University Students as Co-creators in Designing Gamification Teaching Activities using Emergent Technologies in Swedish K-12 Education

Abstract

This paper reports on a study exploring the use of university students as co-creators when designing activities for an emergent teaching practice such as gamification, using emergent technologies in a Swedish K-12 education context. More specifically, the aim was to empirically explore and develop knowledge about the process ofdesigning for gamification teaching in K-12 education, to develop gamification teaching design principles and, in addition, to study how emergent technologies could be used in this context. Four sub-studies were conducted between 2014 and 2018 which included four groups of university students as co-creators in the teaching designs. The empirical material is based on observations from the field test in which school students tested university student designs. Post interviews were conducted with participating school teachers and university students. In addition, university student written reports were included. Findings illustrate four themes; 1) The design process of the gamification teaching activities, 2)Thegamification teaching design principles developed, 3) The school students’ experiences of the gamification designs and4) Designing gamification teaching activities – a complex process. Findings show that designing for gamification teaching designs using emergent technologies is quite a complex process.This complexity concerns, among other things, the puzzle of combining the different knowledge domainsinto the TPACK Model (i.e. technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, content knowledge) in an emergent teaching practice (gamification) with the use of emergent technologies. The co-creation process and the move between these knowledge domain areas could maximize the effect of achieving a pedagogical balance concerning what school students perceive as funwithout sacrificing focus on their knowledge acquisition and learning processes.

Using gamification as an online teaching strategy to develop students’ 21st century skills

“…Moreover, studies also show that teachers continuously struggle in this regard [24]. For example, Mårell-Olsson found in her study [8] that teachers perceive designing gamification activities as a real challenge to find what she terms as a pedagogical balance. The pedagogical balance concerns designing teaching activities in such a way as to create a balance between fun elements in relation to knowledge elements and technology used in the designed gamification activities that in turn will trigger students' knowledge acquisition and learning processes without sacrificing deep learning.…”

“…However, it could be important for today's contemporary education to further explore gamification as a teaching strategy and its effects and to focus additionally on developing students' 21 st century skills during their schooling for being part of a so-called smart learning ecosystem [4]. Therefore, this presented study aimed to take a holistic approach on this issue and investigate if, and in that case how, using university students as co-creators [8] for developing gamification activities in K-12 education could be an example of adapting different learning systems (e.g., school and university). This approach focuses on developing competences that both school students and university students need in the future to be able to live and work in a constantly changing digitised society.…”

“…Many educational reforms have failed, and according to Dede [7], the same terminology of 21 st century skills is used, but apparently means different things. Furthermore, teachers perceive the process of digitising and changing the ways they teach as a real challenge [8]. At the same time, due to the current COVID-19 pandemic occurring during 2020, teachers have been given another challenge to master.…”

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“…Together the papers show the wide variation in contexts in which co-creation approaches can be used by the TEL community. The papers include both school [3,4] and university-based [5,6] contexts in which the students are the co-creators, as well as professional learning environments in which the teachers, developers or tool users are the co-creators [7,8,9,10,11]. The contexts are not limited to formal education settings, but also include settings in which non-formal or informal learning [11,12] is the focus.…”

“…A significant number of the papers explicitly state that they are using co-creation as part of a Design-based Research (DBR) approach to their TEL work [5,6,8,10]. Such studies use a collaborative and iterative knowledge creation and design approach to contribute not only to an improved TEL design but also to our understanding of their specific context and to reflect on theory.…”