Baltasar Fernández Manjón (UCM) gave a course entitled Aplicaciones educativas de los juegos serios y la gamificación at Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación (ICE) at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) in Madrid, Spain. The course had a duration of 8 hours and was held in two mornings of 17th and 18th of May, 2018. The course was coordinated by D. José Luis Martín Núñez from ICE.

The goals of the course were to introduce the main foundations of games as educational content, to know how games can be effectively used in a class environment and to know the principles and techniques of the games to apply them in other educational environments (gamification).

COURSE INTRODUCTION

Games are one of the main industries of today’s almost omnipresent entertainment in society. With the widespread use of mobile devices, a large part of society can be considered to be at least casual gamers. Games are highly motivating content that keeps users interested in them in a very effective way. There is currently a great deal of interest in how the games or strategies used in these games can be used to improve training processes. If you use a game as such, you often talk about serious play or educational play because it is a game whose main purpose is not only entertainment. If what you do is use gaming techniques (e.g. competition, collaboration) but in a non-gaming environment it is called gamification or ludification.

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Pictures from the course at Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación.

More information about the course can be found at: http://www.ice.upm.es/v2007/actividades/informacion/actividad.asp?a=2299&i=0