What is it about?
Gamification has attracted great interest in the educational domain, but how does it work to improve learning? Through an experimental study, this paper shows that gamification improves learning gains by affecting students' motivation and that contextual factors might chance (increase/decrease) such effect.
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Why is it important?
While there are many empirical studies on gamification applied to computer programming education, those often focus on whether it works or not and do not analyze factors that moderate (increase/decrease) gamification's effect. This work differs by analyzing how gamification affects learning gains (through intrinsic motivation) and moderators of that effect (usage time and previous familiarity with programming).
Perspectives
With this paper, I hope to shed light on the fact that gamification has the potential to improve programming learning and reinforce the need for more structured empirical studies. The results confirm gamification's potential, but also highlight the fact that one size does not fit all, as shown by the moderator analysis. Without such analysis, the research would not be able to distinguish when and to whom gamification worked. Similarly, if only focusing on the learning gains, we would lack understanding of how gamification affected it (via intrinsic motivation).
Luiz Rodrigues
University of São Paulo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Gamification Works, but How and to Whom?, March 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3408877.3432419.
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