Gamification of the Games Course

O'Donovan, Siobhan (2012) Gamification of the Games Course, CS12-04-00, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town.

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Abstract

Our objectives are to determine if gamification could improve the motivation of students to do coursework and how this could be implemented for one of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) courses. Our subjects were 90 anonymous university and college students from Cape Town who took part as participants in two surveys. Our main outcome measures were the average type of gamer among the subjects and the level of motivation they would possess for each example of education-appropriate gamification. We found that the average type of gamer is a Mastermind-Conqueror-Seeker – a player who takes pleasure from strategizing and solving puzzles, beating the competition and discovering interesting things. These gamers also do not like fear, pressure or working with people. The quizzes and lone challenges received 57.8% and 53.3% of the participants’ votes, respectively. The levels of motivation for badges, progress bars, storyline, visual and leaderboards averaged to between “very motivated” and “moderately motivated” except the rewarding of stars and the social forum. We have determined which gamification techniques have the potential for being effective in an educational setting. A story-line, reward system and a potential technical implementation have been devised and proposed.

Item Type:	Technical report
Uncontrolled Keywords:	gamification, games design, games course, Vula
Subjects:	Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Computing education
Date Deposited:	09 Mar 2012
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:33
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/771

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