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Abstract: Educators are currently facing the problem of students not fully engaging with the curriculum in educational institutions. Gamification is the application of game elements to real life tasks, which can help change behaviour, improve motivation and enhance engagement. By gamifying the students' learning experience we can improve student engagement, increase their motivation to learn and help further their involvement in their own education. For this reason we are setting out to answer two questions: How much does gamification influence student engagement? , Which game elements are most effective? This paper will look at the use of a specially constructed online learning platform to monitor the engagement of a third level computing course through the students' interaction with the platform. By adding different game elements to various versions of the learning platform, we aim to gauge the success of each element and measure the effect of game elements on student engagement. The platform as a whole will provide students with the ability to set their own learning outcomes and view the progression of their goals. By incorporating game elements into the platform we can give users more frequent and enticing feedback to achieve flow, and use progression loops to help students with onboarding and mastering. By increasing the students' engagement using these game elements, it is hoped that they will feel a greater intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and in turn will spend more time learning. The students' engagement will be measured through their interaction with the platform and feedback from the students' on the felt motivational effect of different game elements. By analysing the data gained from this project, we hope to determine to what effect and degree different game elements engage students.
Keywords: gamification, engagement, motivation, game based learning
1. Introduction
Student engagement can be measured as the time and effort students put into activities benefiting their own education, and activities that are empirically linked to the desired outcomes of their institutions (Kuh, 2009).
As student engagement is shown to be linked statistically to the rate of student graduation in these institutions (Price & Tovar, 2014), it is hoped that an increase in student engagement through gamification will result in increased a higher rate of graduation.
Gamification is "The application of gaming...