Prospective preschool and primary school teachers’ knowledge and opinion about gamification

Abstract

Abstract. Gamification is a rather new method in education and unfortunately is not a widely known method among Hungarian primary school teachers in Romania. This paper presents the knowledge and opinion of pre-service preschool and primary school teachers about gamification and its use in education. In this study 81 Primary and Preschool Pedagogy students from BabeșBolyai University were participated, 80 of them were female and 1 male. 40 students are in first year and 41 in second year of their studies. The research was carried out during February-March 2020 at Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania. To get to know their point of view and knowledge about gamification, an online questionnaire was developed by the authors. The obtained data was quantitatively (closed questions) and qualitatively (open questions) analyzed. According to the results, half of the students think that there is no difference between gamification and game-based learning and for three quarter it is difficult to see the differences. This is surprising as students were taught about gamification before filling in the questionnaire. Students perceive a high level of utility of gamification in education. The most frequently mentioned benefits by the participants are that gamification motivates and actively involves students. Even if participants gave many advantages of integrating gamification in education, the biggest disadvantage is related with the time necessary for preparation of a gamified lesson and for the time-allocation during the lesson. As obstacles of using gamification, they mentioned the negative attitude or/and lack of methodological knowledge of some teachers and the constrains of the curriculum. Most of the preservice teachers prefer both paper-pencil based and technology-aid gamification. They consider solving exercises the most suitable for gamification.