GAMIFICATION IN PREPARING FOR THE UNIFIED STATE EXAMINATION AT SECONDARY SCHOOL

Abstract

In the paper we present a method of gamification applying in the Unified State Examination (USE) preparation activities in the Russian Federation. The USE is a final examination at school as well as a university entrance examination. Students' preparing for this exam takes two years and is accompanied by solving of a large number of similar tasks. Over time, students' interest in these activities is reducing, which leads to unsatisfactory results. We have proposed a model of mobile learning for the USE that uses game mechanics to increase the involvement of students in the process of preparing for the USE. These mechanics are based on the approaches that we used to implement the gamification in the educational process and includes the particular properties of the Unified State Examination. We've implemented the model in a platform consisting of mobile applications for students and a web-interface for a teacher. The platform lets students execute different types of the USE tasks as a training and simulate the examination with a complete set of tasks and a time limit. The processes are accompanied by visualization of user progress, competition in the form of other students success' rating, receiving badges for special sets of actions, etc. Some of the tasks support automatic checking and scoring. Tasks that require a mark of a teacher are sent for review. We've also defined the methods that help to get more information about using gamification in the process of preparing for the USE and formulated an experiment for a school. The paper focuses on the description of the experiment that is based on using the platform in the USE preparation activities at school and outside it.