GAMIFICATION AND GAME-BASED LEARNING IN BIOTECHNOLOGY | by Ts Pratheep Sandrasaigaran

The COVID-19 pandemic has been perplexing for two years, leading to uncertainties for many, especially among the students and teachers’ groups. More than one billion students throughout the globe have been forced to enrol on virtual classrooms and compelled the academicians to get acquainted with modern teaching techniques using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Blackboard, and Skype to convey the curriculum. Such a sudden digital transition caused academics to get confused and ironically exposed students to stressful learning experiences. Moreover, the biggest challenge in online teaching and learning is to sustain the student’s level of engagement and interest.

We faced similar problems at Manipal International University (MIU), hardship in keeping the Biotechnology students’ attention for more than 20 minutes. We sometimes heard nothing from the students at the end of every lesson period (probably dozed off). This became a great challenge, and as a result, we were forced to adopt technologies and seek additional pedagogical modifications to assist with online teaching.

One way that we could overcome such problems was to introduce gamification and game-based learning in the daily teaching and learning activities. Gamification applies game design elements and ideas to non-game circumstances, such as in the online classroom. It may also be defined as a series of activities and processes that leverage or use game component features to solve problems.

However, designing games and integrating them into online teaching is not easy, especially for someone with no programming knowledge. The wordwell (https://wordwall.net/), a web-based tool, can be used to design interactive games for online learning with just a few words and a few clicks, which solves the novices' problems.

For an experience (experiment) with gamification in an online lesson, I had personally used the wordwell.net in every online class and continue to use it, even now, during the face-to-face classes. To truly understand the effectiveness of gamification in motivating the students besides keeping them engaged in classrooms (especially online), we conducted a survey that took part by 103 students of multi-demographic backgrounds and 20 teachers with varying levels of experience.

The outcome of this study has shown significant improvements in students' stress and emotional levels when gamification is introduced as part of their online lessons. The academicians also perceived that gamifying teaching and learning activities could significantly reduce students' stress and emotions, besides improving the students' attention span during online classes. This study was published in the Malaysian Journal of Science and Advanced Technology which can be accessed via:


 

(A) Maze chase game developed using the wordwall.net; (B) Students were enjoying game-based learning as part of teaching pedagogy during the face-to-face class in MIU; (C) Research findings that were published in the Malaysian Journal of Science and Advanced Technology.