STUDENTS' ATTITUDE TO GAMIFICATION OF EDUCATION DEPENDING ON THEIR PRIOR EXPERIENCE

Gamification can be applied to various subjects of education with an aim of raising students' motivation and engagement, giving students more personalized and challenging learning experience, and creating more natural and convincing environment for practical application of theoretical knowledge. However, the successful application of gamification in education depends on several factors. In this paper, we focus on two key factors: the students' engagement with games and their prior experience with gamification. We discuss the results of a survey among students, investigating their attitude to game-based techniques both in general and respectively to eight preselected techniques including storytelling with alternative scenarios, individual development paths, role-playing, direct competition with other students, rankings within student groups, non-material rewards, random events during classes and the use of mobile applications supporting gamification, such as fast quizzes. The analysis of the survey results in the context of the two key factors confirmed the expected relationship between gaming habits and good prior gamification experiences with positive attitude to gamification. More interestingly, it also revealed that even students not interested in playing games or having negative prior experiences with gamification, expressed positive attitude to specific game-based techniques, which is an important observation for the practice of educational gamification design and development.