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This article reviews Gaming and Extremism: The Radicalization of Digital Playgrounds (2024), edited by Linda Schlegel and Rachel Kowert. Gaming and Extremism (2024) presents the current state of the literature on the nexus between videogames, gaming spaces, and extremism.

Motiver les apprenants est un défi constant pour les enseignants. La gamification, utilisée comme outil pédagogique, présente un fort potentiel pour engager et motiver les apprenants. Cet article présente et analyse quatre plateformes ludifiées qui peuvent être particulièrement utiles dans l'enseignement et l'apprentissage des langues étrangères afin de stimuler la motivation et l'engagement des apprenants. Abstract Motivating learners presents a persistent challenge for educators. Gamification, when implemented as an educational tool, demonstrates considerable potential to engage and motivate students. This article presents an analysis of four gamified platforms that have been identified as particularly effective in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. The study examines their potential to enhance learner motivation and engagement, thus supporting improved educational outcomes.

As gaming and gamification play an increasingly important role in recruitment processes and radicalisation, there is an urgent need for evidence-based research in this field. One aspect is the use of games and gamification in prevention work. The article presents a project in which an online-game against extremism was developed and focuses on its evaluation using a pre-post design and a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The aim of the game is to educate young people about radicalisation processes in order to increase their resilience. The pre-post comparison showed that young people changed their attitude towards extremist narratives after playing the game: they agreed significantly less with statements that referred to extremist narratives, e.g. legitimising violence or spreading conspiracy theories. When they played the game in the course of a workshop, they also showed lower approval rates for authoritarian attitudes afterwards. The self-assessment of their learnings was consistently high, whereby even greater effects could be observed for those who had played the game in the course of a workshop. Despite some limitations in data collection due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the evaluation provides interesting insights into the impact of the game on the prevention of radicalisation.

Rekabetin vazgeçilmez öğesi olan örgütsel öğrenme kapasitesinin artmasında gönüllülüğün önemi, diğer güdüleyicilerden daha belirgin görünmektedir. Örgütlerde öğrenme ve öğretme etkinliklerinde oyunlaştırmanın önemi hakkındaki kabullenme de koşut etkililik faktörlerinden sayılabilecek, oyun deneyimine katılım arzusu yaratacaktır. Eğer bu sav yerindeyse oyun deneyiminin örgütsel öğrenmeyi gerçekleştirmesi için çalışanların oyuna katılma arzusu taşımaları gerekmektedir. Hem örgüt yöneticileri hem de çalışanlar bilgi üretme ya da edinme yarışında iş yerinde oyun deneyiminden yararlanma olasılığını araştırmaktadır. Böylelikle hem daha uzun süre çalışmak hem de daha başarılı olmanın mümkün olup olmadığı ile ilgili pek çok araştırma yapılmaktadır. Bu çalışma bu alandaki kurama dair bir denemedir. Çalışmanın amacı oyunlaştırmanın, oyun deneyimine katılım arzusu aracılığıyla örgütsel öğrenme kapasitesi üstündeki olumlu etkisini incelemektir. Oyunlaştırma deneyimi Afyonkarahisar İlindeki işyerlerinde çalışanlara 22 Mart- 21 Mayıs 2021 tarihleri arasında verilen Endüstri 4.0 eğitimlerinde incelenmiştir. Oyun deneyimi için Türkiye’de ilk kez kullanılacak araştırma ölçeğinin keşfedici faktör incelemesi yapılmıştır. Ardından, aracı değişkenlerde ilişki analizi için “PROCESS” makro algoritması yardımıyla uygulanan hipotez testiyle iş yerinde yenilikçilik sürecinde çalışanların ön kabulüne bağlı olarak oyunlaştırmanın örgütsel öğrenme kapasitesini artırdığı bulunmuştur. Bu kapsamda araştırmacı ve yöneticilere getirilebilecek bazı önerilere değinilmiştir. Diğer araştırmalardan farklı olarak bu araştırmada güçlü çıkan kabul arzusunun aracılık etkisi örgüt yöneticilerinin dikkatine sunulmaktadır. Bu kapsamda önerilen dikkat, yöneticilerin oyunlaştırmayı dayatarak gönüllü katılım koşulunu kaçınılmaz olarak ihlal etmekte oldukları üzerinedir. Böyle bir zorunlu katılım dayatması belki de oyunlaştırmanın liderler ve yöneticiler tarafından her derde deva görülmesinden kaynaklanmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın ortaya koyduğu gibi bu tavır çalışan bağlamını önceki çalışmaların çoğunun kullandığı ilk müşterilerin çalışanlar olduğu var sayımından önemli ölçüde uzaklaşmaya neden olabilecektir.

The functionality of social media permits (and maybe fosters) an increase in political radicalization, which causes immense social harm. In response, authorities have started using social media for prevention but empirical evidence on the effectiveness is scarce The present study evaluates the effects of an interactive film distributed in social media that aims to reduce the individual level of radicalism in attitudes and radicalization intentions. During the film, viewers have to express their opinion on increasingly radical statements by clicking popup buttons. Depending on their opinions, the plot of the film takes a different route. For identification of causal effects, the evaluation uses a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with a two-week follow-up. The empirical results show that the film immediately reduces the level of radicalism in attitudes by 12% and radicalization intentions by 15% of a standard deviation. After two weeks, these effects are still persistent but fade out a little in the general population. There are stronger and more persistent effects among the subgroups of 18-24 year-olds, women, and people on the left of the political spectrum. Because these subgroups resemble the characteristics of the protagonists, we speculate that social identification enhanced treatment effects. Cognitive dissonance, on the other hand, may explain why people on the right of the spectrum did not react to the film. The findings demonstrate the importance of target-group oriented design and early prevention.

Gamification techniques have long been applied by the business and marketing world to encourage explicit behaviours and increase customers’ incentive and commitment. However, in the past ten years in education, especially in language teaching and learning the benefits of this technique have also been realized as it provides an alternative to engage and motivate students in the classroom. The motivation and involvement of today’s digital generation can easily be increased by the integration of various digital tools and applications providing further opportunities for students to collaborate and communicate as well as to obtain extra scores, which can later be turned into grades or even exam grades. This methodology and pedagogy assist language teachers in finding the balance between achieving their teaching goals and meeting students’ needs. Therefore, in education today it is crucial to be resilient and flexible and be able to modify and adopt instructional methods and activities in order to meet the needs of the digital generation, and be ready to respond instantly to emergencies, or global pandemics, as it was and still is the case with COVID-19. The present paper aims to provide an insight into an international research that was carried out in the spring of 2019 involving 547 medical and healthcare students from seven European Higher Education institutions. The goal of the study was to gain some understanding of the use of gamification techniques applied in Languages for Medical and Healthcare Purposes (LMHP) classes as well as to shed light on students’ attitude towards its use. As the results suggest, gamification tools are highly applied in medical and healthcare education across Europe, and gamifying LMHP classes contributes to students’ motivation, provides them with a genuine sense of achievement and enhances their communication and collaboration skills. The authors conclude that the success of gamification lies in making the learning experience engaging and interactive, irrelevant of weather we are applying this methodology during face to face classes or online sessions due to COVID-19.

With students spending up to 20% of their in-class time texting, emailing, and checking social media, it is no wonder the problem about smartphones in the classroom arises. This article presents results of a piece of research focused on the analysis and reflection of the smartphone applications used with higher education students in order to provide, as well as to improve, their results in departmental exams while they are studying English at a professional level. The study took place over one semester of a curricular English course where smartphone applications were carefully selected and integrated into the current didactic units of the standardized institutional English program, with the purpose of finding, in the school of tourism and gastronomy, not only a solution, but a different approach to turning the problem into part of an updated methodology for the foreign language classroom. The results of this research are expected to have a significant impact on the improvement of the methodology used by teachers at all the schools on our institutional English program with the effect that, once the teachers begin to implement the systematic use of smart phone applications in the delivery of their lessons, learners will hopefully perceive the English course as more relevant and meaningful and be motivated to achieve the expected results.

While the last years have seen increased engagement with gaming in relation to extremist attacks, its potential role in facilitating radicalization has received less attention than other factors. This article makes an exploratory contribution to the theoretical foundations of the study of gaming in radicalization research. It is argued that both top-down and bottom up gamification have already impacted extremist discourse and potentially radicalization processes but that research on gamification in other contexts points to a much wider application of gamification to extremist propaganda distribution tools in the future. The potential influence of video games on radicalization processes exceeds the transfer of the popular argument that exposure to violent media leads to desensitization to the context of radicalization and includes the exploitation of pop culture references, increases in self-efficacy regarding violence, and the direct experience of retropian visions through the content of games.

L’educazione finanziaria è un argomento di sempre maggior interesse al giorno d’oggi, in particolare per la formazione degli studenti delle scuole secondarie, in modo che diventino soggetti attivi e consapevoli nel prendere decisioni in ambito economico e finanziario. All’interno del progetto Edufin@Polimi è stato creato un gioco da proporre nelle scuole secondarie di secondo grado per avvicinare i ragazzi ai concetti principali di matematica finanziaria, come le leggi di capitalizzazione, il rendimento degli investimenti, le condizioni dei prestiti. In questo articolo viene descritta la fase di progettazione del gioco e si riportano i risultati delle prime sperimentazioni realizzate in tre diverse scuole.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The main purpose of the article is to select the elements of games that increase the student’s external and internal motivation tailored to the specific type of player he/she represents. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The research problem is the issue of motivating students using gamification. The author addresses the issue of preparation of classes that will actually translate into motivation to learn practical skills, but also to develop, pose difficult questions and engage in the learning process. The research is based on the Self-Determination Theory and Marczewski gamification users typology. The basic method used in the presented research is an analysis of a questionnaire conducted among students of the Cracow University of Economics. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The article consists of two main parts. The first presents the concept of gamification and its use in motivating. Second part of the article is divided into three subsections. First of them contains characteristics of different participants types in gamification projects. Second of them presents assumption and research hypotheses, the other one includes analysis of the results and conclusions of the study. RESEARCH RESULTS: Thanks to the conducted research and based on the subject literature, the predispositions of students to accept the use of selected mechanisms known from games were determined. The conducted research confirmed the assumed hypothesis that the legitimacy of using particular elements of gamification depends on the target group of participants. However, the hypothesis of ineffectiveness of the use of elements specific to the type of player was not confirmed. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS: Further research is needed to verify this assumption, e.g. using a gamification project. Due to the limited research sample, the results do not reflect the entire population, but provide a basis for further research on the motivational elements of individual participants.

Open access to modern information technologies generates a new type of society that increases the productivity and competitiveness of any country in the world market and requires significant changes in the education system. One of the most innovative approaches in education is gamification of learning which has considerable capabilities to increase students’ enjoyment, interest and engagement in the study. In this regard, the aim of our research is to analyse the use of gamification in higher education institutions of Poland, Ukraine and to study the effectiveness of using Kahoot as one of gamification technologies in teaching English for specific purposes (ESP) to students in a technical university. As shown by the results of the study, Poland has considerable experience in the use of computer games in higher education, whereas Ukraine is only beginning to implement these technologies in learning. An experimental study of the use of Kahoot platform in ESP classes at university level, which employed the methods of testing, observation and questioning, showed the effectiveness and expediency of this technology, as the students demonstrated a higher achievement rate, more active engagement and deeper motivation for learning.