Study on the Impact of Gamified Teaching Using Mobile Technology on College Students’ Learning Engagement

Abstract

Mobile technology has become an indispensable resource in people’s lives, and educational software applications are closely related to day-to-day life. These applications provide an effective basis for implementing interactive teaching and allow teachers and students to quickly exchange information through mobile devices. Compared with teachers, students are tolerant and open about mobile technology. To meet the learning needs of students, adopting different teaching methods to improve learners’ learning outcomes is the focus of mobile learning. Therefore, gamified teaching supported by various information technologies such as computers, multimedia, and mobile technology has received widespread attention. In this study, 124 undergraduate students majoring in Civil Engineering from Harbin University of Science and Technology, Heilongjiang Province, were randomly assigned to one experimental group (with gamified teaching design, 62 students) and one control group (without gamified teaching design, 62 students). The paired sample T test was used to compare the pre- and post-test scores of the learners, while the independent sample T test was used to analyze the learning engagement (behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement) of college students under gamified teaching using mobile technology. Results show no significant difference in pre-test scores between the experimental and control groups (P = 0.374 > 0.05), meeting the prerequisite for the comparative experiment. Gamified teaching using mobile technology found significantly improved test scores (P = 0.003 < 0.05), where independent sample T test results showed a significant difference in learning engagement (behavioral, cognitive, and emotional). After using gamified teaching using mobile technology, the experimental group of students showed a significant increase in learning engagement, which is consistent with the results of most of the literature. The results of this study have important reference value for school administrators to propose new teaching strategies and for teachers to integrate information technology to assist the teaching process, to propose solutions for building interactive teaching environments, and to alleviate the fatigue phenomenon that often occurs in the application of multimedia technology in current information technology teaching in universities.