Abstract
Students attend the first sessions of your units and then disappear, some of them forever, and some of them have no clue what is going on or they work for other units’ assessments. When it comes to providing them with formative assessment, it is not always well received as it is perceived as extra work. The purpose of this article is to define a gamification framework based on structural gamification that focuses on that weak part of your cohorts that do not engage as much, and it does that in a great way, as it embeds video game rules and role-playing into the curriculum. This is achieved through implementing game elements to the entire second-year cohort (N = 34) of computer game development students, in the unit ‘Engineering Software Systems’. The goal is to motivate and engage the at-risk students of the cohort with lower activity, attendance and involvement in the unit.
Highlights
Academics in higher education (HE) seem to find challenge in maintaining the high motivational levels of their students during their teaching from the first to the last session
All students were avid gamers, and all were already exposed to gaming terminology as they all either play, watch or stream video games online
Students believe that the most engaging aspect is the role-playing game (RPG) fights aspect (F igure 2) and the less engaging is leader boards (Figure 3), yet, part of the sample has put leader boards as most engaging and RPG fights as less engaging, so that it only confirms that different elements appeal to different students
Summary
Academics in higher education (HE) seem to find challenge in maintaining the high motivational levels of their students during their teaching from the first to the last session. For the purposes of this article, the framework will only address structural gamification and techniques/ elements that were used within a unit for an entire semester (Kapp 2012). Gamification, on its own, comes in two types: Structural and Content gamification (Kapp 2013) The former tackles structure in varied scopes of education: from lesson and unit plans to course structures without altering the learning content. The latter gamifies the content used in the teaching scenario, be it a 5-min think-pair-share activity, micro-lecture or an assessment activity by adding the elements of challenge, story, choice and reward
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