Planning gamification strategies based on user characteristics and DM : a gender-based case study.

Gamification frameworks can aid in gamification planning for education. Most frameworks, however, do not provide ways to select, relate or recommend how to use game elements, to gamify a certain educational task. Instead, most provide a "one-size-fits-all" approach covering all learners, without considering different user characteristics, such as gender. Therefore, this work aims to adopt a data-driven approach to provide a set of game element recommendations, based on user preferences, that could be used by teachers and instructors to gamify learning activities. We analysed data from a novel survey of 733 people (male=569 and female=164), collecting information about user preferences regarding game elements. Our results suggest that the most important rules were based on four (out of nineteen) types of game elements: Objectives, Levels, Progress and Choice. From the perspective of user gender, for the female sample, the most interesting rule associated Objectives with Progress, Badges and Information (confidence=0.97), whilst the most interesting rule for the male sample associated also Objectives with Progress, Renovation and Choice (confidence=0.94). These rules and our descriptive analysis provides recommendations on how game elements can be used in educational scenarios.Comment: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UI28N2UtrOfL06k2mzHIUdPcgQtdfmy9/view?usp=sharin

Analysing Gamification Elements in Educational Environments Using an Existing Gamification Taxonomy

Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design and analysis of gamified strategies. This paper analysed the game elements employed in gamified learning environments through a previously proposed and evaluated taxonomy while detailing and expanding this taxonomy. In the current paper, we describe our taxonomy in-depth as well as expand it. Our new structured results demonstrate an extension of the proposed taxonomy which results from this process, is divided into five dimensions, related to the learner and the learning environment. Our main contribution is the detailed taxonomy that can be used to design and evaluate gamification design in learning environments

Does gender stereotype threat in gamified educational environments cause anxiety? An experimental study

Gamification has been used by many researchers and practitioners in online education to increase students' motivation and engagement. However, studies showed that gamification elements also caused negative effects on learning. Moreover, recent investigations reported stereotype threat by gender had impacted students performance, in particular, the use of a male-dominant leaderboard affected women math performance. In this sense, we attained to conduct a hypothetical study to investigate whether gender stereotype threat in online gamified educational scenarios influences anxiety and performance. We conducted a three-stage survey where participants were asked indirectly about their anxiety, then they were redirected to a hypothetical online gamified system to solve a logic quiz. Afterward, their anxiety was assessed one more time in order to find out how much it had changed. We found evidence indicating the male-stereotyped environment affected participants’ anxiety

Data-Driven Analysis of Engagement in Gamified Learning Environments: A Methodology for Real-Time Measurement of MOOCs

Welfare and economic development is directly dependent on the availability of highly skilled and educated individuals in society. In the UK, higher education is accessed by a large percentage of high school graduates (50% in 2017). Still, in Brazil, a limited number of pupils leaving high schools continue their education (up to 20%). Initial pioneering efforts of universities and companies to support pupils from underprivileged backgrounds, to be able to succeed in being accepted by universities include personalised learning solutions. However, initial findings show that typical distance learning problems occur with the pupil population: isolation, demotivation, and lack of engagement. Thus, researchers and companies proposed gamification. However, gamification design is traditionally exclusively based on theory-driven approaches and usually ignore the data itself. This paper takes a different approach, presenting a large-scale study that analysed, statistically and via machine learning (deep and shallow), the first batch of students trained with a Brazilian gamified intelligent learning software (called CamaleOn), to establish, via a grassroots method based on learning analytics, how gamification elements impact on student engagement. The exercise results in a novel proposal for real-time measurement on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), potentially leading to iterative improvements of student support. It also specifically analyses the engagement patterns of an underserved community

A Taxonomy of Game Elements for Gamification in Educational Contexts: Proposal and Evaluation

Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design of gamified strategies. This paper aims to create a taxonomy for the game elements, based on gamification experts' opinions. After a brief review from existing work, we extract first the game elements from the current state of the art, and then evaluate them via a survey with 19 gamification and education experts. The resulting taxonomy taxonomy included the description of 21 game elements and their quantitative and qualitative evaluation by the experts. Overall, the proposed taxonomy was in general well accepted by most of the experts. They also suggested expanding it with the inclusion of Narrative and Storytelling game elements. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is proposing a new, confirmed taxonomy to standardise the terminology used to define the game elements as a mean to design and deploy gamification strategies in the educational domain

An ontology-driven software product line architecture for developing gamified intelligent tutoring systems

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) are effective to provide instruction for students in several situations. Many works have been using gamification by adding game elements to learning contexts aiming to engage students and to drive desired learning behaviours. However, the design of gamified ITS should deal with a huge variability. Software product lines (SPLs) promise to offer rapid product development and more affordable development costs to build software from the same family. A key factor to successfully implement a product-line approach is to structure commonalities and variabilities into a product line architecture (PLA). In this paper, we propose a PLA for developing gamified ITSs that uses an ontology-driven feature modelling strategy. We illustrate how our architecture could be applied to instantiate a product on the basic math domain. We also discuss a set of implications of using it as well as how it could support the evolution/changing of gamified ITSs