Analysis of a Gamified Tool to Promote Motivation and Enhance Global Competencies for Elementary School Students

This paper describes the usage experience of a student response system that delivers badges as a pedagogical tool to enhance the development of global competencies among elementary school students. Badges are a gamified element that introduces game dynamics in school environments to promote students’ motivation in learning curriculum content. The study followed an exploratory approach to determine teachers’ and students’ perceptions of their experience with the Global Network Badges rewards tool. A questionnaire was designed as data collection instrument that included gamified elements to be administered to students. For teachers, semi-structured interviews were employed. Analysis was conducted utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, including statistical techniques, data mining, and natural language processing. The results revealed that badges are an effective tool to build a narrative around characters from the general culture in teaching the curriculum content. Therefore, badges allow for building a gamified ecosystem of resources that works as a motivating ludic element that facilitates access to curriculum content. Among other gamified elements, badges are the most effective tool to build a narrative based on popular characters aligned with students’ cultural consumption to reflect complex concepts for elementary school students.