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This study aims to examine the existing evidence on gamification in educational settings, highlighting its impact on motivation and academic performance. Methodologically, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was developed under the PRISMA statement criteria using three multidisciplinary databases: Web of Science, Scopus, and Scielo. According to the inclusion, exclusion, and quality criteria, it was determined to include 9 SLR articles on gamification that address at least one of the two key variables: student motivation or academic performance. The articles were published between 2016 and 2022, available in open access, written in English or Spanish, and with content that is directly related to the research questions. The results reveal that gamification significantly influences motivation by facilitating the assimilation of knowledge, the improvement of skills and academic competencies of students, and specifically refers to a wide range of capabilities that are essential for success in the educational environment and that can be enhanced through playful and interactive learning experiences. These skills can be cognitive, self-learning, social, or collaborative, among others. It is concluded that creativity and adaptability are key to successfully implementing gamification in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The teaching of structural analysis is essential in the training of undergraduate students who will be qualified in structural calculations. The use of games in learning can motivate students and improve their performances in evaluations. To this end, H5P-based matching games have been adopted in Moodle for a structural analysis course as an optional assignment to train graphs of internal forces (GIFs). Although the students knew that participating in the games would positively impact their grades, they were not informed of the exact number of extra points they would receive based on their performances. The engagement, motivation and performance of the students were analyzed using various statistics. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the game in facilitating knowledge acquisition was evaluated by comparing the students' performances in the games to their performances in the GIF exercises during face-to-face examinations. The study found that the students who participated in the games exhibited high levels of motivation and engagement. In addition, the results indicate that the participants had a moderately improved understanding of GIFs when taking the course examinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, a diary was developed and used by students to reflect on digital games in geography lessons. The students' reflection results, through the use of the diary, were compared with reflections without instructional guidance. These results show a significant improvement in reflection through the use of the reflection diary compared to a previous study. Through the combination of lessons, play phases, and the reflection diary, a learning arrangement that enables in-depth reflections at different levels of reflection was created. The medium plays a decisive role by taking the pupils out of their role as players and enabling a critical distance to the game. With the help of the reflection diary, students should be able to better reflect on the game. The reflection diary is integrated into the lessons. It also shows that subject-specific lessons are indispensable for reflecting on the gaming experience in order to counteract subject-specific misconceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies highlight researchers' concerns about how science should be taught today. It is recognised that teachers have difficulty involving and motivating students to learn about different complex topics, such as geology. Schools must promote skills development to develop citizens who can be active and informed in society. One way of undertaking this is to use active methodologies such as educational games, in which students play an essential role in developing activities. Games encourage changes in conceptions regarding the relevance of this scientific topic that is often undervalued by students. Games have gained space in recent years in several disciplines, and it is essential that this tool is thought out and planned within a consistent pedagogical proposal. This educational resource is used to increase motivation for learning, as well as enhance and strengthen the effects of learning. An intervention plan can be framed within game-based teaching. Teachers have been underrepresented in the game-based learning literature, with more emphasis on games' effects. However, the pedagogical issue of games has been particularly relevant in recent decades. The current investigation used a survey given to geology teachers (n = 112) from public and private middle and secondary schools in Portugal. Its purpose was to assess teachers' perceptions regarding game-based teaching and its potential to promote active learning. Our sample ages ranged from 24 to 64 years (average of 48.9 years old); 81.3% were women and 18.8% were men. The analysis of the results seems to confirm that although they do not always use games to promote learning in geology, most teachers still recognise their potential to motivate, enhance, and reinforce the learning of geological content, with digital games being the preferred option. They emphasise the importance of teacher training in this area and the inclusion of game applications in school textbooks to approach different geology-related themes. Our results seem to indicate some lack of consistency in teachers' opinions on the impact of games on student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extended Reality (XR) is an emerging technology that enables enhanced interaction between the real world and virtual environments. In this study, we conduct a scoping review of XR engines for developing gamified apps and serious games. Our study revolves around four aspects: (1) existing XR game engines, (2) their primary features, (3) supported serious game attributes, and (4) supported learning activities. We used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) model to conduct the scoping review, which included 40 primary studies published between 2019 and 2023. Our findings help us understand how current XR engines support the development of XR-enriched serious games and gamified apps for specific learning activities. Additionally, based on our findings, we suggest a set of pre-established game attributes that could be commonly supported by all XR game engines across the different game categories proposed by Lameras. Hence, this scoping review can help developers (1) select important game attributes for their new games and (2) choose the game engine that provides the most support to these attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 disease has dramatically changed lives worldwide, including education. This is a challenge for traditional learning. In fact, the European Higher Education Area poses the challenge of boosting the quality of teaching through active methodologies supported by digital pedagogy. Gamification is one of these tools and it has considerable attention in the healthcare literature. We aimed to create a game in the Campus Bio-Medico University Hospital Foundation in order to offer continuing education on Quality and Clinical Risk procedures to our staff. The 2021 "Campus Game" (178 players) introduced the "Badge Challenge" (Team Building, Procedures, and Security) and 73 questions. The leaderboard of every single match was posted in some of the hospital's strategic areas and also published online on the company intranet to ensure engagement and competitiveness. Gamification has spontaneously promoted teamworking and a virtuous process of multiprofessional education. We found that, during the Campus Game, there was a 4.9% increase in access to the intranet page containing information on Quality and Patient Safety and an 8% increase in access to the Hospital Policies and Procedures. In the near future, we wish to expand this game, involving hospitals with similar types of activity and levels of attention to quality and safety issues, and also to enhance the network of partners and the principles of Q&S management itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managing passenger information during disruption (PIDD) is a significant factor in running effective and quick-to-recover rail operations. Disruptions are unpredictable, and their timely resolution is ultimately dependent on the expert knowledge of experienced frontline staff. The development of frontline employees by their employers usually takes the form of practice reviews and 'on-the-job' learning, while academic education majors on theoretical approaches and classroom-based teaching. This paper reports on a novel industry-funded project that has developed a serious game (the 'Rail Disruption Game') that combines theory and practice to better manage PIDD for frontline staff in a UK train operating company (TOC). It defines challenges and the development method for the Rail Disruption Game; it also incorporates developer and user feedback. This paper provides insight into how to design, make and deploy a serious game as part of a gamified management process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A serious game is a type of game that is designed for a primary purpose other than entertainment. Instead, serious games are intended to achieve specific goals, such as education, training, or health promotion. The goal of serious games is to engage players in a way that is both enjoyable and effective in achieving the intended learning or behavior change outcomes. Recently, several systematic reviews on the development and application of serious games and on the application of gamification techniques have been published, which indicate high activity and ongoing progress in this area of research. Such an extensive body of review papers raises the need to analyze and extract the current state and the prevailing trends of the serious games and gamification (SGG) domain by analyzing and summarizing the systematic review articles. This study presents a systematic meta-review, i.e., a review of the 53 survey papers on the domain of serious games and gamification. The systematic review follows the PRISMA guidelines, while constructive and cross-sectional methods are used to analyze and present the results. Finally, this study identifies the future trends and challenges for the domain. As a result, the meta-review helps the reader to quickly assess the present status of SGG and serves as a reference for finding further information on each technology utilized in SGG. Using the criterion of the citations, the meta-review analysis provides insight into the quantity and academic relevance of the published SGG articles. Moreover, 53 articles published in journals were selected as important surveys in the research field. The study found that serious games and gamification techniques are increasingly being used for a wide range of health conditions and the focus is shifting towards the use of mobile and digital platforms, virtual reality, and machine learning to personalize and adapt interventions. The existing research gaps include the lack of standardization in development and evaluation, insufficient understanding of underlying mechanisms of action, limited understanding of integration into existing healthcare systems, limited understanding of specific game mechanics and design elements for promoting health behaviors, and limited research on scalability, adoption, and long-term effects. These research gaps highlight the need for further research to fully understand the potential and limitations of serious games and gamification for health and how to effectively apply them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feedback is a critical aspect of optimised learning design, but there are few, if any, feedback models that map different types of feedback and how they may assist students to increase performance and enhance their learning experience. This research paper outlines a feedback model as an extension of the four-dimensional framework which includes a consideration of the type, the content, the format, and the frequency of feedback, as well as the agent which delivers it. This model is based upon an understanding of learning in the context of designing learning experiences and utilises a game-based model of learning to understand the importance of motivation and autonomy in learners to enhance and accelerate learning. The framework is developed and reflected upon by analysing two cases: a medical triage case in which the timing and frequency of feedback proved critical, and a business simulation which illuminated the need for a range of types of feedback and to be aware of the possibility of different agents (instructor peer and game) that can deliver feedback. The extended model may help game and learning designers alike to discern different types of feedback, both in games and more generally, in more explicit and nuanced ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, there has been a significant increase in the adoption of game-based interventions for behaviour change associated with many fields such as health, education, and psychology. This is due to the significance of the players' intrinsic motivation that is naturally generated to play games and the substantial impact they can have on players. Many review papers measure the effectiveness of the use of gaming on changing behaviours; however, these studies neglect the game features involved in the game design process, which have an impact of stimulating behaviour change. Therefore, this paper aimed to identify game design mechanics and features that are reported to commonly influence behaviour change during and/or after the interventions. This paper identified key theories of behaviour change that inform the game design process, providing insights that can be adopted by game designers for informing considerations on the use of game features for moderating behaviour in their own games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard video games are applications whose development process often follows a traditional software methodology. Serious Games (SGs) are a tool with an immensely positive impact and great success. SGs enable learning and provide entertainment and self-empowerment, which motivates students. The development of an SG consists of complex processes requiring multi-disciplinary knowledge in multiple domains, including knowing the learning domain and adding the appropriate game mechanics to foster high intrinsic motivation and positive player experience that makes the players feel like they are having fun while learning. Otherwise, the game is viewed as boring and not as a fun and engaging activity. Nevertheless, despite their potential, the application of SGs in education has been limited in terms of pedagogy. Several authors assert that this lack is because SG standards and guidelines have not been developed. There is an imbalance between experts' contributions to education and game design specialists for the SG development. Not all the SGs that have been developed have applied appropriate design methodologies that incorporate both the entertainment mechanics and the serious component. To ensure that an SG meets the user's expectations, it must be designed using an appropriate method. This work aims to present iPlus, a methodology for designing SGs based on a participatory, flexible, and user-centered approach. Additionally, this paper analyses several case studies with the iPlus methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study presented makes an original, new and exhaustive analysis of the adaptation of a classical board game which has been named Binary Who is Who? This proposal shows a very useful tool for the consolidation of mathematical concepts related to the study of real-valued functions that are treated in the different levels of the teaching of mathematics (first and second year of superior secondary studies and the first years of some university degrees). The use of games as a means for learning is the authors' proposal. The aim is to offer teachers the chance of using the games as a method of teaching mathematical concepts, as well as a motivating instrument for them. This game has been created to be played face-to-face in the classroom and it has also been programmed to create a video game which allows the students to play virtually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research focuses on the study and qualitative assessment of the relationships between motivators and game mechanics per the ratings of expert gamification consultants. By taking this approach, it is intended that during the design phase of a gamified system, decisions can be made about the design of the system based on the motivators of each of the profiles. These motivators can be determined from the information provided by the potential players themselves. The research presented starts from a previous analysis in which, based on the three most used gamification frameworks and through a card sorting technique that allows the user to organize and classify the content, a set of mechanics are determined. In the present study, each of the mechanics is analyzed, and a more precise motive is decided. As a result, a higher level of personalization is achieved and, consequently, approximates a higher level of gamification effectiveness. The main conclusions are implemented in the development of the Game4City 3.0 project, which addresses gamified and interactive strategies to visualize urban environments in 3D at an educational and social level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Games have become one of the most popular activities across cultures and ages. There is ample evidence that supports the benefits of using games for learning and assessment. However, incorporating game activities as part of the curriculum in schools remains limited. Some of the barriers for broader adoption in classrooms is the lack of actionable assessment data, the fact that teachers often do not have a clear sense of how students are interacting with the game, and it is unclear if the gameplay is leading to productive learning. To address this gap, we seek to provide sequence and process mining metrics to teachers that are easily interpretable and actionable. More specifically, we build our work on top of Shadowspect, a three-dimensional geometry game that has been developed to measure geometry skills as well other cognitive and noncognitive skills. We use data from its implementation across schools in the U.S. to implement two sequence and process mining metrics in an interactive dashboard for teachers. The final objective is to facilitate that teachers can understand the sequence of actions and common errors of students using Shadowspect so they can better understand the process, make proper assessment, and conduct personalized interventions when appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperation is a ubiquitous and beneficial behavioural trait despite being prone to exploitation by free-riders. Hence, cooperative populations are prone to invasions by selfish individuals. However, a population consisting of only free-riders typically does not survive. Thus, cooperators and free-riders often coexist in some proportion. An evolutionary version of a Snowdrift Game proved its efficiency in analysing this phenomenon. However, what if the system has already reached its stable state but was perturbed due to a change in environmental conditions? Then, individuals may have to re-learn their effective strategies. To address this, we consider behavioural mistakes in strategic choice execution, which we refer to as incompetence. Parametrising the propensity to make such mistakes allows for a mathematical description of learning. We compare strategies based on their relative strategic advantage relying on both fitness and learning factors. When strategies are learned at distinct rates, allowing learning according to a prescribed order is optimal. Interestingly, the strategy with the lowest strategic advantage should be learnt first if we are to optimise fitness over the learning path. Then, the differences between strategies are balanced out in order to minimise the effect of behavioural uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Loss of motivation is one of the most prominent concerns in programming education as it negatively impacts time dedicated to practice, which is crucial for novice programmers. Of the distinct techniques introduced in the literature to engage students, gamification, is likely the most widely explored and fruitful. Game elements that intrinsically motivate students, such as graphical feedback and game-thinking, reveal more reliable long-term positive effects, but those involve significant development effort. This paper proposes a game-based assessment environment for programming challenges, built on top of a specialized framework, in which students develop a program to control the player, henceforth called Software Agent (SA). During the coding phase, students can resort to the graphical feedback demonstrating how the game unfolds to improve their programs and complete the proposed tasks. This environment also promotes competition through competitive evaluation and tournaments among SAs, optionally organized at the end by the teacher. Moreover, the validation of the effectiveness of Asura in increasing undergraduate students' motivation and, consequently, the practice of programming is reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is a key factor to respond to the threat of climate change, increasing not only knowledge but also encouraging changes in attitudes and behaviors to adopt sustainable lifestyles. Scholars and practitioners in the field of education call for innovative ways of engaging youth—a reason why gamification has gained more attention in recent years. This paper aims at exploring the role of gamification in affecting pro-environmental behavioral change and searching for best practices for educational purposes. For that aim, pro-environmental gamification platforms are identified and analyzed by applying two different frameworks: the Octalysis Framework and the Climate Change Engagement through Games Framework. After scanning 181 cases, a final sample of six is analyzed and two of them are selected as best practices with higher potential to engage users in pro-environmental behavioral change: SaveOhno and JouleBug. Meaning, ownership, and social influence, as well as achievability, challenge, and credibility, are seen as core elements that can increase the success of gamification platforms. In conclusion, the more attributes are enclosed in the gamification design, the stronger physical and mental connections it builds up with participants. Insights from this study can help educators to select best practices and gamification designers to better influence behavioral change through game mechanics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different types of rewards are applied in persuasive games to encourage play persistence of its users and facilitate the achievement of desired real-world goals, such as behavioral change. Persuasive games have successfully been applied in mental healthcare and may hold potential for different types of patients. However, we question to what extent game-based rewards are suitable in a persuasive game design for a substance dependence therapy context, as people with substance-related disorders show decreased sensitivity to natural rewards, which may result in different responses to commonly applied game rewards compared to people without substance use disorders. In a within-subject experiment with 20 substance dependent and 25 non-dependent participants, we examined whether play persistence and reward evaluation differed between the two groups. Results showed that in contrast to our expectations, substance dependent participants were more motivated by the types of rewards compared to non-substance dependent participants. Participants evaluated monetary rewards more positively than playing for virtual points or social rewards. We conclude this paper with design implications of game-based rewards in persuasive games for mental healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]