Gaming has always been a fantasy for the student com munity as they would always love to be engaged in some form of action or the other. The acad emicians should understand the same and create opportunities for them to excel in what they wish to do in turn contributing towards their overall development. The advent of Education 4.0 will fuel the change in the landscape of education from what is being offered within the walls of the institute to the ones that address the challenges being faced by the society in innovative ways with the help of advancements in educational tech nology. However, such a transforma tion is only possible when the learners gain necessary interest in learning by actively engaging with the content and exploring its potential applica tions. The contents available in tradi tional formats like books, videos, etc. at times may not bring in the kind of interest among the learner to get going with doing great things on their subject of study.
Gamification plays a vital role in improving the retention of the concepts being learned through interaction with the content and its application environment. Also, the context aspect added to the gamifica tion platforms gives the overall big picture to the learner and makes them understand their progress towards the overall attainment of the learning outcomes.
Gamification of learning content requires a lot of effort, as there are only limited human resources availa ble to create the same across the domains. The primary reason for such a shortage of the gamified con tent is the lack of awareness among the learners on the importance of egaming activities. The taboo in see ing egames as a distraction for a long time has resulted in preventing the young minds from exploring the same. eGaming develops better hand-eye coordination and enhances the reflex of the mind, enabling them to gain greater focus on their environ ment. The introduction of collabora tive egaming platforms have enabled the gamers to solve a challenge as a team knowing the strengths and weaknesses of their team members thus resulting in greater satisfaction of achievement. Allowing the stu dents to be involved in esports and enabling them to explore the oppor tunities for designing the games for the future is something that the insti tutes should take seriously in the days to come. With the advance ments in technologies like Augment ed, Virtual and Mixed Reality, mere introduction of the same to the stu dents is of no benefit unless we guide them to create the contents for the consumption of the world. The intro duction of Metaverse platform has opened up greater opportunities for the organizations across the world to create a better experience for their customers across the domains like marketing, ecommerce, education, healthcare, etc. These virtual experi ence platforms enable the learners to try and explore the possibilities which otherwise could not be done in a real world environment. Be it practicing as a lawyer, doctor, manager, etc. or being a rock star, player in a soccer team anything is possible for the future generation in the platforms like metaverse. Organizations including educational institutions are getting ready for this virtual transformation as their business lies where their cus tomers are. It’s high time for the edu cational institutes to give the oppor tunity to the learners to be involved in esports and kindle their interest to design new games and gamification platforms for the benefit of people across various domains. It’s been a very long time since the creative side of the learners is seen and challenged due to the traditional process of edu cation. Let us tap that hidden poten tial of the generation that is game for anything and make the country a self sustainable one. Jai Hind!!!
The author of this Article is Dr Raghuveer VR, Dean of Academics, KL University, Vaddeswaram, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh