Blending Project Centric Approach With Gamification For Teaching Computing Courses

Project centric approach refers to the type of teaching that involves a simultaneous approach towards learning concepts and their implementation in a series of well-defined steps. This teaching methodology is effective in helping students engage with the course learning and yield good results, as opposed to the more simplistic approach whereby the implementation of course concept is assessed in the form of a project at the end of the course. Over the years several different pedagogical approaches have been designed and validated with the help of associated tools in order to increase efficient learning. The recent popularity of smart phones is has also introduced other ways for improvisation in teaching and learning methodologies and many different tools have been implemented that engage the students and teachers using mobile phones and web based applications. The most major of these approaches is known as gamification; a method employed to teach and train people in a game like manner, thus making it entertaining. At the same time, it is pertinent to incorporate other necessary ingredients, namely curriculum and assessments, to come up with a holistic framework. Therefore, this research aims to combine curriculum and assessments with gamification based project centric learning in a single framework. Our research demonstrates how these components can be incorporated in a way that it produces higher student engagement, learning outcomes, and better and complete projects after the completion of a course. Through experimentation, we demonstrated how the combination of gamification and project centric approach leads to the highest level of improvement, thus successfully proving our research hypothesis.