Gamification in education

Abstract

This article surveys the main directions of gamification of education. Using a typology of formation of educational space in relation to the virtual space when creating educational computer games (Whitton N. 2009), it shows the degree of involvement of educational computer and video games in education of modern children in Sweden, Finland, Australia, USA and many other countries. It marks a re-orientation of this type of games from the needs of an adult in connection to a child, in direction of the child's needs. It shows that the questions of development of effective, environmentally friendly and at the same time securely motivated educational computer and video games, as well as the question of their impact on child's development in long perspective remains open. In addition, the article states that psychological research of educational tools’ gamification is aimed primarily at addressing the problem of dyslexia, leaving unstudied such specific problems of children as dyscalculia, or the effect of education when mediated by virtual space