Gamificación, pandemia y aprendizaje de la historia de las ideas. Experimentos en el contexto Core Currículum

This paper presents the rationale and results of a gamification experiment based on serious games in the context of teaching the history of ideas. The study was conducted over 80 sessions of the Core Curriculum subject “Contemporary Civilization”-a history of Western philosophy from Plato to Freud-with four courses of 23 students, all of them taught at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile. All sessions took place through Zoom, during the context of the pandemic, i.e., between March 2020 and December 2021. Drawing on gamification theories and philosophical analyses on the cognitive powers of play, the playful activities implemented as well as their outcomes are presented. The research was carried out through a process of autoethnography to record the teaching experience in class. In addition, ethnography was used to record the sounds (spoken interventions) and texts (written interventions) reproduced in each session. As a result of the experiment, it is argued that the game allowed the development of essential skills for the critical understanding of the history of ideas: hermeneutic and intersubjective reasoning, historical imagination, a sense of contingency and the ability to contextualize.