Peer-reviewed article
The Possibilities of Gamifying the Mathematical Curriculum in the Early Childhood Education Stage
Verónica Marín Díaz, Begoña Esther Sampedro Requena, Juan Manuel Muñoz González, Nοelia Jiménez-Fanjul ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study surveyed 232 trainee early childhood education teachers in Spain about their views on using gamification to teach mathematics. Teachers believed gamification could help children learn specific math content by developing mathematical thinking and helping them understand relationships between concepts. The study found that teacher characteristics like age and gender did not significantly influence their opinions on using gamification in the classroom.
Key points
- Future early childhood teachers viewed gamification as a potentially useful resource for mathematics learning
- Teachers identified two key benefits: development of mathematical thinking and establishment of relationships between mathematical concepts
- Teacher demographics (age and gender) did not determine their perception of gamification's usefulness
- Teachers' opinions are an important factor affecting whether gamification is actually used in classrooms
- The study involved 232 teachers-in-training using a cross-sectional quantitative design
Limitations
This study captures only the beliefs and opinions of trainee teachers, not actual classroom implementation or evidence of whether gamification actually improves children's mathematical learning outcomes. The research does not measure the impact on children's development or compare different teaching approaches.
Abstract
The addition of gamification to the classroom as a methodological tool means that the teacher’s opinion about this has become an inflection point that can affect its use or not in the classroom. In this sense, the main objective of the present article is to explore the opinion of future Early Childhood education teachers on the use of this resource for the development of the mathematics curriculum at this education stage and to obtain an explanatory model that explains it. The design of the study utilized a descriptive perspective and a cross-sectional quantitative focus through a quantitative exploratory study. For data collection, an ad hoc questionnaire was utilized, which was administered to a sample of 232 teachers-in-training. The main result obtained was that the future early childhood education professionals considered that gamification could be a resource for the learning of specific mathematics contents, and this was shaped around a model of two elements. On one hand, the development of mathematical thinking, and on the other, the establishment of relationships between mathematical concepts. Lastly, we can conclude that elements such as age or gender do not determine the perception of the use of gamification in the early childhood education classroom.