PhD Thesis Online

My PhD thesis

Using Gamification to Improve Participation in Social Learning Environments

is available online at ResearchGate and Academia.edu










Abstract:

This thesis addresses the problem of students’ disengagement by investigating if gami- fication can make a contribution to solve the problem and how. Gamification is a new trend that aims to improve people’s engagement, motivation, loyalty or participation. It started as a marketing tool but widespread to several different areas where peoples’ involvement is a key issue. Gamification is inspired by the success and popularity of video games and looks for ways to use game’s features in non-game contexts, as a way to drive game-like engagement. 

While schools are struggling with the lack of motivation and engagement of many of their students, technology is part of most children and teenagers lives in today’s societies. They are heavy users of several media that, through mobile and wireless technologies, are almost permanently present and available everywhere. Schools have to compete for students’ attention and time and find the ways to use technology in their favour and fill the gap between school and the outside technological world. Also, most of today’s students are video game’s consumers. Games have been used in educational and training scenarios for a long time. But building full-fledged games with learning purposes has high implementations costs. 

Gamification is a way to take advantage of the games’ power with lesser costs and ef- fort. An initial research on gamification revealed that education was precisely one of the main fields that could benefit from this new trend. As a main goal, the thesis proposes a framework to help teachers using technology-enhanced learning environments powered with gamification. It is expected that these environments can improve students’ behaviors towards school and learning. The framework also defines what should be the high level architecture of gamified digital systems. This architecture is platform independent and is proposed as a way to help developers in the implementation of gamified systems, by highlighting what their main building blocks should be. Based on a broad literature review, this thesis presents the most used game elements and game techniques found in already existing gamified applications. A set of those elements and techniques were included in the proposed framework. 

Further research was needed to investigate the impact of gamification and how to mea- sure that impact. The tendency to experience flow was chosen as a measure of engage- ment. Flow is a psychological state felt by people when they act with total involvement. People can experience flow when performing an engaging task. A high tendency to experience flow means high intrinsic motivation and a better engagement. The thesis addressed these issues by conducting an empirical study with primary education young students. The study investigated if a social learning environment with gamification tools would be more able to increase students disposition to experience flow than a non-gamified version. In this experiment, some gamified learning activities were set following the guidelines of the proposed framework. 

The results from the empirical study showed that there was an improvement in the students’ disposition for flow when using the gamified version of the social learning en- vironment. The students’ average score had an increase and the statistical test taken allowed to conclude that the average score increase has statistical significance.

Leaderboards: A Social Game Element (Part II)

 http://csi.softwareadvice.com/gamification-preventing-support-agent-burnout-1022112/

Another paper presented at Gamification 2013 shows how to use a leaderboard to improve behaviour change (see this previous post Leaderboards: A Social Game Element). 

The paper, Time's Up: Studying Leaderboards For Engaging Punctual Behaviour (João Costa, Rina Renee Wehbe, James Robb and Lennart E. Nacke) studies the use of a leaderboard for improving punctuality of participants to regular work meetings. Again, the authors conclude that leaderboards are more effective if they are used as a social game mechanic. They conducted an experiment where data were collected from 28 participants, members of the Laboratory of Games And Media Entertainment Research (GAMERLab). The arrival times to meetings of laboratory members were recorded for nine meetings.

Concerning the different kinds of leaderboads, discussed in the previous post, the leaderboard in this experiment was a multiplayer leaderboard, ranking high performance peers.

These are the authors' main conclusions:

"Our study showed that leaderboards do give way to positive social behaviours like social comparisons, which were of great importance to the majority of the participants, in particular to assess their improvement or standing in comparison to those who were of their interest, as opposed to assessing themselves in the global panorama of punctuality.
In conclusion, our study shows the possibility of gamifying meetings to improve the punctuality of the work group. This can help individuals project a better self-image, keep on task and increase their productivity."

The paper is available in the conference proceedings.

Leaderboards: A Social Game Element

Leaderboards are one of the most popular game elements that are used in gamified systems, along with points, badges or achievements (see How Gamification Can Drive Behavioural Change). Essentially they appeal to extrinsic motivation and are a means to give feedback to the players. Badges are probably at the top of this list. They are used in many systems and recently, Moodle's latest version also includes badges (see All About Badges and Open Badges). There is a lot of information, blog posts and academic papers about how to use badges and there are even MOOCs on badges.

On the other hand, leaderboards are less mentioned although they are also common in gamified systems. Applications like Leaderboarded can be used to easily create leaderbords. Gamified systems in the education sector do not use leaderboards so often, probably because they appeal to competition.

A recent paper presented at Gamification 2013 (see this other post), Reimagining Leaderboards: Towards Gamifying Competency Models through Social Game Mechanics, discusses how to use leaderboards as social game mechanic. Leaderboards are game elements that can be collaborative and qualitative and not only quantitative and competetive. In this way, leaderboards are a social game element. The paper proposes a framework that uses a prosocial leaderboards. Prosocial interactions occur when individuals act in the interest of others.

The paper defines social gamification as "... an emerging subgenre of gamified systems that use game mechanics and elements from social games, which feature interactions designed for close peers and direct ties to social networking systems , in which they are often embedded". It then cites one of our previous works, A Social Gamification Framework for a K-6 Learning Platform, mentioning that in our proposal, game elements were taken directly from social games. We also have our own definition of social gamification: the use of design elements from social games in non-game contexts to drive game like engagement in order to promote desired behaviours. 

In the Gamification 2013 paper, leaderbords are defined as "... a performance comparison game element". They can be single or mutiplayer. Single player leaderboards compare the players latest score to the previous scores. Multiplayer leaderboards can display rankings of near performing peers (a usual approach in social games) or rankings of high performing peers (where players with lower score may not be present, leading to demotivation, which is a drawback for this kind of leaderboards).

An example of a multiplayer leaderboard of high performing peers is the Gamification Gurus Leaderboard built with Leaderboarded:

The prosocial learderboard approach uses elements like status, scarcity, karma points and group leaderboard. These elements are used to encourage prosocial behaviours. In this prosocial approach all users must benefit and social interaction is achieved through altruism, sharing, reciprocity and gratitude. The concept is being applied in a competency-based assessment system for medical education.

Leaderboards, that at first are nothing more than an extrinsic motivator can, in this approach, be used to promote social interaction and to foster intrinsic motivation. It appeals to relatedeness and to a feeling of doing something not just for our own sake but for the sake of our group or community.

References

Seaborn, K., Pennefather, P., Fels, D. (2013). Reimagining Leaderboards: Towards Gamifying Competency Models through Social Game Mechanics, Proceedings of Gamification 2013, Stratford, Ontario, Canada, 107-110

Simões, J., Redondo, R. D., Vilas, A. F. (2013). A Social Gamification Framework for a K-6 Learning Platform. Advanced Human-Computer Interaction 29, 2, 345–353.

Paper in "Computers in Human Behavior"

Artigo publicado na revista Computers in Human Behavior em co-autoria com Rebeca Redondo e Ana Vilas da Universidade de Vigo:

Article title: A Social Gamification Framework for a K-6 Learning Platform
Reference: CHB1881
Journal title: Computers in Human Behavior
Corresponding author: Dr. Rebeca Díaz Redondo
First author: Dr. Jorge Simoes
Online publication complete: 5-JUL-2012
DOI information: 10.1016/j.chb.2012.06.007

Impact Factor: 2,293

Disponível em http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.06.007

Abstract:

As video games, particularly, social games are growing in popularity and number of users, there has been an increasing interest in its potential as innovative teaching tools. Gamification is a new concept intending to use elements from video games in non-game applications. Education is an area with high potential for application of this concept since it seeks to promote people’s motivation and engagement. The research in progress will try to find how to apply social gamification in education, testing and validating the results of that application. To fulfil these objectives, this paper presents the guidelines and main features of a social gamification framework to be applied in an existent K-6 social learning environment.

Versão estendida do artigo publicado na Tech Education 2012 (ver este post).

Gamification / Social Gamification: a Definition

Apresentação partilhada no Slideshare (conteúdos ainda em desenvolvimento):

Gamification / Social Gamification of Education

View more PowerPoint from jmapsimoes