Analysing gamification elements in educational environments using an existing Gamification taxonomy

Armando M. Toda,Isabela Gasparini,Seiji Isotani,Ana C. T. Klock,Ig Bittencourt,Alexandra I. Cristea,Paula T. Palomino,Wilk Oliveira,Lei Shi,Luiz Rodrigues

doi:10.1186/s40561-019-0106-1

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Gamification has been extensively used in educational environments and instructional practices (Dichev and Dicheva 2017) to enhance students’ engagement and motivation through the employment of game design elements outside of a fully-fledged game (Barata et al 2015; Deterding et al 2011; Kapp 2012; Nand et al 2019)
We focus on expanding the descriptions of the gamification elements that were presented, and choose some existing gamified educational environments, based on their popularity and presence in research papers, to analyse these elements have been applied and interpret why, since this can be used to support designers to select the most appropriate game elements in their environments
This section describes the definitions of the taxonomy, some synonyms, and examples of how each element can be applied in an educational environment and some advantages and disadvantages in its use

Summary

Introduction

Gamification has been extensively used in educational environments and instructional practices (Dichev and Dicheva 2017) to enhance students’ engagement and motivation through the employment of game design elements outside of a fully-fledged game (Barata et al 2015; Deterding et al 2011; Kapp 2012; Nand et al 2019). There are no naming conventions and the process to support which elements belong to gamification are other issues found in gamification literature in general, as they use different synonyms for the same game element, e.g., badges and trophies (Koivisto and Hamari 2019; Pedreira et al 2015; Seaborn and Fels 2014) All these hinder the adoption of gamification by teachers and instructors, since recent studies demonstrated that these specialists have interest in using gamification but does not have time or resources to make sense of differences and similarities in deciding which game elements to use, as well as which game elements are more (2019) 6:16 appropriate in educational context (Martí-Parreño et al 2016; Sánchez-Mena and Martí-Parreño 2016; Toda et al 2018a). By answering this research question, our contributions include: improving the existing taxonomy, by providing details on the selection, description, and use of these elements to evaluate and analyse existing systems; proposing recommendations on how to hierarchically organise these elements semantically, to be used by designers, teachers, and other education stakeholders

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Discussion

Conclusion