LEARNING BY PLAYING. A GAMIFICATION APPROACH TO A LANGUAGE-LEARNING DIGITAL TOOL

The educational institutions – public as school and university and private ones – and other players in the learning environment are undergoing deep changes driven by different social and technological forces.

The new generations of students are born and grown up with digital technologies – Generation X, Digital natives, Millennials and so on – and they represent a sort of genetic evolution in the way they approach and interact with the learning process. In their daily life, search engines, mobile connections, touch interfaces and social digital relationships are natural part of the experience.
On the other hand Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is becoming even more pervasive in many ways as an academic subject, as a learning tool or a teaching supporting framework.

Under the pressure of these thrusts – do not necessarily convergent – also teaching methods and praxis are facing with new challenges both in the field of formal learning and in the way to use and implement hard- and soft-digital innovations. Furthermore, ICT is shifting the focus of learning experience based on co-presence of teachers and students in the same place and time, to a deferred interaction mediated by digital tools in which learning activity is extended and enlarged to cover part of the daily and personal lifetime. Collaborative platforms – wiki, social network, video blogging etc. – enable people to spontaneously and informal learning not mediated except by amateurs-experts or by community of interest or peers. Eventually technology is changing the teaching tools moving from mimetic forms simulating the printed book, notebooks and paper to virtual forms such as e-publishing and mobile apps in which medium and contents converge becoming really learn-machine.

In this context and according to changing dynamics, the paper presents “Res Logica” – as a paradigmatic a case study – an app pilot for tablet design to study syntax and linguistic construction of Italian language.

The research project particularly faces the transition that educational publishers are living – according to a relatively recent national law 133/2008. The editorial sector is required to give books – whatever the word is meant to define – in hybrid/digital version, even if it’s not specified explicitly cultural and format standards.

Res Logica offers a solution based on the characteristic of the device – the app has been prototyped with Adobe InDesign Digital Publishing Suite for tablets and optimized for iPad – using touch interactions and gesture and multimodal languages.
Conceived both as a teaching support and a learning tool Res Logica uses the gamification approach to generate collaborative dynamics and learning by doing processes specific of social networks and web 3.0 to acquire theoretical an practical notions about the language structure and grammar.

The proposed case study tries to test the potentiality of digital learning tool and the convergence of the more recent digital revolution to evaluate a model and/or a design method discussing limits and possible developments in parallel with the evolution of digital worlds.