Revisiting Teaching and Games: Mapping Out Ecosystems of Learning

This special issue opens with a study of gamified digital brainstorming as a response to the social and creative losses that remote learning imposed during COVID-19. The authors cite sharp declines in student mental health and peer interaction during the pandemic, including one Swiss university reporting a 30% dropout rate compared with a usual 5%, and argue that structured, gamified brainstorming can help rebuild social bonds and foster creativity. Their approach builds on known productivity problems in conventional brainstorming, including production blocking, social loafing, and social inhibition, which electronic brainstorming methods are designed to mitigate.

The central artifact is Spark-IT, a gamified e-brainstorming application built in Unity and selected through weighted criteria evaluation of three candidates. Its features include an idea-generation race, trophies, and an anonymized leaderboard intended to raise both the quantity and quality of ideas. In a double-blind usability study with 31 business students comparing Spark-IT against a non-gamified application, participants praised the voting and results views but reported performance slowdowns and some interface confusion. Roughly 78 percent viewed the gamification favorably and about two-thirds preferred Spark-IT, though a minority found the competitive race inappropriate for creative work.

On output, Spark-IT produced up to 20 percent more ideas than the comparison application, although the difference was not statistically conclusive given eight sessions per application, and 28 of the ideas were empty. Gamification did not measurably affect idea generation, since trophies and scores were hidden during that phase. The authors acknowledge the small sample and explicitly defer any formal study of the stress effects of competitive gamification, proposing repeated sessions with the same participants, additional game elements, and comparisons of tablet versus paper and in-class versus online use.