Teachers’ Practices and Students’ Experiences of Gamification in High School Science Classes
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Abstract
Gamification is increasingly applied in science education to improve students' engagement, motivation, participation, and interaction. But little research has focused on the implementation of gamification by high school science teachers and the students' experiences of gamified science activities in the classroom. Through a qualitative descriptive study, data was collected from six in-service science teachers and thirty secondary school students in the Division of Iligan City. Data were collected by conducting preliminary interviews and semi-structured interviews and analyzed by thematics analysis and comparative analysis. The results indicated that teachers employed the following elements of the game to encourage interaction, teamwork, motivation, and meaningful learning of science such as using points, badges, challenges, feedback, rewards, and progression to promote engagement, collaboration, motivation. Students generally experienced gamified science lessons as enjoyable, interactive, collaborative, and motivating. The comparative analysis showed that teachers’ practices and students’ experiences aligned in terms of engagement, participation, collaboration, and motivation. However, students also reported challenges related to unclear mechanics, time pressure, challenging scoring systems, and overwhelming competition, which sometimes hindered their conceptual understanding. The study suggests that gamification can support high school science learning when it is clearly structured, aligned with curriculum objectives, inclusive, fairly paced, and focused on learning rather than solely on rewards or competition.
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