“Wow” Experience with Immersive Reality: Gamification in the Tec Virtual Campus

Crisis means opportunity, and during the Covid-19 self-isolation contingency, many universities experienced the engagement problem in higher education. Suddenly, teachers had the best opportunity in the world to reinvent themselves and use creativity to redesign their classes so that, despite being remote, they were motivating and high-quality in academic content. Many professors gamified their classes, employing virtual and augmented reality platforms to engage students in class topics and make content easier to assimilate. Gamification motivates a desire to win and allows students to repeat the experience as many times as necessary until their learning is meaningful. This research aimed to share the lessons of an academic activity designed with gamification and using an immersive reality platform called “Tec Virtual Campus.” [1] To achieve meaningful learning through the gamification of complex and theoretical class topics was a big challenge. Designing an academic activity in immersive reality is not just for fun; it is a means to acquire knowledge in a fun way, contributing to students' emotional balance with entertaining activities and high-level academic content.