OneUp: Supporting Practical and Experimental Gamification of Learning

Abstract

Gamification of education is still evolving. It lacks systematic studies assessing its effect in different learning contexts. Creating gamified courses is still difficult, since there is a lack of sufficient understanding of how to gamify learning and appropriate software support is missing. As a response to these challenges, we developed OneUp ̶ a customizable platform aimed at facilitating the process of gamifying academic courses and enabling contextual studies on educational gamification. In this paper we rationalize our approach to building OneUp and present the underlying principles and motivations guiding its design. We also describe the platform functionality which includes support for integrating game design elements in learning activities, creating dynamic problems, and visualizing student performance and progress. At the end, we present a usability study of the platform and the assessment results from an end user perspective.

OneUp

“…Gamification, the use of game design elements in non-game contexts [3], has attracted the interest of educators with its promises to foster motivation and behavioral changes in learning contexts, but there is a lack of appropriate tools to support instructors in gamifying their courses [4]. To bridge this gap we developed the OneUp Learning platform [5], which is aimed at facilitating the process of gamifying academic courses and enabling tailoring of the gamification features to meet the vision of the course instructor. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first highly configurable platform for gamifying courses.…”

To reward and beyond: Analyzing the effect of reward-based strategies in a MOOC

“…When using reward strategies, practitioners are responsible of (i) gamifying the learning design and aligning the pedagogical goals with the gamification intentions (e.g., create the reward-condition rules); (ii) implementing the gamification design in the platform (e.g., learn how to use the gamification platform, make changes in the gamification design according to the platforms capabilities); and (iii) managing the evolution of gamification during course runtime (e.g., watch over the effect of rewards on student behavior). All these gamificationrelated activities imply an extra time and effort (Dicheva et al, 2018) added to the existing work employed by practitioners to produce a MOOC. Such extra time and effort may hinder the use and adoption of these gamification strategies.…”

Gamifying learning for learners

“…In Fall 2017 we started a longitudinal study aimed at exploring certain relations between various motivational drivers and gamification. The study used the OneUp course gamification platform (Dicheva, Irwin, & Dichev, 2018) for gamifying out-of-class student practicing in a Data Structures class. For the control group, the gamification features were turned off and OneUp was used only for practicing.…”