Grabbing students' attention is becoming more challenging in the digital age, distance education, and increasing low literacy. This complex educational phenomenon needs to be mitigated to prevent negative social and economic consequences. This work presents the use of gamification in higher education to engage and motivate students in Calculus, a course that traditionally presents high failure and dropout rates. The main goal is to report an experience developing an RPG-style educational digital game to be used and tested in part of the course during one semester. The project applied concepts of gamification, educational digital games, digital game-based learning, and the theory of meaningful learning as a theoretical basis for the formulation of the game. The results showed positive acceptance of this approach by the students and an increase of interest in proceeding with using the game for learning purposes. According to the results, 73% of students declared the game contributes to the learning process, and 82% showed interest in using the game for the whole semester.
TopIntroduction
Historically, Calculus has high dropout rates and failure. According to Barufi (1999), the subject presented a 66% failure rate between 1990 and 1995 at the Institute of Physics of University of São Paulo (USP). This same subject at the Institute of Geosciences between 1990 and 1993 reached an alarming 72% non-approved rate at USP. A survey conducted by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), concluded that students considered Calculus learning ineffective, lacking aspiration, with an excessive amount of content and at a very fast pace. In addition, the lack of connection between the teacher and the students was identified (Bressoud et al., 2012). Another problem, reported by Mendes and Giostri (2008) is that the student arrives in higher education with inadequate math knowledge and without motivation to maintain a regular study.
According to Kessler et al. (2011), many Calculus students have gaps in fundamental mathematics knowledge, however these concepts are essential for calculus understanding. The Meaningful Learning Theory proposed by Ausubel et al. (1968) says that this basic knowledge of mathematics is called “subsumers for meaningful learning”. The reinforcement of contents through lectures (the traditional pre-calculus courses) has sometimes proved to be ineffective, since the difficulties of students in this area and the learning style are very diverse.
Nowadays, most students in higher education belong to a group called digital natives, composed of people born in the 1980s or later and grew up surrounded by technology. Digital natives have access to information very easily and quickly. They are not usually motivated by traditional instruction. Instead, they prefer inductive reasoning with fast interactions. Therefore, to keep the interest of digital natives, the education needs to fit these student profiles and use the technological resources to improve the teaching and learning process (Prensky, 2010). Obviously, the conventional teaching process is essential. However, in some cases, the massive and purely conceptual expository lectures demotivate students (Bezerra, 2016). In that regard, gamification arises as an alternative to deal with this gap since it could make learning more interesting and engaging (Surendeleg et al., 2014).
Gamification is defined as the application of game techniques and game-oriented thinking in non-game contexts. It emerges in applications of marketing, training s, productivity, finance, health, sustainability, as well as news and entertainment media (Deterding et al., 2011). However, over the years, the phenomenon of gamification is spreading also through the educational area (Fardo, 2013). Several studies report the success of gamification in education. Silva et al. (2016) focused on the problem of programming learning, which usually presents a high rate of evasion. The authors developed a model based on student engagement with gamification techniques and applied it in three classes containing 24 students. The results showed that the students became more engaged, and the teachers stated that the model helped in the learning process. An exploratory case study was conducted by Machajewski (2017), containing dense descriptions of students in the subject of Introduction to Computing at Grand Valley State University. 1184 comments from students enrolled in a gamified version of the discipline were qualitatively analyzed and pointed to the success of the purpose.
The research by (Rincon-Flores et al., 2020) analyzed the use of gamification in Calculus through telepresence and holographic projection. All thirty-four students who participated stated that the gamified strategy made the classes more motivating. This was reflected in grade improvement of the second evaluation period. The literature review by Manzano-León (2021) analyzed articles published between 2016 and 2020 that implemented gamification in the education context formal. Fourteen works were selected for analysis from 750. The results support that educational gamification has a potential impact on student academic performance, commitment and motivation.