With the development of technology, our habits of playing games have also changed, as have many of our habits. While we used to play games with our friends on the street or at school, we have now moved these games to digital environments. Since the earliest times of history, the game has been instructive for people. Not only humans but also animals learn by playing. For example, puppies learn to use their teeth thanks to the games they play with each other. Although we cannot teach everything by playing games, we can gamify what we want to teach. New methods in education are now needed to keep students whose attention span has been reduced by the use of mobile phones and tablets, focused on a topic from beginning to end. Gamification is one of the preferred methods for this purpose in recent days. Many studies have shown that gamification positively affects student performance and motivation. 

There is no specific model in educational gamifications. Gamification can be done by determining the necessary game elements according to the needs of the lesson and the student profile and adding them to the lesson. For example, do your students benefit from that lesson with individual activities or with collaborative activities? This is one of the important questions for determining game elements. In this way, you can determine whether the gamification will be competitive or cooperative. 

One of the benefits of gamification in the field of education is that it creates an emotional bond between the player, the student, and the subject. Thanks to this bond, students can focus on the subject for a longer period of time. Since gamification actually contains a story, that is, students feel themselves in a story, it is easier to transfer the learned information to the long-term memory. At the same time, gamification improves students’ cognitive skills such as problem solving, making sense, and planning. While solving the problems they encounter in the game, students experience learning by living. Since gamification includes instant feedback, it also avoids misconceptions. 

To summarize, gamification is an effective method that can be used to attract students’ interest in the lesson. It creates an environment where students can feel themselves in a universe and learn by living as a part of that universe. 

Imona Game Team