Abstract:

Despite the European Higher Education area requires that professors apply learning methods that encourage students to participate more actively in their own learning and achieve a greater academic satisfaction, nowadays in the university setting the master class is still the predominant pedagogical practice. However, flipped classroom and gamification are having a growing interest as alternative teaching methods. Consequently, the purpose of the present work was to describe the innovative teaching project based on a flipped classroom and gamification through the Pasapalabra game (i.e., “The Alphabetic game” or “Alphabetical”) in a collaborative form among university students, as well as to examine their academic satisfaction. A total of 126 students (96.9% of 130 that participated; 167 students were matriculated) gave their consent to be used their data in the present publication (57.9% females; aged 18-36 years old). As part of their subject, all the students enrolled in the morning shift (two different groups) in the Physical Education subject (compulsory) of the first year of the Primary Education Degree at the University of Jaén (Spain) during the academic year 2020-21 participated in the present innovative teaching project. Particularly, the teaching program was developed with the second topic of the subject (i.e., History of Physical Education), which took three one-hour lessons. Because of the current health situation, all the lessons were carried out online (synchronously) by the Google Meet application. Based on the flipped classroom method, the students had to look for information about the topic during the first lesson, which it was called “Historical researchers”. Divided by groups of 4-5, the students from each team had to look for information about the history of Physical Education following an ad hoc guided Google Form sheet task. Based on the gamification method, during the second lesson (which was called “Collaborative Pasapalabra”), again in groups of 4-5, the students were challenged to win a Pasapalabra game. An ad hoc Pasapalabra challenge with the topic was performed with the Educaplay application. After the game, in the main room the professor shared the ranking of the game and the teams from the podium were congratulated. During the first two lessons, for a better experience and humanization of the lessons, students were requested to use their cameras. Moreover, at the end of the lesson, in the whole group any doubt was solved. Finally, during the third lesson, and as part of the flipped classroom method, the professor taught the topic. Although it was based mainly in a master class, students were also constantly asked to share what they had been found about each period before the professor transmitted the information. As regards the results, on average, students reported high academic satisfaction with the Pasapalabra challenge (5.2 out of 6). In this sense, 80.2% of students reported an average value of 5 to 6 points (that is, “strongly agree” or “totally agree”). In conclusion, as part of an innovative teaching project based on the flipped classroom and gamification, a collaborative Pasapalabra challenge is a good way to achieve academic satisfaction among university students.

Keywords:

Collaborative learning, application, app, enjoyment, academic well-being, college students.