Category Archives: education

gaming and learning

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a new paper published on gaming habits and education:

Mozelius, P., Westin, T., Wiklund, M., & Norbert, L. (2016). Gaming habits, study habits and compulsive gaming among digital gaming natives. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308947959_Gaming_habits_study_habits_and_compulsive_gaming_among_digital_gaming_natives

The aim of the study is to analyse and discuss digital native gamers’ gaming habits and how excessive gaming might have disturbed school studies or social activities.

Casual gamers often spend a lot of time gaming, but not with the long uninterrupted gaming sessions that characterise hardcore gamers. Casual gamers mainly play casual games and are quite reluctant to hardcore games and complex rule sets. Hardcore gamers like complex games and long game sessions, but they play all kind of games.

practically all students’ defend their gaming and claim that it has given them a richer life with several positive experiences worth the risk of addiction and displacement. One student wrote in the essay that: “Generally, gaming is a fantastic possibility to escape daily routines for a while to be immersed, to discover and to learn. At the same time this can lead to less pleasant states like compulsive gaming or addiction.”

 Future studies

This study tried to explore if excessive gaming might have disturbed school studies or social activities. An interesting idea discussed among the authors is to the flip perspective and get a dialog with the digital native gamers that find school to disturb their gaming activities.

Can Games and Badges Motivate College Students to Learn?

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Can Games and Badges Motivate College Students to Learn?

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/04/20/can-games-and-badges-motivate-college-students-to-learn/

Daervasi defines gamfication as “the addition of reward systems to non-game settings and contexts.”

see other definition for gamification from
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/files/2015/03/Gaming-and-Gamification-in-academic-and-library-settings-final-draft-1digudu.pdf

Gamification takes game elements (such as points, badges, leaderboards, competition, and achievements) and applies them to a non-game setting. It has the potential to turn routine, mundane tasks into refreshing, motivating experiences (What is GBL (Game-Based Learning)?, n.d.).

Gamification is defined as the process of applying game mechanics and game thinking to the real world to solve problems and engage users (Phetteplace & Felker, 2014, p. 19; Becker, 2013, p. 199; Kapp, 2012). Gamification requires three sets of principles: 1. Empowered Learners, 2. Problem Solving, 3. Understanding (Gee, 2005).

Some authors, e.g. Malykhina (2014), fail to make the distinction between games and gamification in the educational process and attribute gamification to the influx of games in the curricula, rather than to the application of game elements as defined above or constrain the definition ascribing only reward system to learning settings and contexts (Darvasi, 2015).

An excellent outline and historical and bibliographic overview of games and gamification in their learning context was recently published by Liu and Santhanam (2015). As per Liu & Santhanam (2015), there are certain “commonalities between gamification and other game-related designs, but they differ in terms of whether they are predominantly work-oriented (versus play-oriented) and whether they have well defined goals and structures” (p. 6). They also offer a useful framework, describing the roles of different gamification design elements.