GameWork: a gamified environment for organising and doing homework
Homework is a relatively widespread and common educational activity, especially among elementary and high school students. It facilitates both students’ engagement and performance (Magalhães et al., 2020; Hagger et al., 2015). Despite the apparent benefits of assigning homework to students (learning, consolidation, and application of learning content, better time management in the classroom), it appears to be a tremendous discomfort to students. Trying to make students get their homework done was always a big challenge -not only during the pandemic- faced by teachers and by parents as well. Therefore, the need to address this issue strongly emerges.
Research data have shown the effectiveness of gamification techniques in the educational process because they are highly engaging, motivating and thus they enhance learning compared to traditional learning techniques (Hamari et al., 2014; DomíNguez et al., 2013). However, converting educational material and exercises into online educational games for online learning and assessment for each course is a virtually impossible task for teachers and school institutions. The project’s objective is to develop an online gamified environment that overcomes this challenge (the transfer of physical learning material and exercises into digital form) while conserving the motivational mechanics of games to help students better engage with their homework improving their learning outcomes.
The proposed gamified homework environment will allow the easy creation of gamified experiences independent of the specifics of each course, thus providing a versatile educational tool encouraging the take-up, use, and adoption in all schools regardless of the courses they provide. This goal will be achieved by eliminating the difficulties of creating educational games that incorporate all the learning content and by associating the gamified elements with the homework activities The GameWork project aims to help alleviate students’ reluctance to do homework by developing a gamified environment for organising homework that will use gamification techniques to engage and motivate students to do their homework.
Therefore, this approach promotes innovative pedagogies and methods for teaching, learning, and assessment and supports students and teachers to use digital technologies in creative, collaborative, and efficient ways. Moreover, the GameWork project is about developing digital learning materials and tools, particularly Open Educational Resources and Open Source Educational Software. Finally, the GameWork proposal is also about tackling learning disadvantage, early school leaving, and low proficiency in basic skills since the use of the gamified homework environment will help teachers gain insights regarding the strengths and weaknesses of each student individually, the progress they record, and the time completion for each task.
Programme: KA220-SCH - Cooperation partnerships in school education
Project No.: 2021-1-EL01-KA220-SCH-000034399
Project period: 2021 11 01 – 2024 02 28
Target group:
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Primary and basic education school teachers
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Pupils (primary and basic education)
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School staff
Objectives:
1.Homework organisation: learners can access the environment with their smartphone or tablet and see the daily list of activities that they must perform to prepare for the next day, ticking the completed ones. Each activity can provide details that will help the student better organise their time while doing their homework. Some of such details can be: the estimated time to complete an activity which would give students an indication of how to fit each activity into their schedule better, a suggested activity order that would provide a proposed order in activities that depend on each other, complex activities can be divided into subactivities that will better guide the student towards completing them references to educational material that the student already comprehends before completing each activity, etc. This functionality will allow the student to see a complete overview of their homework at a glance and support them to better estimate, organise, and, in the end, complete their homework.
2. Student engagement: the GameWork project will engage students from the early stages of development, allowing us to investigate their views and ideas about gamified homework. The needs analysis from the student’s feedback would provide the gamified features and courses included in the development creating a gamified homework environment that will engage students in doing their homework. Some gamification features that could be included in the environment could be: rewards: upon completing their homework, students can earn points that will increase their level in the environment, prompting them to complete their homework to earn more rewards rankings: based on the students’ performance, a ranking system can indicate the relative performance of each student, motivating them to do better than their classmates content unlocking: content can be unlocked when a student reaches a certain level that can include fun material not related to homework, such as a funny video or an image notification: student can receive notifications when they level up to motivate them to continue their progress.
3. Progress monitoring (for students and teachers) A verification process will be designed for a student not to skip the assignments and declare them untruthfully complete. The platform will ask for answers to one or more questions essential for each task.
PARTNERSHIP:
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PANEPISTIMIO PATRON (Patras, GR) – coordinating institution
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Arsakeio Lyceum of Patra (Rio Patras, GR)
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MAIEUTICA COOPERATIVA DE ENSINO SUPERIOR CRL (Avioso Sao Padro, PT)
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Agrupamento de Escolas de Freixo (Freixo, PT)
VšĮ “eMundus” is associated partner
Project web: https://game-work.eu/
Project social network: https://www.facebook.com/GamifiedTeam/