Design Didactic Activities Using Gamification: The Perspective of Teachers

Abstract

In recent years, gamification has raised considerable interest in various fields, including industry, healthcare, business and education. Moreover, the spread of technological and IT tools has contributed to the claim of new methodologies, approaches and tools, such as games, in the education field. Teachers are often attracted by gamification but they do not know how to put it into practice. It is therefore necessary to train teachers not only on the theoretical contents, but also and above all on the planning of didactic activities to adopt innovative educational approaches. The context of this research is the immersive 3-hour workshop on the theme "Gamification and education: innovative approaches to facilitate learning" which involved 54 teachers from all over Italy from primary to secondary school. After a short theoretical introduction, the teachers were guided through the individual step-by-step creation of a gamification activity. The research questions are: Which are the most frequent characteristics, factors and elements of gaming employed in the planning of didactic activities by school teachers? What were the most adopted gamification strategies? To answer the research questions, we analyzed teachers' responses to the initial questionnaire before the workshop and to the final questionnaire at the end. We considered also the design forms filled by teachers in order to understand how teachers employed the proposed methodology within their educational activity. The results show that teachers really appreciated the proposed methodologies and they tried immediately to put them into practice.