Effects of Gamification on Students' Computational Thinking Skills: A Systematic Bibliometric Literature Review

The rapid advancement of gamification and computational thinking presents new opportunities for students to acquire essential digital skills that support their cognitive development, thereby opening up new horizons in education. Gamification has gained prominence due to its ability to foster high levels of participant engagement in educational activities. Therefore, this paper aims to synthesize knowledge on gamification and computational thinking to improve education for the benefit of students, utilizing both systematic review and bibliometric techniques. For this purpose, 57 documents from the Web of Science and Scopus databases were examined, and the bibliometric analysis process was carried out using the R program. In the systematic analysis process, the platforms on which the studies were conducted, the programming languages selected, the sample level, computational thinking skills, theoretical background, and research results were examined according to certain criteria. In the bibliometric analysis process, findings such as the distribution of studies by year, the frequency of co-occurrence of keywords, and trending subject keywords were obtained. The findings of the study show that gamification has become increasingly widespread in recent years, with the aim of developing computational thinking skills. The widespread use of various tools and platforms in the process of developing computational thinking, one of the basic skills of the 21st century, and the ease of gamification integration have accelerated this process. Gamification-based approaches have been shown to increase student motivation and contribute significantly to the development of computational thinking skills. Additionally, it has been concluded that these methods make the learning process more interactive and effective, thereby supporting critical thinking and problem-solving skills. The study discusses the disadvantages encountered in the gamification integration process and offers various recommendations to researchers and educators.