Abstract:

Creating effective environments to engage learners is a common objective of teachers. Accomplishing this goal involves motivating learners to interact with content materials which can be challenging in general. This is exacerbated by increasing class sizes and ubiquity of distracting sophisticated mobile devices.

The recent interruption of in-person classroom learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic compounded the situation. With no explicit training or preparation, classroom teachers and university educators suddenly found themselves fulfilling teaching responsibilities in an entirely foreign medium while without access to first-person feedback from the learners.

The challenge of learner engagement in remote classes has been well documented. Of particular note is the frustration of learners who watch recordings of class sessions, yet are unable to identify the key issues discussed. As such, we were inspired to search for a solution to enhance engagement while assisting learners to recognize important key concepts from lessons.

Gamification has been shown effective as an approach in addressing learner interaction and engagement issues in classrooms. This includes the recent gamification solutions during the COVID-19 lockdown, targeting issues encountered from remote learning. Inspired by these impactful results, we searched for a gamified approach to address engagement and note taking in remote class settings.

Many of the existing gamification efforts are creative and yet ad hoc adaptations of popular gaming elements, e.g., TV game shows, or attempts to address specific topic areas, e.g. operating systems. While demonstrated to be effective, there lacks a holistic platform for new solutions to be designed based directly on these results.

Instead of direct adaptation, an alternative approach would consider elements that are common to all gamification learning systems: the learners and community, the teacher, the game, and the gamification goals. One can then analyze existing results according to their solutions to issues related to these elements, derive a design platform governing system specification, and then perform the actual implementation. Such a systematic approach would allow analytical comparison and methodical adaptation or derivation of related new solutions.

Based on this approach, a system specification was derived, and the Lecture Board Game was developed to be played during lectures. At appropriate intervals, a teacher would post fact recalling or content summarizing challenges where students would record their answers as notes while engaging in small group competitions. Being remote, anxiety from competition was curtailed with anonymous avatars and gameplay mechanics that are independent from physical capabilities. Distraction was minimized by limiting the trivial gameplay moves with answers to the posted questions. At the end of each challenge, correct answers served as sample lecture notes for student references. Results from playtests, though with areas of potential improvements, indicated initial success.

The next section of the paper analyzes related work and defines the goals of our gamification effort. A system specification is then derived, followed by details of our implementation and playtests results. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential refinements and the next step.

Keywords:

Gamification, Lectures, Board Games, Note Taking, Engagement.