Undergraduate Research at FIU (URFIU) Conference

Application of Gamification in Education

GC Ballrooms

Gamification is a technique that incorporates game elements into everyday activities in order to increase the efficiency and engagement of users. This technique is usually used in businesses in order to increase productivity and create a more enjoyable environment for the workers. It is believed that since gamification is used to improve engagement and productivity, if games and game elements can positively impact a user’s ability to acquire, process, and retain information, then gamification has a huge role to fill in the educational system which involves engaging the students with the material being taught, facilitating the learning in each classroom, and allowing a more enjoyable atmosphere where students may learn in the ways that makes it most easiest for them. Major methods will be used in determining whether or not gamification was actually useful for our education system. The first will be to get an accurate value as to how many of students in high school play video games. Then, after getting numerical results, it will be time to understand how exactly different types of videogames affected the brain. The third method will lie in figuring out how businesses are incorporating gamification into their own companies and how is it that they are prospering so quickly. The last method will be discovering how many people are actually using gamification to improve learning in the present and how exactly is it benefitting those that are using those techniques to learn as well as how popular are these techniques with the public. This project is innovative because it approaches a technique that is not accepted by many due to its relation to games, however if advances are made in this area it can prove to be a great competitor for old methods of learning. Education is something that is rapidly taking a fall seeing as teachers keep on using old methods to teach a new generation. Therefore, by discovering these new methods to keep students in school engaged, it can path a way for higher learning in middle and high schools which essentially leads to higher learning overall in society.