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TopIntroduction
Engaging learners, nurturing their interest, and igniting their curiosity and perseverance constitute perpetual challenges in education. These challenges become more evident in online, distant settings (Bolliger and Martin, 2018; Martin and Bolliger, 2018) and were further accentuated amidst Covid-19 pandemic. The rapid transition to remote education, social isolation, and mobility restrictions have fragmented the connections between learners, educators, educational activities, and learning outcomes (Piki, 2020; Piki, 2022). The unprecedented situation caused by the pandemic has also revealed various skills gaps for both students and educators. These challenges raise the need for adjusting, repurposing, and personalising learning content, student feedback, and assessment strategies; re-establishing student-student and student-educator connections; responding to social and emotional needs; as well as attending to the educational needs of learners with disabilities and underprivileged members of society (Brzezinska and Cromarty, 2022). Furthermore, there is an increasing emphasis on continuous re-skilling and up-skilling of both learners and educators to better prepare them for the ‘new normal’. Alongside aptitude in technology-mediated communication and collaboration, demonstrating empathy and emotional intelligence becomes a key transferable competency. The Innovating Pedagogy 2022 report (Kukulska-Hulme et al., 2022) highlights the role of social media, mobile learning, and the role of emotions and wellbeing in new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment. Gamification and game-based learning are also increasingly utilised to motivate learners and enhance the learning outcomes (Zainuddin et al., 2020). These observations present a genuine opportunity for rethinking how to construct seamless, personalised, and engaging learning experiences in the post-pandemic era. Mobile and digital technology can play a pivotal role towards attaining these goals. Considering the ongoing changes affecting students’ and educators’ lives, the objectives of this paper are:
- a)
To explore how gamification and game-based learning can be leveraged through mobile technology to seamlessly blend formal and informal learning experiences.
- b)
To present a game authoring tool that enables educators to create mobile gamified lesson paths (GLPs) towards promoting learner engagement, interest, and curiosity.
- c)
To conduct an initial evaluation and identify the challenges and opportunities for future research and development in game-based learning.
TopBackground
A vast literature exists on educational gamification and game-based learning. This section discusses relevant literature on key concepts including gamification, playful learning and game-based learning; seamless and mobile learning; and microlearning. These concepts informed the design and development of the proposed tool for authoring mobile gamified lesson paths.