Exploring the Impact of Non-conventional Gamification Elements on Student Motivation and Engagement

This Full Paper in the Research-to-Practice track builds on research in gamification of instruction. A primary objective of gamifying learning is to encourage and sustain students' engagement in activities by making them more gamelike. However, it is still unclear what structures borrowed from games could afford such a “game-like” experience and in what contexts. Embedding classmates' duels in learning settings seems a promising gamification strategy for exploration due to its potential of increasing motivation and engagement through a “game-like” experience. Similar effects are expected from using virtual currency, another design element popular in video games. Accordingly, the goal of this study is to empirically investigate whether the incorporation of dueling leads to increased interest in out-of-class practicing. In addition, we were interested in investigating to what an extent adding virtual currency can boost students' interest in dueling. An introductory class in Python programming served as the experimental environment. Unlike most studies in which the control group works in a non-gamified condition and the experimental group works in a gamified condition, this experiment uses a different approach. We investigated the impact on learners' engagement of adding duels to an ongoing gamified activity. Engagement indicators were measured and logged throughout the semester while student motivation was examined through surveys. The opportunity to challenge classmates appeared after the first exam (around one-third of the semester) and continued for the remaining two thirds of the class time. Thus, the same students in the new condition served as the experimental group. After the third exam, we added virtual currency. Students were able to earn virtual currency by issuing and responding to duel requests as well as by doing extra practice. This had a noticeable effect on the use of dueling. The empirical results of the study show that overall, for this group of students, adding duels alone had no positive effect on students' engagement with the gamified practicing system. However, evidence from the survey suggests that the studied combination of gamification elements (points, badges, leaderboard, avatars, duels, and virtual currency) did increase student intrinsic motivation.