Course Paper

In this work I intended to present a review of the literature on the subject of gamification applied to the area of education, demonstrating in these studies examples of gamification techniques in elementary schools in Latin America, Spain and Portugal. It was applied appropriate techniques of literature review: specific search strategies that aim to detect as much relevant literature as possible, documented search so that readers can evaluate rigor and completeness; explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria to evaluate each of the literature and the presentation of the results of the study by means of graphs and tables, together with the discussions.

Takeaways

• ✿ The gamification is presented as a teaching and learning strategy that motivates, engages and encourages student participation. However, it seems an extremely optmist view of education which is complex (involving teachers' trainning, social/political/cultural context, etc.)
• ✿ With the writing of the literature review article, it was possible to have a more comprehensive understanding of the concept of gamification as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts. It is a concept defined in the scientific academy.
• ✿ The importance of making explicit elements of the scientific method for data collection. In this case, the collection of articles on gamification applied in elementary schools in the University of Gothenburg database.
• ✿ The writing of an academic text has certain particularities, such as the presentation of a defined outline: a problem to be answered, the theoretical background, the research method, the results, the analysis and the discussions.
• ✿ Writing material in a language different (English) from my native language (Portuguese) was a great challenge for me.