Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2018 number 4

Introduction.Gamification in education is a recent and topical trend in the current pedagogical design. Gamified techniques application has spread throughout different educational levels including higher education. This paper summarizes the authors’ experience in gamification applied to some parts of Introduction to Philosophy course for undergraduate students of technical majors. The course taught to eighteen student groups was launched during the Spring semester of 2016-2017 academic year at Siberian Federal University, Russia. The methods described in the paper are designed for teaching a mixed course which combines face-to-face classes with various forms of e-learning. The experiment is aimed at increasing the students’ motivation to learning philosophy. Methodology and methods os the research.The «Philosophical Hunt» game includes a set of assignments to construct a scenario to add new dimensions to the course. This gamified approach strengthens History of Philosophy topics that are traditionally taught based on biographical, typological and comparative methods. Gamifying both in-class and home assignments of the mixed course allows creating an interconnected learning scenario and tracking the results. The results of the study.The result of the experiment reflected in teaching evaluations and students’ feedback demonstrate a significant increase in motivation and engagement. The authors claim that they have successfully implemented the Community of Inquiry instructional model. It is proved to be efficient for the technical major undergraduate students. The keys to the model implementation success are utilization of the game mechanics elements, introduction of various group work forms and creation of the learning environment with high density of communication. Conclusion.The most significant limitations of gamified approach appeared to be the increase in the workload for instructors, time consuming development of the instructional materials, ambiguity of assessment, lack of the published guidelines for gamified instruction, absence of research based guidelines or recommendations for quality and valid gamified assessment for philosophy teaching. Pedagogical experiments in humanities and liberal arts have high capacity for gamification implementation, however integration of pedagogical innovations into their long-lasting tradition requires creative, though careful approach to the game mechanics and the ability to harmonize the gamified elements inside the course.