Improving Knowledge of COVID-19 for Elementary School Students using Gamified Software

Abstract

Gamification focuses on applying game mechanics to non-gaming contexts for audience participation and incorporates little fun from routine activities other than generating motivational and perceptual benefits. Businesses, schools, universities, and many other types of organizations have harnessed the potential of gamification. Digital health services also take advantage of emerging trends such as remote monitoring of the elderly during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we read all this information, nothing is made especially for kids. This paper aims to apply gamification in COVID-19 learning and measure the increase in children's knowledge, especially from 6 to 8 years. We performed two measurements; The first is an internal context measurement to test whether the system follows the original design or not. The second is on students. Thirty-five students at several schools participated in the implementation and were surveyed using their automated activity logs and then conducted a seven-day monitoring survey. The results showed a significant increase in the total increase in the average score from the first experiment compared to the best experiment, namely 1.26 times in the corona jump, 2.00 times in the corona quiz, and 1.10 times in the corona labyrinth. On the other hand, we found a 28.57% decrease (10 of 35 children) in quitting the game. This condition proves that children need a lot of scenarios and content to enjoy the gamification process in the long term to achieve all abilities and need to take advantage of game mechanics skills and psychological effects.