Efficacy of Game-Based Learning During Covid-19 Pandemic: Digital Response

The pandemic times during the COVID-19 outbreak allowed us to explore the potential of technology to a greater extent. It allowed the field of game design and development to explore yet another dimension of its use in the education system. The gamified approach itself is not new but its use for enhancing the teaching-learning environment is still untouched to greater lengths. Although researchers have put in efforts to grasp the opportunity by creating various learning applications, the gap still remains. The most prominent issue while developing gamified environment is the efficacy and the retention enhancement ability of such applications. In this study, the use of gamified environments in an educational scenario for the pre and post-pandemic phases are explored. The proposed system is used for learning the mathematical concept of multiplication and is deployed on kids from the 5–7 years age group under the guidance of their parents. The analysis of the obtained result shows that the application was found to enhance retention in understudies and the feedback from parents allowed us to predict the high efficacy of the gamified environment. As part of future work, extending this approach of gamification to other concepts would be the focus of the authors.