Abstract:

The gamification techniques and technologies are a consolidated reality in industrial and educational contexts. Using gamification in higher education to improve student engagement has been experimented in the last years. With respect to the current literature, The “pointsification” technique is the easier way to construct experiences apparently similar to gamification instead they are not the right way to intend it, rather, they are a reason to criticize its real effectiveness. The compelling gamification need lot of work, and it is not obvious that everyone have time to construct a narrative or a gamified system to attend at the specific need. Furthermore in a degree course is not so simple, reducing the importance of traditional mandatory assessments using “mark-grade-badge” triade, to have compelled student and learn specific skill without a precise scope. In this paper we analyze the most important elements of student engagement, and we describe a two-years experience made in a Virtual Reality course within a Msc curriculum in Digital Humanities. In this course we construct a compelling educational experience using a tv series theme (namely the 1st season of the Netflix Stranger Things tv-serie and 1st season of the HBO WestWorld tv-serie) as the gamification principle of inclusion and participation to improve the learning of skills and motivation. The gamification slogan was “When the student are not only student, but the Cast of a TV show”. Each course activity - both participation (lectures, seminars, readings, etc. ) and tasks (homeworks, exercises in the lab, team working, individual presentations) was rewarded according to the course and TV-serie schedules, in order to produce each week a dynamic adjustment of the cast, from the main roles to the guest stars. Finally we analysed the reactions of the participants by means of interviews, presence detection and active participation, to get how much this approach affect the motivation of students and it helps them in a better way of learning. Some preliminary promising results will be shown in the paper, even if the evaluation of the learning effectiveness is still an open issue.

Keywords:

Gamification, Learning, Education.