Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Both the knowledge society and technology have generated a new scenario of concerns among young people, translated into changes in the interests of students, which education has not always been able to satisfy. That is why it is necessary to look for new strategies and resources in the classrooms that will increase the motivation and commitment of the student (Ortiz-Colón, Jordán, & Agredal, 2018).
The master classes, in which there is an economical an productive way to transfer information by an educator (Bati, Mandiracioglu, Orgun, & Govsa, 2013), have been the most used teaching method in higher education (Schmidt, Wagener, Smeets, Keemink, & van der Molen, 2015). However, this educational process has been influenced by the rapid development of new technologies, leading to a change of the roles played by both teachers and students (Aleksić-Maslać, Rašić, & Vranešić, 2018).
In higher education, the passive response of students (Abadía, Muñoz, & Soteras, 2011; Egelandsdal, Ludvigsen, & Ness, 2019), who are accustomed to the use of new communication technologies (Backhaus, Huth, Entwistle, Homayounfar, & Koenig, 2019), is evidence of the inefficiency of this method (Larsen, 2006). This has even been justified from a neuronal point of view, reflecting how the individual's brain activity decreases to levels close to relaxation when he or she is attending a master class (Sánchez-Carracedo & Vargas Barba, 2019).
Master classes become tedious for the younger generation (Ashwin et al., 2020; Pinter, Čisar, Balogh, & Manojlović, 2020) and after fifteen minutes concentration is lost (Schmidt et al., 2015). This is why it is a challenge to keep the students’ attention in classroom throughout a whole teaching day (Aleksić-Maslać et al., 2018), and maybe a cause of student absenteeism (Bati et al., 2013; Moore, Armstrong, & Pearson, 2008; Triado-Ivern et al., 2020).
In contrast to traditional learning methods that have shown a lack of motivation in students (Simões, Redondo, & Vilas, 2013), games are emerging as one of the possible means of motivating and attracting the attention of new generations of students thanks to competition, among other factors (Hanus & Fox, 2015). Games, which have been a fundamental part of human civilization along thousands years (McGonigal, 2011), are a possible form of active learning to prevent students from just only listening and taking notes in class (García-Peñalvo, Alarcón, & Domínguez, 2019).
Games encourage student motivation thanks to their recreational component (Kenny & McDaniel, 2011), confirming the existence of a relationship between motivation and gamification (Molina, Ortiz-Colón, & Agreda, 2017). Therefore, if one of the main objectives in education is to increase students' motivation to achieve significant learning (Curto, Orcos, Blázquez, & Molina, 2019), games represent a great opportunity to avoid students' abandonment, lack of motivation, reluctance, or lack of commitment in their teaching-learning process (Mérida, Angulo, Jurado, & Diz, 2011).
Some educators consider game based learning to be a powerful teaching method (von Wangenheim & Shull, 2009), as it maintains the purpose of education, enhances the player's skill and can be used in real life (Chang, Wang, Lin, & Yang, 2009). In fact, the use of gamification in education has increased exponentially since 2014 (Torres-Toukoumidis, Ramírez-Montoya, & Romero-Rodríguez, 2019) maybe because the educational games make the student the centre of learning, which facilitates a more fruitful and interesting learning process (Su, 2016). That is why the introduction of games in education aims to promote motivation, commitment and certain behaviours (Lee & Hammer, 2011).
But the current educational landscape requires the inclusion of technological advances to enable the quality of teaching and the learning process to be improved (Molina et al., 2017), what would be in line with the preferences of the millennial generation for more active and technology-oriented learning styles (Jain & Dutta, 2018).