The 14th International Scientific Conference
eLearning and Software for Education
Bucharest, April 19-20, 2018
10.12753/2066-026X-18-042
The Advantages of Gamification and Game-Based Learning and their Benefits in the
Development of Education
Gabriel Călin NISTOR, Adrian IACOB
Police Academy “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”,Aleea Privighetorilor Street 1A, Bucharest, Romania
gb_nstr@yahoo.com, adi_iakob28@yahoo.com
Abstract: In the United States, gamification is used in education for more than 10 years. Gamification
is a procedure that employs certain game specific elements in different fields like education, health,
sport or human resources. This process is known as "Human-Focused Design", as opposed to
"Function-Focused Design." It's a design process that optimizes for human motivation in a system, as
opposed to pure efficiency. Most systems are "function-focused", designed to get the job done quickly.
This is like a factory that assumes its workers will do their jobs because they are required to. However,
Human-Focused Design remembers that people in a system have feelings, insecurities, and reasons why
they want or do not want to do certain things, and therefore optimizes for their feelings, motivations,
and engagement. Since games have spent decades learning how to master motivation and engagement,
we are now learning from games, and that is why we call it Gamification. Take for example Duolingo, a
massive online collaboration which combines a free language-learning website with a paid
crowdsourced text translation platform. The service is designed so that students can learn a given
language online, while helping to translate websites and documents. The traditional motivational
methods are less and less efficient and thus the companies are forced towards more attractive and
innovative methods, fit for the psychological profile of the current generation, a generation raised and
schooled in close connection with the technological progress. European Union started to show interest
for these aspects, as proven by the Game-Based Learning and Gamification training course that was
organized in Spain by the means of a European Commission project.
Keywords: gamification; learning; innovation; m-learning.
I. INTRODUCTION
Gamification is the application of game-design elements in various non-game contexts, such
as: human resources, health and education.
Though the term “gamification” first appeared online in 2008, it did not gain popularity until
2010. Nick Pelling claims he was the one to create the term “gamification” in 2002, by which he
described the application of computer game-design elements to electronic devices, in order to make
them more appealable. A more rudimentary example for this term’s description and the way in which
gamification works is the manner in which parents feed their children when they are little by turning
that teaspoon into an airplane or the manner in which animals teach their pups to hunt when they are
small. Gamification is used more and more by the large companies as a way of keeping their
employees satisfied and relaxed, thus becoming more productive or as a way of recruitment by the
human resources department. We live in an era of technology, of its fast-track development; children
learn to use a tablet before they can walk, and this is why this phenomenon is so catchy among the
current generation. Introducing it to education seems necessary and unavoidable at the same time,
from primary to university education, including to the public order and national security-related
education.
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