Thinking Inside the Box: How to Tailor Gamified Educational Systems Based on Learning Activities Types

Abstract

Selecting gamification elements suitable for specific players (personalization) has been sought to improve the impacts of Gamified Educational Systems (GES). However, the lack of context might be a factor on the inconsistent results of those approaches. To address this lack, we introduce a method for personalizing GES based on learning activities types. The assumption is that selecting gamification elements for specific types of learning activities has the potential to improve GES impact on users by considering the context of each activity and, thus, contributing to their learning process. We describe how to apply our approach, how it differs from user-based methods, as well as discuss three cases of application and challenges yet to be tackled.

Gamification suffers from the novelty effect but benefits from the familiarization effect: Findings from a longitudinal study

“…Additionally, we only deployed a single gamification design throughout the data collection period. In contrast, research suggests that one's experience with gamification might change depending on the task Liu et al (2017) and that different designs should be adopted, depending on the learning activity Rodrigues et al (2019); Hallifax et al (2019). Therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility that we observed an effect due to the combination of the gamification design and the task type (i.e., programming assignments).…”

“…Therefore, we can summarize that our study context differs from those of prior research in terms of domain, learning task, and major. Note that acknowledging such differences is important because research suggests that one's experience with gamification might change, depending on the task Liu et al (2017); and that different designs should be adopted depending on the learning activity Rodrigues et al (2019); Hallifax et al (2019). Consequently, the difference in contexts might have affected our findings when compared to similar studies.…”

Are They Learning or Playing? Moderator Conditions of Gamification’s Success in Programming Classrooms

“…However, empirical analyses of the role of contextual aspects are rare, although recent research highlights their importance and lack of studies in this regard [31,41,43,50,77]. For instance, research has explored majorâĂŹs moderator efect [44,64], which its within the external context, but found no signiicant efects.…”

GamiCSM

“…Due to its influence on users' motivation, gamification (as the use of game elements outside of games [6]) has been widely used in educational environments [7,53]. However, to achieve such positive effects, gamification needs to follow good design practices, focusing on a broad range of characteristics of users and their context [27,39,49]. As stated by Seaborn and Fels [43], gamification is context-dependent, which means it is essential to understand the environment and its users before implementing it.…”