Abstract:

This paper emphasizes the role of gamification for the development of different aspects related to STEM, diversity and achievement and present some ideas and guidelines for pre-service teacher who want gamify some of their classroom activities.

The term gamification, originally devised within a digital media industry, has gained widespread acceptance in last years in many contexts. Gamification is an approach which incorporates game design elements into a non-game context such as education. In recent years, strategies based on aspects related to gamification are catching practitioners, teachers and researchers´ interest in order to effectively introduce in classroom activities that promote, among others, student-centered actions, enhancement of learning, revision of concepts, interactions with other students, problem solving, intrinsic motivation and development of other skills such as collaborative work or acquisition of different responsibilities within a team. Research literature has shown that, although gamification within education could be still considering as a growing phenomenon (e.g. “escape rooms” related publications were three time those published in 2018) there seems to be a lack of studies assessing its impact on learning. A demand of systematically design and rigorously tested studies for these approaches are needed to keep on growing knowledge associated with educational benefits and effectiveness of gamification. Moreover, some studies carried out within educational contexts, have revealed that there is some lack and there are not enough evidences to support long-term benefits of gamification. On the other hand, it seems that practices of gamifying learning have overtook researchers’ and teachers´ understanding because sometimes its mechanisms and methods are not all well-known and that the knowledge of how to gamify an activity in accordance with the specifics of the educational context is still limited.

For these reasons, it seems appropriate to insist on these strands of action and research. This paper describes, embedded in STEM and initial teacher education contexts, good practices of gamifying activities and strategies found in literature that involve all students to participate in class discussions about STEM concepts, that offer students the opportunity to work on a task on their own level and that provide opportunity to give level-feedback in connection with organizing whole class progress. Considering the gamification of subjects and practices related to STEM we want to designing an emergent project to show some conceptual frameworks (already identified and described in educational research), guidelines and good practices as part of a teacher training program aimed to offer instructional materials aligned with research results and which can be considered as a source of inspiring ideas and ways-of-work for pre-service teachers who want to adopt gamification as an innovative and effective practice, highlighting the possibilities that these approaches address regarding inquiry-based learning methodologies, open tasks and opportunities for learning on diverse achievement levels.

Further steps, in the context of this project, are linked to the measurement and assessing of the impact related to values, beliefs and practices of pre-service teachers when they adopt gamification, as learning and teaching approach, in STEM contexts.

Keywords:

STEM, gamification, escape room, pre-service teachers, teachers beliefs.