Gamification As A Means Of Increasing Students’ Motivation To Learn

The creation of conditions for the development of 21st-century skills, which the teacher can use in different ways in different contexts, occupies an important place in the values ​​of the platform team. Today we publish the experience of Victoria Gavrilina, a teacher of chemistry and basics of health, who among the possibilities of highlights team games and the possibility of using gamification to motivate students.

In the modern education system, gamification is increasingly used as an innovative learning process.
It is the use of game practices and mechanisms in a non-game context to involve users in solving problems. Joint actions to achieve their own goals, virtuality and countdown (task completion for a limited time) are elements of the gamified process.

The cloud platform team offers the use of team games during the educational process. Lido learning is an online service for instant tests that can be conducted both during the lesson and at home. The main focus is on collaboration. Team games are a project that gives students a goal that they can only achieve together. Using a projector (or interactive whiteboard), the teacher shows an animated story, the development of which depends on the correct answers of the whole class. The more correct answers – the further the game progresses. Only the success of the whole class will help Team Game to have a positive ending. The purpose of team games is to promote the development of skills of cooperation in the classroom as opposed to competition with determining the absolute winners, involving the whole class in joint work, development of analytical skills and critical thinking, a saturation of the lesson with relevant visual material.

For students, the positive emotions they feel during the game, the relationships between team members and the feedback are important. Inactive children join the task and are not afraid to make mistakes; they realize that everything can be fixed. And this is very important for adult life. They are proud of their contribution to the game and want public approval for completing the process. A convincing positive factor is that students learn in an interactive environment, interact with classmates and help each other. Thus, students from a key competence “Initiative and Entrepreneurship”: to show the ability to work in a team, to be proactive, to generate ideas, to take responsibility for decision-making, to conduct a dialogue to achieve a common goal.

During the team game, students solve problems by answering questions from their own devices. They can look for the right answers on the Internet, in textbooks, or on smart cards, they create at home using the Inverted Classroom method. This creates “Information and digital competence”: to use modern devices for searching for chemical information, it’s processing, storage and transmission.

Team games implement three forms of gamification:

1) the competition becomes a game motivation, where simple and clear rules are used, the screen of the interactive board on-line shows the progress of each team as in the standings;
2) the game “without a winner”, during which students learn casually, becomes a pleasant process;
3) visualizes the goal, increases the visibility of the results of teams.

Creating chemical test tasks on the platform helps students with different types of information to better learn the material. Visuals with a leading visual channel are helped to perceive information and memorize it by vivid pictures with models of molecules, being in nature or using substances. This activates the associative memory. Auditors need to hear the soundtrack of video downloads from the YouTube channel. Digital (discrete), in which the digital channel is leading, to increase motivation will be interesting to solve logical problems, tasks for the use and safety of chemicals, the environmental aspect. And kinesthetic with the leading body-sensitive channel it is interesting to interact with the information by touching the gadget screen.