Gamification in Tourism Teaching and Learning: Exploring the Emergent Dimensions

First introduced in 2002 by British Programmer Nick Pelling, the term gamification has gained massive momentum in the last decade with extensive applications in teaching and learning (Hebebci & Selahattin, Current Studies in Social Sciences 2021:174, 2021). In its simplest form, gamification refers to the adoption of principles and design elements of various games in nongame situations (Deterding et al. From game design elements to gamefulness: Defining “gamification”. In Proceedings of the 15th international academic MindTrek conference: Envisioning future media environments (pp. 9–15), 2011). Further, the interaction between the students and technological interventions is rising, opening new avenues for innovative strategies like gamification to promote effective teaching and learning (Kapp, The gamification of learning and instruction: Game-based methods and strategies for training and education. Wiley, 2012). In the context of tourism, works of (Nair, B. B. Endorsing gamification pedagogy as a helpful strategy to offset the COVID-19 induced disruptions in tourism education. Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism Education, 30, 100362, 2022.) and Aguiar-Castillo, Hernández-López, De Saá-Pérez, and Pérez-JIménez (Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism Education, 27, 100267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhlste.2020.100267 , 2020) provide insights into the various facets of gamification as a tool for teaching and learning. However, these works hardly address the emerging issues in adoption, implementation, and barriers that have been dealt with in this chapter. Against this backdrop, the first section of this paper ventures into the various implications of gamification in the field of tourism teaching and learning. Next, taking cues from significant land marking studies, this work lists the factors responsible for making gamification an effective teaching and learning tool in tourism. Lastly, attempts have been made to underline the elements that may pose challenges in the path of the rise of gamification as a teaching and learning tool. This work can be primarily classified as a conceptual paper with a systematically drawn inductive approach. Majority of the paper has been drafted based on the review of critical works derived from the search of keywords such as “gamification” and “tourism” and “teaching and learning” on major search engines such as Scopus, Web of Science, and JSTOR. The authors conclude that gamification as a teaching and learning tool in tourism education is still its necesent stages of implementation, and there are an equal number of challenges that need to be addressed before it (gamification) becomes a mainstream tool in tourism teaching and learning.