Defining the Concept of Gamification in Education
The concept of gamification is not entirely new in the educational arena and has been applied in several educational contexts during the last decade, yet a large amount of information is still unknown (Metwally, Nacke, Chang, Wang & Yousef, 2021).
As a starting point, the definition that dominates the literature pertains to Deterding, Dixon, Khaled and Nacke (2011a), who defined gamification as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (p. 2). On its part, Werbach (2014) refined this conceptualization as “the process of making activities more game-like” (p. 6). In 2015, the conceptualization has finally moved towards learning by Landers, inaugurating gamification of learning. In his theory of gamified learning, gamification is interpreted as “the use of game attributes, including action language, assessment, conflict/challenge, control, environment, game fiction, human interaction, immersion, and rules/goals to facilitate learning and related outcomes” (p. 6). In other words, gamification in education is a mechanism that conflates game elements and game-like experiences into the learning process with the ultimate goal to change learner’s contextual behavior.
With that in mind, an increasing number of educational implementations made their appearancewith positive results on motivation, engagement, performance and interaction (Antonaci, Klemke, & Specht, 2019; Zainuddin, Chu, Shujahat, & Perera, 2020), but outpaced the understanding of gamification and its method (Dichev & Dicheva, 2017; Landers, Bauer, Callan, & Armstrong, 2015).