Engaging Computer Science Students through Gamification in an Online Social Network Based Collaborative Learning Environment

Abstract

voluntary and active as was hoped for. Even though there is a group of actively participating social activities in PeerSpace by posting helpful, useful, and/or insightful posts, and join in discussions, there are also who participate PeerSpace activities mainly because they are required as part of the class assignments. Analysis of data collected from controlled experiments show that there is a direct, positive relationship between the amount of usage of PeerSpace and the benefit gained from this learning community (4). The question for us is How to better engage the in PeerSpace social and learning activities?. This paper describes our approach to this question by introducing game mechanics to promote the students learning by encouraging them to:  participate more in social and learning activities,  develop a stronger sense of community, and  be more willing to help each other on academic and social matters. The approach we took is called gamification. Gamification uses game mechanics, dynamics, and frameworks to promote desired behaviors. Gamification attempts to harness the motivational power of games and apply it to real-world problems (5). It is a new concept but has received very warm welcome by many companies, such as Google, Groupon, Photoshop, Pandora, FourSquare, Zipcar, Steam, etc. These companies used gamification features in their web sites to better engage their loyal customers and to attract new customers to their sites (6)-(5). In this work, we present how gamification may be applied for education purposes to better engage Computer Science to participate in social and learning activities in an online learning environment. A number of gamification features were added to PeerSpace to reward the for performing social activities, help them make new friends by playing turn-based games with different students, and to engage in peer-learning and peer-tutoring activities. Section II presents the background information of PeerSpace and gamification used for education. Section III discusses the various gamification features that have been implemented in PeerSpace. Section IV discusses the preliminary experiments and results obtained in assessing the effects of the gamification features in engaging students. Section V presents the conclusions of this work.