Gamification and Education: A Literature Review

The term "gamification" is generally used to denote the application of game mechanisms in non-gaming environments with the aim of enhancing the processes enacted and the experience of those involved. In recent years, gamification has become a catchword throughout the fields of education and training, thanks to its perceived potential to make learning more motivating and engaging. This paper is an attempt to shed light on the emergence and consolidation of gamification in education/training. It reports the results of a literature review that collected and analysed around 120 papers on the topic published between 2011 and 2014. These originate from different countries and deal with gamification both in training contexts and in formal educational, from primary school to higher education. The collected papers were analysed and classified according to various criteria, including target population, type of research (theoretical vs experimental), kind of educational contents delivered, and the tools deployed. The results that emerge from this study point to the increasing popularity of gamification techniques applied in a wide range of educational settings. At the same time, it appears that over the last few years the concept of gamification has become more clearly defined in the minds of researchers and practitioners. Indeed, until fairly recently the term was used by many to denote the adoption of game artefacts (especially digital ones) as educational tools for learning a specific subject such as algebra. In other words, it was used as a synonym of Game Based Learning (GBL) rather than to identify an educational strategy informing the overall learning process, which is treated globally as a game or competition. However, this terminological confusion appears only in a few isolated cases in this literature review, suggesting that a certain level of taxonomic and epistemological convergence is underway.