Gamifying an Organic Chemistry Laboratory Course as a Strategy to Improve Students’ Motivation

• José Nunes da Silva Júnior ^[1] ; Renner César Silveira Jucá ^[1] ; Antonio José Melo Leite Junior ^[1] ; Dávila Zampieri ^[1] ; Daniel Esdras de Andrade Uchoa ^[1] ; Janete Souza Magalhães ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidade Federal do Ceará

     Universidade Federal do Ceará

     Brasil

     
• Localización: Journal of chemical education, ISSN 0021-9584, Vol. 102, Nº 8, 2025, págs. 3355-3365
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article outlines the design and implementation of a gamification strategy in an organic chemistry laboratory course for Pharmacy undergraduate students at a Brazilian university. The study, which was conducted over two semesters (2023.2 and 2024.1), employed game mechanics such as points (XP), coins, badges, avatars, levels, and rankings to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes. The gamified course comprised 12 missions, each integrating cognitive, social, operational, and attitudinal skills, with XP distributed proportionally across these competencies. This study demonstrates that gamification, when systematically applied with clear scoring metrics and alignment to learning objectives, significantly boosts motivation and engagement in laboratory settings. The students who participated in the gamified laboratory evaluated the process and gave it an overall score of 9.04, and an average overall score of 4.27 on the User Engagement Scale – Short Form (UES-SF), on a scale from 0 to 5. The detailed framework and results provide actionable insights for educators seeking to adopt similar strategies in science education.