Search Results (2)

Within the context of pedagogical renewal in Physical Education, Game-Based Learning (GBL) has emerged as a pedagogical model that can foster students’ motivation and engagement. This study explored university learners’ perceptions of a playful activity in a natural environment, entitled Autolycus’ Game, and its perceived contributions to their holistic development. A total of 114 undergraduate students enrolled in Early Childhood and Primary Education degrees participated in a two-hour session designed as a Breakout EDU in a university park. After the experience, their perceptions were collected through an online semi-structured questionnaire and analysed using qualitative coding techniques in Atlas.ti. Findings indicated that participants perceived Autolycus’ Game as motivating, creativity-enhancing, and supportive of social interaction and cooperative work. Most participants highlighted that this methodology helped them strengthen social and communication skills, while also valuing the use of the natural environment as a didactic resource. At the same time, participants identified areas for improvement—such as repetitive tasks, uneven difficulty across challenges, and limited supervision—that may reduce engagement if not carefully planned. Overall, participants described Autolycus’ Game as a valuable pedagogical strategy that may enrich learning experiences in Physical Education and support socio-emotional and motor competences, although the findings should be interpreted in light of the study’s limitations (single-institution sample, self-reported data, intact class groups taught by the researchers). Future work could examine outdoor Breakout EDU with mixed-methods and longitudinal designs to assess motivational processes and learning outcomes over time. Full article

Recent societal changes have meant that education has had to adapt to digital natives of the 21st century. These changes have required a transformation in the current educational paradigm, where active methodologies and ICT have become vehicles for achieving this goal, designing complete teaching sequences with STEM approaches that help students to learn. Under a gamified approach, this document addresses a didactic proposal in geometry focused on STEM disciplines. This proposal combines tools such as AR, VR, manipulative materials, and social networks, with techniques such as m-learning, cooperative-learning, and flipped-learning, which make methodological transformation possible. The research was carried out during two academic years under an action research framework. It departed from a traditional methodology and, in two cycles, methodology was improved with the benefits that gamification brings to STEM proposals in Secondary Education. The data gathered in the experiment were analysed following a mixed method. Learning produced, strategies employed, successes and errors, and results of a questionnaire are presented. Evidence shows an improvement in academic performance from 50% fails to 100% pass, most of the students ended up motivated, participation was of the whole group, more than 80% showed positive emotions, and thanks to the cooperative-learning, group cohesion was improved. Full article