Motivating Learners by Dynamic Score and Personalized Activity Stream

Abstract

Motivation is very important in any kind of human activity. This is especially true in the context of learning. Various educational systems therefore try to incorporate elements, which has motivating effects on their users--learners (students). Increasingly popular in this domain is employing elements of gamification. In our work, we propose specific type of one of the gamification mechanics--score. Our method for score computation works through dynamic regulation of score for particular activities that is based on whole group of students' activity. For motivational purposes we accompany the dynamic score calculation by an activity stream, which visualizes changes in score for particular activities that affects overall score calculation for individual students. Our hypothesis is that this motivates the students to perform activities currently preferred by their teacher evenly. Activity stream is interconnected with several gamification elements--it is primarily the student score, but also other elements like a set of badges, where the activity stream displays information about badges obtained by peers. Proposed gamification elements were integrated into the existing environment of adaptive web-based educational system ALEF used at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava for several courses. We present an experiment on dynamic score, which confirms our hypothesis.