The improvement of teaching tools and the increasingly necessary use of innovative techniques to capture the attention of students is essential to improve the results obtained. From the academic point of view, the numerous types of teaching that we can provide in universities imply the use of different motivational techniques, focused in each case on very specific aspects of the different subjects. Thus, the improvement of learning results will be essential for the progress of future professionals, who increasingly have to face a greater technological challenge compared to decades ago. In this sense, gamification has become a novel tool that is increasingly implemented in different degrees of our universities. Properly used, gamification can be of great help in the implementation of concepts that are theoretically more complex for students to grasp, through the use of game and competition dynamics that motivate students and encourage active learning. In this sense, engineering careers can be a great game board for this type of techniques, where their implementation can be carried out both for theoretical and practical concepts.

In the case of this study, gamification tools have begun to be implemented in second, third and fourth year subjects related to the areas of Mining operations and Prospecting and mining research, both at the Polytechnic School of Linares of the University of Jaén, and which train future graduates in Mining Engineering and graduates in Civil Engineering. In general, it has been possible to verify how the use of different teaching methodologies in several subjects of the study subjects have provided verifiable results, having a greater acceptance and retention of knowledge those explained with gamification and rewards tools. All this has laid the foundations for the progressive but increasingly determined implementation of this type of methodologies to a greater extent, with the students themselves being in charge of proposing activities through the development of gamification practices.

Keywords: Gamification, Mining engineering, Mining operations, Prospecting and mining research, Motivation.