,26,27,31,36,38,41,[43][44][45][46][47][48], difficulty [16,17,19,26,28,31,39,41,43,46,[48][49][50][51][52], and motivation [14,17,[24][25][26]31,32,35,38,40,41,44,45,47,49,50,…”

“…This made up 40% of what teachers also considered when deciding whether or not to use Quizizz in their teaching and learning sessions. Quintas-Hijos et al [44] stated that teachers consider Quizizz quite feasible because using it is convenient for all users. However, they still need to be connected to the Internet in order to participate in the sessions.…”

“…Its interface, which is user-friendly, helps learners to access different functions without much hassle. With this, learners who have limited Internet access would not waste much time or Internet quota on navigating around aimlessly [19,20,44]. In the teaching and learning process, students only need a game code from their teachers in order to access a game that can be played in real-time mode or student-paced mode [26,41].…”

“…As agents of change, teachers must constantly be up to date with the latest teaching and learning tools so that they can make sure that the learners are effectively learning no matter where they are, be it in urban or rural areas. Thus, it is safe to say that generally, teachers agree that Quizizz is a good tool to be used in the teaching and learning of the English language, as it is able to motivate learners to learn and improve positively [31,32,44,45,54,55].…”

A Qualitative Analysis of Implementing E-Learning during the COVID-19 Lockdown

“…Quantitative descriptive analyses were previously performed with the obtained data (see Table 2). This information was used as an indicator to direct the thematic analysis, similarly to one of our previous studies [46]. More specific descriptive analyses are found in the Supplementary Material (S3: Classification tree, coding sheets).…”