Gamification and Teaching: Using Classcraft Components in Secondary Education
Andrea Brambilla, Francesca Antonacci
In recent years, gamification in the school context has gained increasing visibility in the academic world at international level, as well as in general educational practice. In Italy, however, it is still little explored, as in the case of the gamified system Classcraft. This paper reports the results of a multiple case study that involved 11 secondary-school teachers in Italy in the use of this platform and, in particular, through a detailed description and the relative results that emerged from the experimentation, explores the possibility of grasping its characteristics and extrapolating its components outside Classcraft, towards its use in ordinary teaching. The results focused in particular on random events, unusual happenings that alter the usual school day, and quests, multi-step activities for class or homework within a narrative scaffold. The article shows how Classcraft, and in particular these 2 components, can contribute to inclusion in the sense of social connection within the classroom, as was the expectation of the teachers at the beginning of the experience. One of the requirements for extending these results beyond the reference context in a probabilistic generalisation perspective is the use of these components within the magic circle.
Keywords
Gamification, Secondary school, Didactic model, Practices of inclusion, Magic circle.
