Abstract:

In the past years there has been an important change in the profile of the new generations of students, mainly due to the incorporation of ICT (Information and communications technology) to the knowledge society. The new technologies have become a part of the young people daily life, as much on their personal relations as on their academic formation. These new needs, force teachers to incorporate new tools and look for innovative teaching techniques, that allow to adapt to the student’s demands, obtaining better results.

In this context is born “Gamification’s Experience”, a project based on the studies led by different authors such as Lee & Hammer or Nahl & James, among others and developed by a group of teachers of University Rey Juan Carlos. “Gamification’s Experience” has a double goal, on one hand, to apply gramification techniques to college education and evaluate its results. On the other, to get to know based on an investigation made by students themselves the degree of application and knowledge of gamification techniques in centers of child’s and primary education in Madrid’s area.
The project has been carried out during the school year 2013- 2014 in the course Methodology of Educative Investigation, taught in the Degrees of Child’s Education and Primary Education of University Rey Juan Carlos. Normally, the students who study this subject have a low motivation degree due to the fact that it has a high content of theory, since different techniques and tools to carry out an investigative process in the field of education are explained. In order to be able to pass the subject, the students have to pass a theory exam about the contents on the syllabus and make an investigation work in which they apply the tools and techniques explained. So, in order to increase the degree of motivation and implication of the students on the project making, the subject is presented to them as a competition. For that, the group is divided in two investigation teams, leaded by a main investigator each, their goal is to obtain a point of the subject’s final degree. Once the investigation is finalized, the results and conclusions drawn will be explained to them. The team with the best results will get the point.

Besides that, in order to take into account the student’s opinion about the use of a competitive system of evaluation, the Google Drive tool as used to get to know their evaluation of about the process of gamifiation in which they have participated.

Moreover, with same tool were collected the results of the investigations realized by the students on the Child’s and Primary Education Centers, what allowed to obtain a global view of the implementation of the gamification techniques in the field of study.

Keywords:

Innovation, technology, gamification, game, reward, motivation.