Over the last decade, we have seen a large amount of research performed on technology-enhanced learning. Within this area, the use of games and gamification in education has gained popularity over the years. In this work, the author aim to identify the main topics in these areas within the last 10 years. The researchers propose a new methodology to conduct text analytics-driven topic analysis following a bibliometrics and text analytics-driven approach. The authors collected all the metadata from 7815 papers in these areas over the last 10 years. The author used it to find the main topics across the papers and hidden relationships between author and papers. The analysis in this work has focused on three main objectives: 1) discover the main topics in games and gamification in education based on paper keywords and topic modeling; 2) discover the evolution of said topics over the last ten years of research; and 3) discover how papers and authors from different communities have interacted over the years from a network's perspective.
TopIntroduction
Nowadays, technology is changing and improving year after year, and this development is also making a significant impact on educational environments. Despite previous studies suggest that the use of games present some limitations that contribute to the still-limited applications of technology in education (such as finding the time for both the presenter/preceptor and student to learn the systems employed, the financial impacts on both parties, or technical limitations), research and interest in this area have been growing over the years (de Klerk & Kato, 2017; Eiland & Todd, 2019). Within this context, there have been two mainstream trends that have gained an important influence in education, which has been the use of games and gamification in educational environments.
On the one side, gamification can be defined as the use of game design elements in a non-game context to encourage users to perform desired behaviors (Deterding et al., 2011; Patrício et al., 2021), and also to encourage users’ motivation, enjoyment and engagement (Patrício et al., 2018). Usually, gamification approaches do not represent games in the proper meaning of the word. Instead, they make use of the possibilities of Information Technology (IT) to develop incentive concepts, which continuously engage users in using products, services and information systems (Blohm & Leimeister, 2013). Moreover, gamification techniques in education have been used broadly in the last years. The main reason to implement gamification elements in education is to improve the motivation and engagement of the student towards the learning goals (Hamari et al., 2014).
On the other side, one of the most prominent examples of technology in education is the use of digital games for learning (De Freitas, 2006). Playing video games is one of the most popular activities in the world. According to a survey from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA, 2019), the role of video games in the American family is changing: nearly three-quarters (74%) of parents believe video games can be educational for their children, and more than half (57%) enjoy playing games with their child at least weekly. This has prompted a rapidly increasing interest in using games in educational settings, not merely because “it is what kids are paying attention to,” but because well-designed games are very closely aligned with the design of good educational experiences (Gee, 2008).
Therefore, motivated by the widespread use of both gamification and games in education, the authors would like to conduct a topic analysis of the main trends across the last ten years of research, considering the use of both digital and non-digital games. Usually, there are several approaches to do this type of analysis, such as systematic reviews or scoping reviews, among others. Unfortunately, these analyses are very time-consuming, especially when we have an extensive collection of documents or when they are performed by a small team of researchers (Kovačević et al., 2012).
With the explosive growth in the research literature production, the need for new approaches to structure knowledge emerged (Kokol et al., 2020). In this work, the authors explore some areas that could be useful to alleviate this workload and perform trends analysis in an easy and scalable way. Researchers aim to do so by taking a mixed approach of three different areas: the first area is text analytics, and specifically topic modeling, that will be used to extract the main topics using the papers’ abstract; the second is the area of bibliometrics, in which authors will use the papers’ keywords to find the most common ones as well as their evolution over time; finally, researchers will use network analysis to create one network using the papers’ authors, and another one using the citations between publications. Thus, this work aims to analyze over 7500 publications indexed in Scopus, benefitting from all these techniques mentioned and obtaining helpful information, using an easy, quick, and scalable approach. More specifically, our main research questions (RQs) are as follow: