Abstract:

The use of engaging strategies has become mandatory to scaffold the teaching-learning process by deploying student-centered strategies to increase innovation and motivation in classes. One learning and motivation strategy used in the last years is gamification. It is based on the inclusion of elements from games to learning environments with the objective of stimulate students’ behaviors, increase their motivation, and foster their participation. In this work, we present a gamification methodology supported by a quantitative study that was applied to 140 students majoring in a software engineering program.

The hipothesis of this work were:
1) Students involved in a class that implements a gamification methodology have greater learning gains than those students that are enrolled in a traditional class, and
2) There exists a given learning modality, under the VARK learning preference model, that is positively impacted when being exposed to a gamification environment.

The methodology was evaluated in a pretest-posttest process with focus and control groups using normalized learning gains. The process was applied to 6 groups of Programming courses for students of the B.S. in Computer Science and Technology. The duration of these courses was 16 weeks (a whole semester).

From a statistical analysis, it was found that students in the focus group had a better performance than students in the control group. This difference is between 3.95% and 15.87%. These findings indicate that the gamification methodology used in the control group helps the students with low performance to improve their learning while maintaining stable the percentage of students with a learning gain greater than the group’s mean.

Also, it was found that read/write preference has a 0.178 correlation coefficient on the normalized learning gain. Given the interaction elements in the gamification methodology implemented, it was expected to find correlations to other learning preference like kinethetic modality. However, this result could be explained because the activities used in the strategy were about solving problems with code, that are closely related to read/write activities.

Other authors observed that there is an effect from intrinsic motivation over learning gains, but it decreased in time given the complexity of the course topics. A decrease in the students’ engagement in the game towards the end of the semester was also observed in the present study. Maybe this was due to the increment in the number of activities and because some badges were not reachable after some dates or events. Future work over the level of motivation through time is needed to explore this element.

This work contributes to the literature on the use of a gamification strategy in programming courses, showing a methodology, a measurement of learning gains and a study about the relationships between learning modalities and gamification and the results validate both hipothesis of the study.

Keywords:

Gamification, Learning strategies, Learning gains, Educational innovation, Higher education.