Unit 5.2 Gamification Methods & Tools

Unit Introduction

Gaming is a significant part of young people’s lives, and they display a number of benefits and threats to their well-being. Despite this mainstream trend, youth workers are not using it in their youth work practice. It happens because gaming is considered to be dangerous, and it is fanned by various stereotypes that only prevent young people from developing calmly in this space without the regular condemnation of the surrounding “adults”. Not to mention, new technologies that young people absorb like a sponge aren’t very familiar to social workers.

Even though youth workers often lack digital skills and understanding the potential of technology and video games, they are skillful in experiential learning. Therefore, they could support young people in learning and empowering them through playing games, creating worlds (e.g., on Minecraft), simulating social interactions (through Sims), making impact on objects by coding or tinkering with technology.

For the all-round development of youth, we suggest you familiarize yourself with the following games that you can use in your work with young people.

Unit Objectives:

To provide theoretical information and tools about gamification method
To enable the participants to get a chance to try some of these tools.

Unit Content:

As a youth worker in the unit, the use of gamification in the preparation and planning processes of your youth work as well as in the implementation processes has been provided to introduce alternative applications for the use of interactive learning tools. However, it should not be forgotten that; the most important difference between the game and the concept of gamification; While the concept of “game” is based on “entertainment”, the concept of “gamification” is the necessity of a “learning” phenomenon that will create a “behavioral change” on the target audience.

Learning Activities:

1 Content sessions with suggested video
2 Exercises

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the strategic attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations and activities in order to create similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users.^[1]

We recommend you watch the video below on gamification.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification

Gamification has an integrational function when speaking about the creation of community. Cooperation of the players provides additional results, adding to the learning process discussions and additional responsibilities in order to youth work for a common goal. Moreover, gamification in a group can be fun and less stressful, giving the opportunity to fulfil experiences of others with one’s own.

Gamification is the combination of motivational settings linked to the game elements, providing individuals with motivational power to act more efficiently and develop new competences by applying more attractive methods of doing so. These methods can be effective to create bigger empathy and motivation from game-like activities and transfer the knowledge to the real-life contexts.

With development of digital technology and changes of social standards, plenty of new digital tools and methods of games have been developed during the last decades and those are overtaken by young people. The motivational function of gamification is taking more place in the youth field, as there are plenty of opportunities and comfort for youth, which make less contribution to their active participation in general sense.

Gamification in youth work can be evaluated as tool for variety of activities:

social activities;
meeting with the peers;
being recognized by society;
identification of expectations and needs;
demonstration of aims and goals;
link between expectations and goals;
evaluation of progress;
identification of further personal development needs;
contribution and appreciation of others.

Exercise 1

Title	Choosing Digital and Gamification tools Module 5 Unit 5.2 Ex1
Objective	To learn gamification and digital tools that you can use for your daily youth activities
Module, Unit	Module 5 Unit 5.2 Ex1
Description/ Instruction	There is a power point presentation (see below) on digital and gamification tools that can be used for youth work practice. Check them to choose 3 of them to use for their daily youth work practice. Finally, explain how you will do that in the Forum.
Time needed	30 Minutes

Download Powerpoint Presentation

Exercise 2

Titel	Kahoot!
Objective	Use of multi-entry online learning tools used to pre-evaluation and post-evaluation a specific subject
Module, Unit	Module 5 Unit 2 Ex2
Description/ Instruction	To use the program, firstly it is necessary to register via the link below. https://kahoot.com As a preference: you can pre-test or post-test with two options, interpretations, multiple options. After registration, test questions are prepared in the “Create” section. The ideal number of Kahoot questions is between 5-7. More testing may cause distraction. After preparing the test questions, Game Pin will be displayed on the screen for users to be online at the same time. For online or face-to-face applications, users are enabled to log in via www.kahoo.it via smartphone or laptop-computer. By following the entries on the main player screen, the questions are completed with the “Next” progress and the person who gave the fastest and most correct answers are displayed on the screen at the end of the application.
Additional information	It would be beneficial to actively use the youth worker Kahoot application to ensure digital participation of participants in many youth work’ concepts. However, it is necessary to follow the relevance throughout the implementation period.
Time needed	30 Minutes