Achievement Unlocked: Investigating Which Gamification Elements Motivate Students

Abstract

Gamification has been used in many different ways to motivate individuals to wholly participate in some activity. One such venue has been in the gamification of learning to promote student interest. In this paper, we describe our efforts to investigate which aspects of gamification students find the most motivating. We present our gamification platform, GamerCard, which was used for four semesters in an upper-level game design course at our institution. We found that some gamification elements that are often thought to be motivating for participants had little to no effect on our course, while elements that specifically targeted making the student's standing in the course more transparent were the most effective.

Gamification in Computer Science Courses: A Literature Review

“…Throughout understanding computer science, the gamification elements can boost engagement and motivation between some of the learners and the learner who has liked doing their job. Gamification education is also a way to help learners, and teachers understand how to make ones educational success extra efficient as well as good looking (Lister, 2015;Frącz, 2015;Borna and Rad, 2018;Buckley and Doyle, 2016;Zahedi, 2019;Wenzl and Miladinovic, 2018;Morreale et al, 2019;Elshiekh and Butgerit, 2017;Iancu, 2019;Pinter, 2020;Ibanez et al, 2014;Sprint and Cook, 2015;Butler and Ahmed, 2016;Hakulinen and Auvinen, 2014;Sherriff, 2016;Azmi et al, 2016;Čisar et al, 2020;Begosso et al, 2018;Permana et al, 2018;Dolgopolovas et al, 2014;Alsawaier, 2018;Iosup and Epema, 2014). Not all learners become motivated through or benefit from the gamification elements (Haaranen et al, 2014;Lister, 2015).…”

“…A series of discussion topics are produced in which an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) programming competition form of the challenge becomes presented for encouraging the learners (Smiderle et al, 2019). Every person, or team of learners, can add the workable answer as responses to the main subject; learners involved in the issue have to see other learners' ideas, have input and comments, and ideas for other ideas (Sherriff, 2016). It offers learners an excellent means of communicating, cooperating, developing their rate, and, most significantly, gain from one another programming abilities (Rahman, 2018).…”

“…ARCS motivation method, as it is the best method to increase educational process efficacy, encourages externally and internally motivation (Pinter, 2020). Keller created it in 1987 for computer science courses to identify several motivational approaches that would be applied throughout learning (Sherriff, 2016;Čisar et al, 2020;Sprint and Cook, 2015;Lister, 2015) to provide and promote the encouragement of learners can be found through gamification elements such as:…”

Impact of Gamification on Student Motivation and Success - Insights Gained from Freshman and Junior Level Technical Courses

“…Gamification in engineering and education is becoming a widely researched topic and the implementation in higher education is increasing [4][5]. Game-based learning and gamification has been shown in majority to receive positive feedback from the participants when incorporated into higher education and more specifically, engineering courses [4,[6][7].…”

“…The findings from Lake Superior State University [9] concluded that the most positive effect of adding gamification to their courses was the students' ability to have immediate feedback from automated online assessments, but there was confusion over what was considered a game feature versus a course assessment. While the University of Virginia [7] and Polytechnic Institute of Portugal [8] integrated gamification as a new form of course grading where experiences and exercises allowed students to "see what they can learn as opposed to worrying about point deductions" [7]. These studies concluded that students appreciate the new mindset of grading and assessment and are more motivated to learn when gamification is used within the grading aspect of the course [7][8].…”