Work-in-Progress: What Motivators Matter When Gamifying a Learning Activity

Although gamification is defined as using game design elements in a non-game context, the main gamification research is focused on the motivational effect of game design elements with less attention to the impact of the “non-game context”. We argue that it is difficult to achieve deeper understanding of how educational gamification may engage or not engage learners by focusing only on the effect of the incorporated game elements, without considering its interaction with motivational drivers engendered from the learning activity. In this paper we report a preliminary study aimed at collecting empirical evidence on how a learner’s responsiveness to gamified learning is impacted by their motivational forces towards the learning activity. Specifically, we experiment with the Expectancy-Value-Cost Scale as an instrument for estimating the potential motivational drivers towards a gamified learning activity.