61 10.5 Key Opportunities
Enhanced Engagement and Motivation:
Games have the potential to raise student engagement levels, especially for students who are less self-motivated about the conventional forms of instruction. Gamified education mixes challenges with immediate feedback or uses elements of interactivity (Buckley & Doyle, 2014) to help learning become more enjoyable and, in the process, memorable.
Development of 21st-Century Skills:
Gamified experiences can help focus the development of necessary 21st-century skills: Students face everyday scenarios, including problem-solving, collaboration, creativity and adaptability. Students solve these problems using real-world challenges, decision-making tasks, and role-playing tasks.
Personalized Learning Paths:
A Gamified approach allows flexibility in the student learning pace, or it provides a possibility of targeted feedback, as many gamified tools are designed to allow personalization easily. This is very adaptable and will be very useful in differentiated learning, as teachers will be able to adapt to the different needs of different learners. For example, Kahoot! It provides flexibility in building its specific quizzes and has the option to have different tracks for reaching different students who take a personalized learning path. For example, teachers can see where students need an extra helping hand after taking a quiz on a certain topic after a class completes it. This information can then be tapped into to create follow-up quizzes using Kahoot! and focus on those exact areas so students can practice and grow those concepts as they didn’t fully understand them. Kahoot also provides students with real-time feedback, knowing where they went wrong, and they will be able to pick up from there. (Wang & Tahir, 2020) Kahoot! is a great tool for differentiated learning because it can be customized to tailor quizzes and give immediate feedback. Therefore, students will be eager to participate, either being able to progress at their own pace or getting the support as needed based on individual student needs.
Data-Driven Insights:
Digital gamification platforms can help track data on student performance, engagement traces, and how those parenting signs can be improved to support the educator when using these platforms.
Adaptive Gamification:
Gamification, where game mechanics change based on the individual student’s needs and performance, is something of growing interest. This also serves to support the personalized learning space, whereby students can independently progress at their own pace and face the needed challenges of their ability.
Gamification in Social-Emotional Learning (SEL):
Increasingly, educators are being tapped to attempt gamified approaches to social-emotional learning, especially with the early grades in mind. These techniques (Kaur et al., 2020) allow students to practice skills like empathy, self-regulation and good communication through role-play and scenario-based activities. Early grades are utilizing gamification to augment Social Emotional Learning (SEL) by having students take part in games that foster empathy, self-regulation and communication skills. An example of this is students using role-play to resolve conflicts between the characters and are rewarded for positive behaviours, as demonstrated by the characters.
Integration with Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR):
Gamified learning is slowly becoming supported by VR and AR technologies, enabling students’ knowledge of complicated ideas by making their learning experience immersive. For instance, virtual field trips and augmented learning experiences (Olmo-Muñoz et al., 2020) allow students to visit historical sites to see scientific phenomena or historical events in forms that were impossible before.
Sustainability and Global Citizenship:
Gamified activities with themes have been growing more and more increasingly to concerns of global citizenship, environmental sustainability and social responsibility. Games developed on these themes allow students to participate in simulated decision-making scenarios that instill awareness of pressing global issues.