Exploring the Attitudes of Computer Science High School Teachers Towards Gamification: A Work in Progress

This work-in-progress research paper describes the results of research conducted as part of an ongoing project “Enhancing Motivation for Learning Through Gamification” on the attitudes of high school computer science teachers towards gamification. The main goal of the project is to develop a pedagogical-technological gamification framework to help high school teachers design and implement gamification activities. Teachers play a key role in introducing gamification into the classroom, but encouraging them to do so can be as much of a challenge as introducing any other educational innovation. Therefore, it is important to research teacher attitudes and use this knowledge to identify how to encourage greater use of gamification, particularly in schools where it is currently less prevalent compared to universities. The paper describes the research in this direction and focuses on investigating the attitudes of computer science teachers and the use of gamification in their classrooms, as they should be the most competent to introduce digital innovations. An anonymous survey was used as a quantitative research method. The research questions were formulated to find out to what extent teachers are familiar with gamification, whether they use game elements and/or digital tools for gamification in the classroom, and what teachers' attitudes towards gamification are. The last research question related to the comparison of knowledge, use and attitudes between the computer science teachers and the other high school teachers. The main finding was that computer science teachers use gamification to a greater extent compared to other teachers because they want to achieve a higher quality of teaching and believe that they know how to create gamified activities. These results will be helpful for further work as a focus group of computer science teachers will be formed to help design the gamification framework.