The Effect of Gamification on Home Economics Students' Motivation and Engagement in Drawing Activities

The engagement and motivation of students in drawing activities are of great importance to their learning processes. The decline in attendance and difficulties stimulating the drawing skills of students make it crucial to develop novel methodologies that can overcome these difficulties. In visual art education research, utilizing game elements within a non-gamified setting (gamification) has become of great interest, as it can directly increase motivation to learn drawing and therefore activity in learning to draw. This research implemented gamification for home economics students as an instructional strategy in the teaching and learning of drawing and evaluated its impact on the students' drawing skills. A quasi-experimental design was implemented and a questionnaire was used to collect data, with a five-point Likert scale. Purposive sampling was used to select the one hundred Senior High School students from Ghana who participated in the study. The respondents' scores on both non-gamified and gamified tasks were compared using a paired sample test and independent sample t-test. The collected quantitative data were analysed using SPSS version 16.0. The implementation of gamification stimulated the interest of the respondents in drawing, thereby engaging and motivating them to improve their drawing skills. There was a statistically significant difference between gamified and non-gamified approaches for teaching drawing. Gamification positively affected the cognition of the respondents and boosted their motivation to draw and improve upon their drawing skills.