ABSTRACT
The emergence of online learning has become important during the COVID-19 pandemic due to the advent of internet technology. The unpreparedness of planning and implementing online learning has caused many problems during the pandemic such as limited or monotonous academic materials as well as difficulty in organizing activities and student involvement. Online learning is also more stressful because students are stuck in private academic processes in the absence of challenging and fun activities leading to knowledge development difficulties. Therefore, this study aims to develop and analyze the feasibility of a gamification model for case and project-based online learning in universities. This analysis used the research and development (R&D) method with the experimental procedure containing model development as well as product validation and testing. In the validation process, two learning design and media experts as well as 76 students participated with a descriptive statistical analysis used to analyze the data. The results of the learning design experts' assessment showed a score of 4.35, learning media experts' assessment showed a score of 4.90 and the average score of the students' assessment was 4.33. Based on the results, the developed learning model was feasible to use in university academic processes. © 2023 by the authors.
ABSTRACT
Scientific misinformation has grown during the Covid-19 pandemic. To reduce the impact of false information, serious games are emerging that aim to make young people media and digitally literate through gamification. The main objective of this work is to analyse the potential of the Go Viral! edugame in terms of its journa-listic quality and design in order to detect the advantages of its implementation in different social contexts. The methodology used is based on a discursive and content analysis used in the study of other newsgames. The results indicate that this game, based on psychological inoculation, effectively allows the user to know how misinformation is created in networks, how it is increased by echo chambers and what tools are necessary to create a network community from the point of view of from the disinformer's point of view, thanks to the transmission of data, contextualization, awareness, interaction and stimulation to action. Although its journalistic quality is limited;the content, the architecture and the design indicate advantages that favor the reduction of disinformation noise as mechanisms to bury the echo chambers created in social networks. Although it cannot be presented as a single effective vehicle to combat scientific misinformation, it can become a valid instrument alongside others such as awareness campaigns, educational resources launched by institutions and the regulation of digital platforms.
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The purpose of this qualitative exploratory single-case study was to explore the perceptions and social interactions of participants in an online role-playing game campaign. Six participants were recruited from social media groups. All participants were over age 18years and had 3 or fewer years of experience playing the traditional role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Game play was conducted, managed, and observed through a virtual tabletop simulator during the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic. Methods triangulation including semistructured interviews, journal prompts and entries, and observations were used to gather data from the study participants and game manager. Narrative data were coded and analyzed weekly to monitor for saturation and other quality controls. The data provided information from the perspectives of the game players leading and cooperating as a team. Data analysis resulted in three main themes (skill identification, social interactions, and leadership skills) and nine subthemes (weakness identification, problem identification, problem resolution, teamwork, delegation, conflict resolution, decision-making, emotional response, and empathy) demonstrating new learning capacities that were transferred socially to various life interactions. Results indicated that the participants gained the ability to recognize learned skills and how to transfer the new knowledge and skills from the campaign to their personal, social, and work lives. Study results increased the body of contextual knowledge on how professionals may view learning from gamification and role play opportunities and their recognition and perception of how to obtain new and transferable skills. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
In Taiwan, students in visual design-related disciplines have long neglected the traditional mindset of balanced development in many subjects during their secondary education. The learning process has largely abandoned STEM and other mathematical and scientific courses, focusing only on skills and craft training. In recent years, STEM education has been actively promoted in higher education in Taiwan. This study aims to plan and design a learning model that is motivating and fun for students within the constraints mentioned above. We used game-based learning to introduce STEM education and enhance visual design students' interest in STEM. A course was selected to teach programming logical concepts. The students were taught to use Scratch and Code.org as learning platforms to learn the building block programming language. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, online board game activities were incorporated into the teaching mode of the course. Game-based learning and game mechanics were integrated into the learning activities of the course. The learning activities incorporated a cardboard game with digital media and a competitive mode to enhance the interest of students with design expertise in STEM topics. The basic concepts of programming language were transformed into images and the game mechanism was added to enhance students' motivation. In this study, students were introduced to the basic structure of programming through a specially designed board game to enhance their logical thinking skills. We found that the transformation of program concepts from words to images helped learners to make picture associations, which effectively increased motivation and motivated learners to participate in learning. Especially for students who were not interested in STEM. © 2023 Author(s).
ABSTRACT
With rapid proliferation of digitalization and compulsion by COVID-19 pandemic, learning formats have been changing from face-To-face to online. Online education enables learners to take courses from anywhere, anytime, but it can also cause some problems for learners who struggle to maintain motivation. In addition, for STEAM education, it is important to engage in hands-on activities, but the ongoing pandemic has made it difficult for students to gather in one place to perform such activities. Incorporating gamification into online education can potentially motivate students and make STEAM education more interactive. On this premise, we have developed PhyGame as a learning system to help high-school students learn Physics. The system includes common game elements such as badges and leaderboards, and interactive simulation of Physics concepts embodying game-like charm. It also includes three modes of learning that allow students to adjust the difficulty according to their own learning levels, and a function that automatically saves learning log. For evaluation, PhyGame was used by students (N=23) at a high school in central Tokyo. The students rated the system on a scale of 1 to 10, and the main results are as follows: (1) Using PhyGame made learning enjoyable (mean score: 7.74);(2) PhyGame provided a good UI/UX (mean score: 7.83);(3) The overall experience with PhyGame was satisfactory (mean: 7.00). Our evaluation results show that interactive and gamified learning systems like PhyGame have a positive impact on user engagement and motivation. © 2023 IEEE.
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The inspiration for this collective writing project began with a digital conference entitled ‘Knowledge Socialism, COVID-19 and the New Reality of Education' held at Beijing Normal University. In this conference and through this article, multiple researchers spread across six continents have engaged in the collaborative task of outlining emerging innovations and alternative contingencies towards education, international collaboration, and digital reform in this time of global crisis. Trends associated with digital education, knowledge openness, peer production, and collective intelligence as articulated by Michael A. Peters' conception of Knowledge Socialism are given careful analysis and exploration. Some of the members of this collective endeavor to identify problems, others, begin to draw boxes around potential solutions. Overall, this article engages with real world challenges and innovations that look beyond dominant neoliberal trends in the knowledge economy to build bridges toward novel possibilities in this era of rapid digital change.
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Our practice programs have changed drastically after the appearance of COVID-19. The practical sessions designed for all Automation subjects until 2019 were face-to-face. But the arrival of the pandemic and health restrictions resulted in the closure of our university facilities, which forced us to redo the laboratory experiences. It is in this context that simulation and gamification helped us to move forward, since the solution we followed was the virtualization of the laboratory. Although the degree of satisfaction of the students with the new practical sessions is quite good, the purpose of this paper is not to present a detailed analysis of all the simulation and gamification tools we studied, but to explain what our situation was like before COVID-19, how we faced the change, what we learned in the process, what the new practice programs we are currently following are like, what tools have helped us, and what goals we still have to achieve. We hope that our experience can be useful to other teachers. Copyright © 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
ABSTRACT
Food purchase choices, one of the main determinants of food consumption, is highly influenced by food environments. Given the surge in online grocery shopping because of the COVID-19 pandemic, interventions in digital environments present more than ever an opportunity to improve the nutritional quality of food purchase choices. One such opportunity can be found in gamification. Participants (n = 1228) shopped for 12 items from a shopping list on a simulated online grocery platform. We randomized them into four groups in a 2 × 2 factorial design: presence vs. absence of gamification, and high vs. low budget. Participants in the gamification groups saw foods with 1 (least nutritious) to 5 (most nutritious) crown icons and a scoreboard with a tally of the number of crowns the participant collected. We estimated ordinary least squares and Poisson regression models to test the impact of the gamification and budget on the nutritional quality of the shopping basket. In the absence of gamification and low budget, participants collected 30.78 (95% CI [30.27; 31.29]) crowns. In the gamification and low budget condition, participants increased the nutritional quality of their shopping basket by collecting more crowns (B = 4.15, 95% CI [3.55; 4.75], p < 0.001). The budget amount ($50 vs. $30) did not alter the final shopping basket (B = 0.45, 95% CI [-0.02; 1.18], p = 0.057), nor moderated the gamification effect. Gamification increased the nutritional quality of the final shopping baskets and nine of 12 shopping list items in this hypothetical experiment. Gamifying nutrition labels may be an effective strategy to improve the nutritional quality of food choices in online grocery stores, but further research is needed.
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During the COVID-19 outbreak, crowdsourcing-based context-aware recommender systems (CARS) which capture the real-time context in a contactless manner played an important role in the "new normal". This study investigates whether this approach effectively supports users' decisions during epidemics and how different game designs affect users performing crowdsourcing tasks. This study developed a crowdsourcing-based CARS focusing on restaurant recommendations. We used four conditions (control, self-competitive, social-competitive, and mixed gamification) and conducted a two-week field study involving 68 users. The system provided recommendations based on real-time contexts including restaurants' epidemic status, allowing users to identify suitable restaurants to visit during COVID-19. The result demonstrates the feasibility of crowdsourcing to collect real-time information for recommendations during COVID-19 and reveals that a mixed competitive game design encourages both high- and low-performance users to engage more and that a game design with self-competitive elements motivates users to take on a wider variety of tasks. These findings inform the design of restaurant recommender systems in an epidemic context and serve as a comparison of incentive mechanisms for gamification of self-competition and competition with others.
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The majority of countries are currently struggling with unsustainable levels of waste production and low levels of recycling, particularly relating to household waste, and this area is in urgent need of new solutions. In general, the waste management sector has struggled with low consumer trust, fraud, manipulation, significant manual processes, and low levels of information and control. Recent events relating to the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted, in particular, the role of trust in effective public policy making and consumer behavioural change. Here we propose a hybrid blockchain solution called a Polkadot parachain. Polkadot is a blockchain technology that connects a network of blockchains, each called a parachain, that can be customised to the business needs of a given application. This solution provides the cost benefits, scalability, and control of a permissioned or private blockchain while providing the security, verifiability, and trust of a public blockchain. The solution is developed with a design science approach and combines three typically separate blockchain use cases: supply chain tracking, incentivisation through a payment system, and gamification to achieve a complete solution for waste management. We provide a detailed discussion on the design of this blockchain solution with the use of blockchain functionality assessed against the criteria and development approaches found in the literature. Finally, we demonstrate how such a blockchain can be implemented with the Substrate blockchain development framework.
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PurposeEscape room-based learning is a new educational game-based learning trend which embeds student learning within an exciting escape room scenario. Ordinarily these educational escape rooms are in a table-top format which involves learners decoding clues together around a table. In the age of a global pandemic [coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)] with stringent social distancing and lock-downs, this normal game modality was not possible and so an alternate online approach was required. Thus, this paper aims to study escape room activities during global pandemics.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors outline how these escape room activities have been taken online, in an synchronous virtual environment and evaluate the student perception of these escape rooms, in contrast to previous cohorts of students who completed escape rooms together in person.FindingsThe authors' results indicate that although students enjoy the escape room game-based learning environment, the remote nature of the activity means the students take longer to solve the puzzles. The students are also more likely to struggle in the activity and find them less engaging than the in-person escape room challenges.Originality/valueAlthough educational escape rooms have been devised for a variety of subjects and can be run through several different modalities (table-top, full rooms and online), this study compares different modalities (online vs table-top) for identical puzzles taken over different cohorts of students.
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Many careers have changed since COVID-19 appeared. In education in particular, the use of ICT tools increased in quite a disorderly manner, and the expansion of these tools opened new opportunities to update the ways of teaching and learning. ICT tools have been used for a long time in education, but they have often been used just as support tools without any academic purpose and without achieving their full potential. If we focus on teaching foreign languages, ICT has given us the opportunity to see and experience other cultures, as well as to live experiences close to a real-life immersion, facilitating the understanding of the use of language and giving everyone a chance to learn in context. This does not only include videos or music;nowadays, we can use and connect many resources including videogames, social media, and blogs, among others. And here is where we can find great potential for development. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to present the plan for a doctoral thesis and its status, as well as some notes on the context, main motivation, literature, and methodology to be used for creating resources that help improve the 21st-century teaching and learning experience. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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The increased use of smartphones and social media has been fuelled by pandemic Covid-19 and successive lockdowns. Investment and brokerage firms jumped at this opportunity to develop trading apps that make the investment process look like playing a game ('gamification'). This article looks at the advantages and disadvantages of this 4.0 investment innovation for retail investors.
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The study compares the effectiveness, popularity, and ease of applicability of different learning tools in virtual classrooms among university teachers and students concerning the users' technological literacy and training, as well as equipment support offered by the universities during the pandemic. Comparisons between face-to-face teaching in classrooms and online virtual classrooms will be drawn concerning limitations, incentives, motivation, and effectiveness toward learning. This study also leads to the question of future course development by exploring the possibility of course design and assessment restructuring with a switch to online education with the new mode of technology as the trend.
ABSTRACT
Virtual, augmented, and immersive reality opens a world of possibilities in education by allowing students to recreate authentic situations, such as operating machinery, assembling a product, or training tool handling, to mention a few. In the TEC21 educational model, the core is the challenge: A project with a real-world challenge assigned by the training partner results in students offering solution proposals.The trigger that accelerated the development of virtual, augmented, and immersive reality activities in distance learning was COVID-19 confinement. During this, these technologies recreated the laboratory and its facilities' learning through augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences.Using these technologies in the classroom allows students to achieve a great learning experience and develop skills for postgraduate studies and professional futures.Furthermore, now that we have returned to our physical facilities and laboratories, we can accelerate the learning obtained at the training partners' facilities, recreating processes and machinery through these immersive technologies and a hybrid experience for our students.The present research shows the activity learning design process and the statistical treatment of the data to provide continuous feedback during the activity;we examine the three transcendental variables in the educational process: The learning (academic rigor), the development of competencies, and the involvement or immersion of the students in the classroom. © 2023 IEEE.
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Technology has found its root and application in all sectors, and the same stands true in the field of medical education. Moreover, with the emergence of the coronavirus disease-2019 pandemic, the use of technology in online teaching-learning and assessment has increased immensely. The purpose of the current review is to explore the utility of gamification apps to enhance the active engagement of medical students. An extensive search of all materials related to the topic was carried out in the PubMed search engine and a total of five articles were selected based on their suitability with the current review objectives. Keywords used in the search include gamification and medical education. Gamification refers to the employment of elements of games in nongame contexts with an intention to engage users and making them to solve the given problems. It promotes the delivery of information in a learner-centered way and meets the requirement of individual students, especially by targeting those domains in which they are interested. These games are designed in such a way that it simulates problems of the real world, wherein students have to apply their knowledge into practice and simultaneously learn the clinical decision-making skills. In conclusion, gamification and the use of technology should be acknowledged as the new aspects of curriculum delivery and all efforts should be taken to incorporate them as one of the components of medical teaching and assessment in the near future across all medical institutions.
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Online learning has become compulsory when the world was facing the Covid 19 outbreak. Accordingly, students' engagement and participation during online learning have been a major concern among teachers. By adapting the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the present study is carried out to examine influential factors towards the intention to use gamification during online classes. With the use of judgmental sampling, 283 usable responses have been gathered from undergraduate students in Malaysia. Results revealed that ‘authentic' positively affects three mediating variables of perceived value (PEU), perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived enjoyment (PE). Additionally, PEU, PU and PE posit positive responses towards the intention to use gamification in online learning. Furthermore, all three mediators also present positive effects in the relationship between authentic and intention to use. Thus, this study affirms the usability of TAM in the online learning context with the extension of authenticity as the external factor and perceived enjoyment as the mediating factor. The results give implications for educators and higher learning institutions to modify their learning outcomes and course content to be more interesting with the usage of online gamification tools. Perhaps, this study gives further insight for future research to apply other external factors, such as knowledge and trust to enrich the study in gamification context © 2023, Asian Journal of University Education.All Rights Reserved.
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Active learning methodologies support the development of higher-order thinking and knowledge application necessary for modern health care environments. Through active learning, nurse practitioner students apply their understanding of population-specific competencies while developing critical thinking and reasoning skills for safe and effective care. Myths regarding student-centric learning, such as cost, time, and design, may create barriers for faculty to incorporate competency-based methods into didactic curricula. This article provides evidence-based strategies and exemplars for active learning as a method to evaluate student competency beyond clinical skills.
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Persuasive games are widely implemented in the healthcare domain to promote behaviour change among individuals. Previous research shows that using persuasive games increases motivation and awareness, leading to a positive change in behaviour. However, there is little knowledge on which persuasive strategies will motivate people at different Stages of Behaviour Change and whether tailoring persuasive games to match users' stages of change will increase their effectiveness with respect to their motivational appeal towards promoting disease awareness and prevention using the ARCS motivation scales and their intention to adopt the precautionary measures. To address this gap, using COVID-19 as a case study, we designed two different versions of a persuasive game, called COVID Pacman, using different persuasive strategies. The two versions of the game target the same goal of motivating the adoption of precautionary measures. We conducted a quantitative study (N=127) followed by semi-structured interviews of 18 participants. The results of conducting an ANOVA on the quantitative data and thematic analysis on the qualitative study show that tailoring the persuasive games to individual's stages of change by using appropriate persuasive strategies increased their effectiveness with respect to their ability to motivate people to adopt the precautionary measures towards disease prevention compared to the non-tailored version. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Human-Computer Interaction is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to outline a research protocol for an initial investigation into the efficacy of an early-development gamified intervention ("Wellbeing Town”) designed with potential end-users with the aim of improving adult wellbeing. Rationale for the proposed research is discussed along with a summary of the planned methodological approach.Design/methodology/approachPreliminary evaluation of "Wellbeing Town” is proposed to begin using a quasi-experiment, pre- vs post-intervention repeated-measures design with follow-up. Evaluation of changes in self-reported wellbeing will be supplemented with an investigation into the extent of self-directed play between post-intervention and follow-up, and its implications for follow-up outcome.FindingsAs this paper represents a protocol for future evaluation, no data is reported presently. The authors present the protocol for data analysis.Originality/valueOnce concluded, this study represents an initial evaluation of a gamified tool for adult wellbeing designed in conjunction with potential end-users. Should the game elicit significant improvements to wellbeing when played, proposals for further evaluation and possible future scalability are presented.