Gamifying in times of pandemic: Redesign of a higher education experience

Abstract

During the quarantines suffered in most countries during the first months of the pandemic, one of the specific problems of lecturers was to maintain the interest of their students in unfavorable conditions. In this context, gamification is a methodology that, in the teaching field, favors the involvement of students in their learning thanks to playful components that keep the participants motivated. In this work we analyze a comprehensive gamification experience for students of various engineering degrees designed for face-to-face teaching and its adaptation to the online environment. The main results observed were the existence of a correlation between the active participation of the student in the program and taking the exam, as well as an improvement in the learning of the concepts and methods of solving problems of the subject, which resulted in an increase in the percentage of students who passed the subject with respect to the total number of students who took the exam when comparing them with the control groups. The students' perception of the experience indicates that they feel more committed to the subject and consider that it has served to improve their learning.