Rabah and Cassidy. 2018. Gamification in Education: Real Benefits or Edutainment?
Rabah and Cassidy perform a meta analysis of review literature on education in games. The following is my annotation of that paper. This study seeks to evaluate a broad variety of review literature on gamification in education in order to establish a consensus of the effectiveness of research in such a practice. In addition, it seeks to identify flaws or blind spots in the current research on the effectiveness of gamification. Gamification is defined as, “the use of game design elements characteristic for games (rather than play or playfulness) in non-game contexts”, or applying elements of video games to other situations, such as learning. It finds that gamification is a factor in many positive learning outcomes, such as lowering anxiety, boosting knowledge retention, and building communities. It also concludes that more research on the topic is needed, especially concerning how specific game mechanics connect to specific design principles. This study performed a qualitative a...