Abstract:

The term gamification has recently emerged as a new concept to the trend to the use of game design elements in non-game contexts. The area of education is seen as a great potential for the application of this concept, as it seeks to promote the motivation and involvement of people in the games based on engagement techniques. The application of these techniques have brought a lot of questions: How such techniques can be used in online teaching and learning? How to design gamified learning activities for virtual learning environments? In this article we investigate what elements of the game make sense to apply for learning activities for online courses. Our goals are to select, describe and analyze some of these techniques to be applied for learning activities in online courses. The approach adopted in this research is exploratory and descriptive, through the use of systematic review techniques, widely used in the Health Sciences, and has been adopted in various fields like Education, Management and Software Engineering. Thus the text was divided into five sections: the first part describes the concept of gamification and some uses in other areas than Education, the second addresses the issue of learning activities in the context of online education, the third part explains the process of inclusion and exclusion of the studies for the systematic review, the fourth part contains a summary of the techniques used in games found in the articles selected for the systematic review with their description. Results were grouped according types of activities and engagement that are expected using them (examples given of challenges and quests, achievements or badgets, progress bars). Thus, scenarios are proposed to use these techniques so that educators can consult and take on their own, these being the major theoretical and practical contributions of the article. The results also show that the study of the gamification is in its initial stage, with many possibilities for future research.

Keywords:

Gamification, engagement, motivation, online courses, learning activites.