From Teaching with Textbooks to Learning on Online Gamified Spaces

This article raises the need for twenty-first century schools to begin transforming their teaching materials by adapting them to the new experiences and expressive forms offered by the digital society. Our study begins by analysing an idiosyncratic school means-textbooks. Text-books are underlying by an encyclopedic understanding of the curriculum made popular by twentieth century's cultural industries and they play an important mediating role between the official curriculum and teaching practice since they scaffold what should be taught and learned. As an alternative to text-books, we present a new approach to producing educational materials based on the logic of video games: gamification. This approach to learning involves a model based on problem solving, on a better human-machine interactivity and on ludic components. Our conclusion is that these digital gamified materials have profound implications for the restructuring of the publishing industry, as well as for the conceptions and practices of teaching and learning in schools.