Application of Gamification in Modern Education

Introduction

Throughout the history, games have always been seen as a mean of entertainment and different types of trainings (McGonigal, 2011) due to their inherit tendency of engaging the user. Such advantages have encouraged researchers to adapt various game elements in other areas. One such endeavor is the concept of gamification, where multiple gaming elements are incorporated in a non-gaming context (Koivisto & Hamari, 2014). This adoption is done to serve several purposes other than entertainment such as job hiring, critical situational thinking and even character building (Deterding, 2012). This is because it engages users and motivates them to solve difficult problems (Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011). It is used in diverse contexts and for a lot of different purposes. For example, it is often proposed as an efficient technique to promote learning, engagement of customers and employees’ performance (Seaborn & Fels, 2015). It is also often proposed that by inculcating any general activity with various engagement and motivation principles through game design elements, some desired behavioral changes can be attained (Nah et al., 2013). Various gamification tools and methodologies have been designed covering multiple domains to enhance the users’ engagement and motivation. Moreover, multiple experiment setups have been devised to explore how this amazing technique can be used to direct users’ behaviors in a particular direction and its long-time effects on them (Seaborn & Fels, 2015).

Gamification has not emerged recently, but has some successful history in business and marketing to maintain users’ engagement, social interactions and the quality and quantity of actions (Hamari, 2013). This is often achieved through membership benefits, promotions and other reward points (Nelson, 2012). A large pool of recent empirical research studies can be seen as an evidence of numerous benefits of applying gamification in diverse domains including politics, business, marketing and public health (Lee & Hammer, 2011; Seaborn & Fels, 2015). Also in recent times, a new strategy, advergames, is used by some marketing agencies to promote their products. These advergames are simple video games containing advertisements for different products and are designed to promote a company, their products, or their services (Lee & Hammer, 2011). Similarly, airlines offering frequent flyer packages, Starbucks, a coffee franchise having partnership with Foursquare – a location based social network, to provide points to its ‘loyal’ customers, Nike+ attracting their costumers to set personalized goals as well as challenges for friends, and even Fiat, an automobile company, allowing its customers to play FiatDrive and earn points (Martínez-López et al., 2016), show how gamification and gaming elements are effectively used by major business companies to engage and motivate users.

These and other similar endeavors encouraged the researchers to apply different elements of gamification in the field of education to enhance students’ learning behaviors. Gamification has the ability to enhance the users’ engagement in an activity which, if coupled with effective teaching, can improve the learning experience of students (Kapp, 2012; McGonigal, 2011). Keeping this in view, many researchers have integrated multiple gamification elements in classrooms and observed an improvement in students’ overall motivation and engagement. This chapter explores the historical advent of gamification, existing theories present in this domain, their blending in the classroom teaching, and the effect of different gamification elements on students’ learning behaviors. It further presents an overview of various platforms to aid the blending of gamification in the education domain, and an exploration of studies signifying its merits and demerits. The analysis suggests that gamification can be considered as a complementary tool to be integrated in the traditional classroom environment but careful consideration is required to reduce its negative impacts.