School violence has emerged as a global problem and continues to attract the attention of countries as its frequency and harmfulness are revealed. The need for school violence prevention education has become increasingly important. The limitations of ...
School violence has emerged as a global problem and continues to attract the attention of countries as its frequency and harmfulness are revealed. The need for school violence prevention education has become increasingly important. The limitations of the existing school violence education methods are that they lack interactivity, do not provide students with real-time learning feedback, which makes it difficult for students to be interested in learning about school violence prevention, and do not assess students' learning after teaching, which makes it difficult for students to understand their understanding of knowledge. Given these limitations, it is imperative to explore ways of teaching violence prevention that are more engaging and effective for students. Mobile apps are rapidly developing in a variety of forms and types, and education using smart devices is evolving. Online learning through mobile educational applications has become the standard way of learning in the digital age, but one of the factors that has caused students to be dissatisfied with their learning is the lack of attention. To improve this phenomenon, some mobile educational applications have introduced gamification elements such as experience (points), achievements (badges), and rankings to stimulate students' willingness to continue using them. The purpose of this study is to develop a school violence prevention mobile application using gamification for elementary school students.
Developing a school violence prevention app using gamification is to combine the CUBI (UX design) model and the DMC gamification design system, summarise the relevance of the two models, and introduce gamification elements into the school violence prevention curriculum according to the relevance. The strategy for developing a school violence prevention app using gamification is to consider the cognitive level and cognitive characteristics of elementary school students, design four aspects of the app: user goals, interaction, business goals, and content, and introduce gamification elements by characteristics to these four aspects to develop a school violence prevention app based on them. To investigate the effectiveness of the developed Experimental bullying prevention app, we conducted a 5-week experiment from 3 April 2024 to 8 May 2024 with 100 students (50 in the experimental group and 50 in the comparison group) from the same primary school in China, and conducted pre-tests and post-tests and surveys on their knowledge of bullying.
To compare the difference in effectiveness between the two education methods, the data collected was subjected to reliability analysis and independent sample t-test analysis using SPSS 26.0, and the following experimental results were presented.
The experimental group that implemented education using the ‘BULLY OUT’ app for elementary school students had higher learning motivation (t=2.647, p=0.009) and academic achievement (t=2. 897, p=0.006), learning satisfaction (t=3.181, p=0.002), ease of use (t=2.239, p=0.027), usefulness (t=2.524, p=0.013), and entertainment (t=2.675, p=0.009) than the comparison group that received training using PPT. Thus, the school violence prevention application using gamification developed in this study was found to be an effective educational tool.
A mobile application using gamification was selected as a tool to educate primary school students on school violence prevention knowledge in order to make school violence prevention education enjoyable and accessible to them regardless of time and place, to increase student interaction and engagement with the curriculum, and to enable students to learn and test themselves. It was also verified that the application is a useful educational tool that can improve students' learning motivation, academic achievement, and learning satisfaction, and that it is easier to use, more useful, and more playful than traditional teaching methods. This is because students can freely acquire bullying prevention knowledge in an educational environment using gamification, which makes it interesting and engaging for them to be immersed in the curriculum. It is hoped that the application developed in this study can be used for school violence prevention education in elementary schools by adding various school violence prevention education contents and gamification elements in the future and continuing to upgrade the app performance.