Discipline: Computer Sciences & Information Management
Subcategory: STEM Science and Mathematics Education
Darina Dicheva - Winston Salem State University
Co-Author(s): Keith Irwin, Christo Dichev, and Xiuping Tao, Elva Jones, Winston Salem State University
Gamification – the use of game design elements in non-game contexts – increasingly attracts the interest of educators due to its promise to foster motivation and behavioral changes in learning contexts. However, a major obstacle that instructors face is the lack of software that could be used to support course gamification. To address this problem we implemented an educational gamification platform – OneUp Learning, which is aimed at facilitating the gamification of academic courses and fostering experimental research on gamifying learning. The platform enables instructors to define course activities and create exercise problems for practicing and self-assessment, as well as tests or quizzes for testing particular skills. Moreover, it enables gamifying these practice activities. It is highly configurable and supports tailoring gamification features to meet the vision of the instructor. In particular, it supports the choice of game elements to be used along with specifying gaming rules for them. OneUp currently offers the following game elements: points (challenge points, skill points, and activity points), progress bar, virtual currency, badges, leaderboards, skill boards, learning dashboard and avatars. The gaming rules define the conditions upon which certain game elements are awarded. In this poster we describe OneUp by presenting its principles, architecture and the results of an initial evaluation. Special attention is given to the gamification configuration, learning analytics and visualization modules of the platform. The configuration module provides support for the instructors to select and configure the game elements they want to incorporate in the organization of a specific course. The visualization module displays the results of the learning analytics which summarize the class and individual learners’ performance, progress and achievements. The aggregated information informs the instructors about all aspects of the student use of the platform thus allowing them to efficiently manage and adjust the instructional process. The platform gives the instructors flexibility and freedom to choose how to apply gamification to their courses which is essential for an appropriate and effective use of this promising intervention for improving student motivation and engagement in the learning process. The poster also presents the results of a case study of using OneUp to gamify a Data Structures course.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): NSF HBCU-UP TIP #1623236
Faculty Advisor: None Listed,