Gamification aims to enhance the educational experience by enabling students to have fun with technology. Although research in the field has previously looked into the effectiveness of gamification, reviews of existing studies show that in the context of education, gamification has been largely applied at the university level, with diverse pedagogical approaches and outcomes. Furthermore, reports often refer to interactions with gamification elements in contexts outside STEM education. To bridge these research gaps, this paper reports on an empirical study involving 199 students from two secondary schools. Students had the opportunity to receive a digital reward (in the form of points, badges, or rankings) for their participation in an online physics lesson. Although no significant differences were found regarding student motivation, results confirm an impact-depending on the gamification element being introduced in the software-on three other important aspects: (i) perceived usability, (ii) student engagement, and (iii) learning performance.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.

No abstract

Gamification has increasingly been utilised to motivate students to use technological tools and applications to learn. Although the existing research seems to recognise the benefits that gamification has in and outside classroom, little has been explored about individual gamification elements. To bridge this gap, we conducted a user-based evaluation of an educational application, Knowma+, with different gamification elements to understand which are more desirable to use from the teacher and student perspectives. Knowma+ is built upon relevant pedagogical concepts such as learning by questioning that fit well with the inclusion of gamification elements to enhance learning experience. Results of eye-tracking data suggest that more visually attractive gamification elements could capture the initial attention of both teacher and student participants. However, there were slight differences between the two groups in self-reported preferences with regard to the perceived usefulness of each gamification element as part of their teaching or learning approaches.

In the current Participatory Design (PD) practice, paper-based approaches are commonly applied. However, the use of software tools can potentially enhance the PD process and outcome, given their flexibility for prototype presentation, data storage, retrieval and analysis. Driven by this assumption, we developed the specific-purpose PD online tool PDotCapturer. To evaluate the effectiveness of PDotCapturer, as compared with a paper-based approach, we conducted a within-subjects study where 33 participants were asked to provide feedback on e-learning prototypes, using either paper or PDotCapturer in one session and vice-versa in another session. The evaluation criteria were quantity and quality of the participants' comments. For qualitative data analysis, we applied the refined coding scheme CAt+. Results show that using PDotCapturer partly led to feedback of higher quality, but the number of comments was higher for the paper-based approach. Our work contributes to the HCI community by augmenting the repertoire of the PD toolbox.

No abstract