Gamification In Education

Fr. Bienvenido F. Nebres, S.J. in his presentation on Building a Science Culture (NAST 2007), citing Talisayon presented that even Philippine Science High School, our top science high school, performs only at the mean of Singapore, Korea, and Hongkong in Mathematics and significantly below the mean in Science. There may be few victories but a mass of poor performance. The Japanese Mathematics Education League quoted “We believe that a country can only march as fast as its slow members.” The Philippines will march as fast as the majority of our students and not at the pace of the few at the top.

Yuan Huang and Soman (2013) disclosed that both motivation and engagement are usually considered prerequisites for the completion of a task or encouragement

Accordingly, gamification can be applied to three different learning areas – namely, those covering ‘cognitive’, ‘emotional’ and ‘social’ needs of students. Cognitive’ benefits include the development of problem-solving skills. Players must complete progressively complicated sequences of actions which may cover areas such as Physics, Math, languages or spatial awareness. Successful completion of levels leads to the reward of more and more difficult levels, providing constant motivation to strive harder and constantly develop skills. This is perhaps the most obvious of the benefits, but the next two may be of equal, perhaps greater

However, if gamification is to be of use to schools, we must better understand what gamification is, how it functions, and why it might be useful. Lee and Hammer (2011) mentioned that gamification can be a powerful tool in addressing the child’s ‘emotional’ needs. Games have the unusual ability to turn positive emotional experiences into positive ones. Simply put, in order to achieve success in games, failure must be experienced several times first. In a formal teaching environment, the negative emotions felt during initial failure would be far more extreme, and difficult to turn around into something positive. Not so in games. The failure is expected – inevitable even, which detracts from the feeling of despondency. When the success follows, as the level is eventually completed, the student’s previous feelings of negativity have been entirely eclipsed by the satisfaction of having finished the