The Possibilities of Gamifying the Mathematical Curriculum in the Early Childhood Education Stage

Verónica Marín-Díaz, Begoña E. Sampedro-Requena, Juan M. Muñoz-Gonzalez and Noelia N. Jiménez-Fanjul
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Verónica Marín-Díaz: Department of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Córdoba, 14004 Córdoba, Spain
Begoña E. Sampedro-Requena: Department of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Córdoba, 14004 Córdoba, Spain
Juan M. Muñoz-Gonzalez: Department of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Córdoba, 14004 Córdoba, Spain
Noelia N. Jiménez-Fanjul: Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Education, University of Córdoba, 14004 Córdoba, Spain

Mathematics, 2020, vol. 8, issue 12, 1-15

Abstract: The addition of gamification to the classroom as a methodological tool means that the teacher’s opinion about this has become an inflection point that can affect its use or not in the classroom. In this sense, the main objective of the present article is to explore the opinion of future Early Childhood education teachers on the use of this resource for the development of the mathematics curriculum at this education stage and to obtain an explanatory model that explains it. The design of the study utilized a descriptive perspective and a cross-sectional quantitative focus through a quantitative exploratory study. For data collection, an ad hoc questionnaire was utilized, which was administered to a sample of 232 teachers-in-training. The main result obtained was that the future early childhood education professionals considered that gamification could be a resource for the learning of specific mathematics contents, and this was shaped around a model of two elements. On one hand, the development of mathematical thinking, and on the other, the establishment of relationships between mathematical concepts. Lastly, we can conclude that elements such as age or gender do not determine the perception of the use of gamification in the early childhood education classroom.

Keywords: gamification; videogame; early childhood education; mathematics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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