Abstract:

Written skill is one the skills that students of the degree of Food Science and Technology of the Burgos University have to acquire during the four years of the grade. The writing of a scientific report includes not only grammar, vocabulary, spelling, structure and clarity, but also other elements to which, according to the previous experience of the group, students do not pay too much attention. These elements are the use of scientific databases to search for information, to include the references consulted in the text, to cite correctly the bibliography, to number figures and tables and to include their headings and captions, etc.

Therefore, in order to help our students to acquire a complete writing skill, a gamification activity was developed. This task was carried out in the subject of “Food and Culture”, which is taught in the first year of the degree of Food Science and Technology. In this subject, the students were asked to write a small scientific report about the history of a food. During the development of this activity students participated in a game named “who wants to be emperor,” that was based on one of the units of the subject, Food in the Roman Empire. It consisted in overcoming challenges divided into four levels depending on their difficulty. For each challenge achieved, the students got different prizes that were exchanged for points. According to the points obtained, each student belonged to one of the five levels in which the Ancient Roman Society was organized: slaves, freedmen, plebeians, patricians and emperor, and depending on the social class they belong to, they had different rewards (different increases in the final grade of the activity).

The results obtained revealed that of the 23 students enrolled in the subject, only 2 (9 %) achieved the points needed to become an emperor, 3 (13 %) were patricians, 4 (17 %) plebeians, 9, (39 %) freedman and 5 (22 %) slaves and only 6 persons overcame the more difficult and valuable challenge. These results seem to indicate that the game proposed was not a very useful tool to increase the engagement and motivation behaviour of students. The reasons could be related to the fact that the rewards were not interesting for them, or to the lack of direct competitiveness with the rest of the students of the subject. Other game-based activities will be developed with different prizes and methodology in order to improved the writing skills of students.

Keywords:

Gamification, higher education, written skills.