Abstract:

Following the pandemic, several online educational tools have been integrated into traditional teaching practices to enhance learning. Among these tools is the Discord platform, which facilitates the creation of study groups for students enrolled in various courses. However, sustaining students' motivation and engagement throughout the semester presents a challenge. Gamification has been recognized as a potential solution to mitigate this issue. Nevertheless, using the achievement systems that, by definition, should not reward the students with points that affect their final grades may pose difficulties due to the absence of substantial rewards. Hence, this paper introduces an innovative educational achievement system tool that leverages the Discord platform to reward completed milestones. For example, this system enabled us to implement ranks corresponding to specific achievement point reward thresholds. Each rank can be associated with a distinct color for the username, thereby accentuating and rewarding students' successful learning endeavors. We focus on ensuring the tool's accessibility to educators across different courses. It is also available online as an open source project. Additionally, this paper outlines the achievements developed for implementation in our software development course. Finally, we discuss the data analysis methods applicable to the accumulated event logs of achieved milestones, highlighting their potential for enhancing educational outcomes.

Keywords:

Gamification, achievement system, education, tool, social platform.