Abstract:

Playing games is fun. When watching people playing games, their motivational involvement is evident. As games always enjoy great popularity, we followed the idea of gamification in the field of knowledge acquisition to motivate learners. The most important issues in a university education are learning and teaching executed by different stakeholders (students, teachers). Playful approaches overcome demotivating factors that could make learning and teaching more difficult or even impossible. For example, theoretical learning content could be more interesting with game-based concepts.

This leads to our following research questions:
1. How does gamification affect learners' (learning) motivation in the BPM cycle?
2. How can the use of gamification support knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer in the field of BPM lifecycle?

To answer these research questions, we developed a non-digital board game as a kind of a rally, based on 15 typical game mechanics. The content of the rally refers to the Business Process Management (BPM) lifecycle, but due to the flexible design, the content can be easily adjusted to or replaced by other learning contents in universities or enterprise trainings. In order to offer flexibility, e.g. in the choice of BPM lifecycle activities, we designed separate rally parts for each activity. Learners can build their own rally track by choosing the activities to play and linking the separate parts.

The prototype was tested and evaluated in the course ‘BPM’ of the bachelor’s program ‘Digital Business’ at the Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt. In order to be able to analyze the effects of gamification on selected aspects, a qualitative case study with 36 students was carried out. It was only announced to the students that a learning activity will take place. However, it was not communicated in what form this would take place. The students were split randomly into two groups: experimental and control group. Both groups attended the BPM course and are in the same semester. The experimental group repeated the course content using the rally. In contrast, the control group repeated the course content without the gamification solution. For both groups a knowledge test (pre and post) as well as further evaluations were carried out. Both groups had the same organizational conditions (time slot, room, team building).

The first results will be discussed in the paper.

Our long-term research aims on identifying and implementing gamification support for activities in the BPM lifecycle. This abstract should be considered as work in progress.

Keywords:

Gamification, Serious Games, Game based learning, board game, BPM lifecycle, Business Process Management, motivation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge transfer.