The Road to Gamification

I entered my IDD program as a long-term adjunct professor who had long since drunk the flipped classroom model Kool-Aid. Each of us recalls what it was like to figure out what we would do for our dissertation, some of you are working your way through this now! As with others, I had an idea and a purpose: I was going to study how to improve my students’ engagement in pre-class learning materials. As I completed various literature reviews exploring the history and the mixed results of a flipped-classroom, a trend began to emerge around 2016–2018 as a result of multiple critical literature of the delivery methods of pre-class learning materials (de Araujo et al., 2017; Jensen et al., 2018; Jensen et al., 2015; Lin et al., 2021; Young, 2016, Zainuddin & Halili, 2016; Zainuddin, 2018). Researchers began recommending that pre-class materials should also be engaging, not just the in-class activities (Lin et al., 2021; Zainuddin, 2018). One of the methods being used was gamification (Huang & Hew, 2018, 2021; Zainuddin, 2018). This was my first time learning about gamification and how it differs from game-based courses. Today, in a literature review, there are now systematic reviews of gamification in a flipped classroom (Ekici, 2021; Zainuddin et al., 2020). …