The Advantages of Gamification and Game-Based Learning and their Benefits in the Development of Education

Headnote

Abstract: In the United States, gamification is used in education for more than 10 years. Gamification is a procedure that employs certain game specific elements in different fields like education, health, sport or human resources. This process is known as "Human-Focused Design", as opposed to "Function-Focused Design." It's a design process that optimizes for human motivation in a system, as opposed to pure efficiency. Most systems are "function-focused", designed to get the job done quickly. This is like a factory that assumes its workers will do their jobs because they are required to. However, Human-Focused Design remembers that people in a system have feelings, insecurities, and reasons why they want or do not want to do certain things, and therefore optimizes for their feelings, motivations, and engagement. Since games have spent decades learning how to master motivation and engagement, we are now learning from games, and that is why we call it Gamification. Take for example Duolingo, a massive online collaboration which combines a free language-learning website with a paid crowdsourced text translation platform. The service is designed so that students can learn a given language online, while helping to translate websites and documents. The traditional motivational methods are less and less efficient and thus the companies are forced towards more attractive and innovative methods, fit for the psychological profile of the current generation, a generation raised and schooled in close connection with the technological progress. European Union started to show interest for these aspects, as proven by the Game-Based Learning and Gamification training course that was organized in Spain by the means of a European Commission project.

Keywords: gamification; learning; innovation; m-learning.

I.INTRODUCTION

Gamification is the application of game-design elements in various non-game contexts, such as: human resources, health and education.

Though the term "gamification" first appeared online in 2008, it did not gain popularity until 2010. Nick Pelling claims he was the one to create the term "gamification" in 2002, by which he described the application of computer game-design elements to electronic devices, in order to make them more appealable. A more rudimentary example for this term's description and the way in which gamification works is the manner in which parents feed their children when they are little by turning that teaspoon...