Innovative new digital technologies arise within the field of education every day. There seems to be a large potential impact in using gamification for improving acceptance and use of new technologies in education. This study aims to gain better and new insights on how to improve the acceptance of new educational technology by applying gamification elements. To this aim, we performed a systematic literature review of 1271 publications, yielding 56 relevant studies. We positioned these studies based on which gamification element(s) and which educational technology acceptance constructs were discussed. Our results show that few studies focus on individual gamification elements and that most studies focus on the same elements and constructs, i.e. Learning Expectancy, Social Influence and Hedonic Motivation are the most discussed constructs related to increasing the acceptance of educational technology when applying gamification, while Points, Badges, Leaderboards and Social Games & Teamwork are the most discussed gamification elements. The impact of gamifying educational technology is mixed -both negative and positive results are being reported -and thus we conclude that the knowledge of how to successfully gamify educational technology is still limited.

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