Abstract:

Higher education in the field on ICT is very demanding due to constant changes in base course content (new programming languages, frameworks, libraries, protocols, paradigms, methodologies, database concepts, etc.). From the Web programming course teacher’s point of view those changes are embedded in the educational context of ICT, often recommended by professional organizations so each teacher follows those guidelines.

On the other side, teaching methods have also been developing but there is no such pressure on the teachers to incorporate them in their education activities.

Some teachers like to be on the front line (called early adopters) of experimenting with teaching methods and learning technologies. Gamification is one of such methods that is highly dependent on technology (LMS or other software) but instructional design of the course has the most important role in successful implementation of the gamification.

In this paper, we present our experience with gamified course we had over three years. We started with preparation of the course with game based elements (e.g. points, badges, leader boards, levels, progress tracking, feedback, and social engagement) in LMS Moodle. In the first year students were divided into experimental and control groups and we compared academic achievements of students from those groups. Next two years the whole course student population used gamified version of the course and we made some small improvements in the course concept in order to give students more information on how they could earn more goodies and transfer them into some of levels of privileges (use of framework, choose week for project presentation, or as ultimate release from a project assignment with maximum points). At the end of each year we made a survey to collect students’ opinion about the course in general, quality of its elements as well as gamification. During each of three years, we actively monitored progress of the students in all activities in order to prevent dropouts and other undesirable characteristics of students. LMS Moodle provide useful plugins that can be used as elements for gamification. Unfortunately, computer could not easily evaluate all student activities and transfer result into a gamified element as is in case of test with multiple-choice questions. Some of them need teacher to make qualitative analysis and that is very time consuming.

Finally, we analysed and compared collected data from all three years, and use them to give answer to the question whether it was worth the whole effort to prepare and implement gamification for the course.

Keywords:

Gamification, Web programming course, LMS Moodle.