Sung Hee (Sunny) Park
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>The Cross-Cultural Community Services
Abstract
Today’s education involves digital platforms as learning tools and digital natives as learners. Since the pandemic, institutions switched their instruction to online or hybrid models and dealt with a range of challenges such as choosing the right digital tools, motivating students to stay on task, and educating staff and students on the digital platforms. Teachers have to come up with effective online tools and strategies to motivate students who have different learning styles and new expectations for online learning. While gamification and game-based learning are gaining ground in business, marketing, and corporate management, their application in education is still an emerging trend. Gaming elements in learning can introduce goal setting, interaction among students, feedback, problem-solving, competition, and fun learning environments in education. Moreover, it increases learner engagement and sustains motivation to stay on task. This chapter of the book discusses the difference between gamification and game-based learning, the pedagogical values these two strategies can bring to instruction, learning theories, strategies, and the advantages of implementing gamification in the online education curriculum.
Keywords
Gamification, Gamification in Education, Game-Based Learning, and application of Gamification and GBL, Gamification and GBL in Online Curriculum, Learning theories in Gamification and GBL.
Introduction
Although teachers continuously seek creative instructional approaches, it is largely agreed that today’s schools face major problems around student motivation and engagement (Kim et al., 2018). The use of gamification and Game-based learning (GBL) as a learning tool is an innovative approach to teaching concepts and knowledge but also reinforces important skills such as problem-solving, collaboration, and communication. Various online education sites use game elements to better engage users and the gamification trend in online educational settings is becoming prominent. Playing games during class offers remarkable motivation and encourage students to be engaged in class with the joy of playing and the possibility to win. Nevertheless, creating a highly engaging, effective instructional game is not an easy task, time-consuming, and costly. In addition, their effective classroom adoption requires certain technical infrastructure and appropriate pedagogical integration (Kim et al., 2018).
Gamification and GBL are similar in that both promote engagement and sustained motivation in learning. However, gamification and GBL can also be usefully distinguished. Gamification, according to Kim et al. (2018) is defined as the use of game mechanics in a non-game environment. It integrates game elements like point systems, leaderboards, badges, or other elements related to games into learning activities in order to increase engagement and motivation. GBL, on the other