Abstract:

Gamification is considered a highly interested tool for the development of many transversal skills, being highly appreciated for coaching professionals in business corporate management and personal development. In this context, adults of different age and professional categories are willing to play to much kind of games such as Trivial or Role-play, among others, in order to improve or gain highly demanded skills. Overall, there is a general opinion of all the participants in this kind of group dynamic that the achieved skills not only increase the personal career, but also benefice business development, improving the efficiency and the agility of team-work.

These advantages and positive results obtained by this methodology are well-known in business media; however, when it comes to the high education, the application of the gamification is still quite restricted. Usually, the limitations for the implementation of gamification-based methodologies come from both sides: lectures and students. Lectures could be afraid of wasting their class time in this kind of activities, and students could not recognize immediately the long-time advances in their knowledge and transversals skills.

In this work, a successful use of a board game as key tool for better understanding of the theoretical contents, self-evaluation and improvement of the transversal skills is reported. The board game design and fabrication, the programmed activities involving this methodology are described, as well as, the evaluation of the achievement of the learning outcomes applied for a Polymer Chemistry general course at Chemistry Bachelor degree.

Keywords:

Gamification, Polymer Chemistry, Higher eduction.