La ludificación como herramienta de motivación en la asignatura bilingüe Waves and Electromagnetism

Abstract

The aim of this project is twofold: finding an efficient tool to evaluate the previous knowledge of the students and motivating them to work on the subject after the classes. With this idea in mind, we have initiated the gamification of the course “Waves and Electromagnetism” for first year students (bilingual degree) of the Engineering Polytechnic School of the University of Oviedo. Several factors hinder the adequate performance of the students: inherent difficulty of the abstract concepts of the matter, the language barrier (the course is taught in English), the weak assimilation of previous necessary knowledge, and the allocation of the course in the second term, which leads to the exhaustion of the students and early demotivation. The gamification experience is implemented with the professional online platform Game Training. The designed competition, named ENGame, consists of questions that the player must answer to get points through a duel system, either against other players (challenge) or against the machine (training). The application provides information and statistics about the performance of the overall or individual players, classified by topics and days, which allow analyzing the difficulty and learning evolution in terms of correct and incorrect answers and answering time. The results of the first phase and improvement proposals are given in this paper.