Gamification in Computer Science Education: An Empirical Study of a Meme Contest

Contests have long been used in computer science education to address themes such as artificial intelligence, video games, cybersecurity, computer programing, or robotics. However, the organization of these contests usually require a lot of resources and are very focused on a specific topic. Furthermore, there are a wide variety of gamification techniques that can complement traditional teaching activities such as points, badges, leaderboards and rewards. Prior research suggests that computer science students especially welcome these techniques, which represents a good opportunity for computer science educators. This paper presents a novel gamified learning activity that serves students to review the concepts they have learned throughout a computer science course. The activity has a contest format and makes use of multiple gamification techniques. The designed contest is performed face-to-face and uses points, leaderboards, and awards as gamification techniques. Specifically, the contest employs the dot-voting technique to collect students' votes and uses stickers and 3D-printed trophies as awards. The trophies were designed through the Tinkercad tool and printed by using the Ultimaker S3 3D printer. Moreover, an essential element of the contest that enhances its ludic aspect is that it is based on the usage of memes, which are audiovisual elements that represent in a funny way the ideas, thoughts or feelings of some people about a certain topic. The contest can be easily replicated and can address concepts related to any computer science course. The empirical validation of the contest was performed during two academic years with 72 computer science students of a database administration course. The obtained results, gathered through a survey, indicate that the perception of the participants about the contest was very positive. The students indicated that the activity helped them to reinforce their knowledge of the course and that it was extremely fun and motivating. Indeed, some students defined the learning experience as unforgettable.