Abstract:

The benefits of gamification in the education of children and teenagers are now beyond doubt: it promotes psychomotor, physical and cognitive development, boosts students' motivation (and sometimes that of teachers) and can facilitate the assimilation of abstract and complex ideas. However, at more advanced educational stages, many teachers are still reluctant to integrate this methodology into their teaching resource kit, partly due to lack of knowledge on how to do it, partly for fear that their classes will be considered "not serious", or simply because they think that their students are too old to play and might even feel offended, treated as little children, if they are approached with playful activities.

This research was born with the aim of exploring the response of different groups of university students to a series of gamified lessons. In particular, several games and gamified activities were proposed inside and outside the classroom to students from different courses of the Primary Education and Early Childhood Education Degrees of the Faculty of Education of Soria (University of Valladolid) for subjects of English as a Foreign Language. The activities proposed range from the typical quizzes, role-plays, riddles, etc., focused on a single aspect of grammar or vocabulary or a communicative situation, to more complex games, which require cooperation as well as competition, and bring different skills and knowledge into play. The gamification activities in the classroom were carried out in years 1, 2 and 3, but gamified activities outside the classroom were proposed only to students in years 1 and 3, as participation would be favoured in smaller groups.

The results, derived from teacher observation (reflected on summary sheets) and student feedback (collected through questionnaires after each activity and a final survey), revealed that students found the gamified lessons more memorable than others where more traditional methodologies were employed, and that invitations to play outside the classroom encouraged student engagement in courses where gamification was applied compared to subjects where it was not. Despite the finding of a more favourable attitude towards the subject, there is no evidence of a clear positive influence of gamification on the academic performance of the participants, so we consider it necessary to further investigate this potential correlation in future research.

Keywords:

Gamification, Higher Education, EFL, memorability, student engagement.