(1755) APPLICATION OF PROJECT BASED LEARNING AND GAMIFICATION METHODOLOGIES AS MOTIVATIONAL TOOLS FOR STUDENTS

摘要

The International Standard Classification of Education classifies upper secondary education studies asLevel 3 ISCED;;at this level, Vocational Programmes are considered as one of the subdivisions thatcan be established. The Education System in Spain offers, within that same context, CiclosFormativos de Grado Medio in the different existing professional categories.In Spain, the graduation rate at that academic level in 2013 was of only 27%;;a small value ifcompared to OECD or UE21 results: 46% and 51%, respectively. Therefore, the identification ofcritical moments throughout that academic level that can lead students to leaving school is interesting.Furthermore, the proposal of educational methodologies focused on the reduction of the early leavingrate is also convenient.So, an increase of students' interest in teachers' teaching proposals is considered as a crucial aspect,as it can lead not only to help students overcoming this academic stage more successfully, but also toallow them accessing to higher education studies or to a more qualified labour market.This work proposes an experimental proposal in order to enhance the motivation of students fromvocational programmes at upper education studies by means of Game-based Learning (GBL)methodologies. To do so, the development of teaching activities, following Project-based Learning(PBL) methodologies, is proposed. In this case, these activities would lead to the resolution of projectsthroughout the competition amongst different work groups.In order to implement these Game-based Learning methodologies, the use of Classcraft(http://www.classcraft.com), as a Gamification and Learning Management System (LMS) tool isproposed. In this platform, every student would have an avatar who would be receiving rewards orpenalties according to the implication of the student in the project development and the obtainedresults.Moreover, the use of virtual collaborative work tools is also considered to manage the documentationof the project, thus ensuring each of the work group members can have full access to all theinformation they are generating, no matter where every student is located. The use of these toolswould also allow the delocalized and asynchronous collaborative elaboration of documents andreports corresponding to the predefined milestones for the different stages of the development of theproject, until its final solution.The use of Whatsapp (http://www.whatsapp.com) is proposed for the organizational management ofthe project. The generalized implantation of this social messaging tool within students at this stagewould easily fulfil the communication needs between the members of a team group, thus avoidinghaving to implement, learn and use further tools for the projects' management.