Abstract:

Despite evidence that digital tools have the potential to foster student learning and self-regulation, digital educational practices continue to suffer a lack in the level of personalization and adaptivity. On the other hand, emerging technologies and techniques, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and gamification, are constantly informing educational innovations and interventions, with the aim of optimizing teaching and learning. Nonetheless, critics of gamification argue that it focuses heavily on fundamental reward systems, which exploit game design aspects, leading to a false sense of accomplishment and extrinsic forms and levels of motivation. Furthermore, the static and non-personal underpinnings of gamification are deemed to fail in keeping learners involved and engaged over longer periods of time. This has prompted a growing academic interest in personalized and adaptive gamification or the timely gamified intervention which takes into account ‘individual differences among learners' preferences’ [Monterrat et al., 2014, p. 117]. The proposed research idea described in this short paper aims to constructively align gamification and AI, to address the shortcomings of the former. By enabling and applying the adaptive and personalized affordances of AI to gamification, the study seeks to move beyond static hard-coded gamified interventions and instead enable dynamic user and observable user interactions in the context of digital education.

Keywords:

Gamification, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Education, Personalisation, Optimised Learning.