Abstract:

A Research Study for the teaching of team cohesion concepts in an undergraduate Sport Psychology Classroom was conducted in a public university undergraduate setting in the Southern United States. Students of the 58 student classroom were teamed up in groups of five, and then asked to prepare for an online game competition over a time period of three class sessions where the students would compete with the other teams in the class. Using an online leaderboard to keep tally of each teams position in a practice competition between the teams, and in the actual competition between the teams two weeks later. This common gamification strategy of a real time leaderboard, helped to engaged students, and also assisted them to be motivated to retain key concepts in the unit of study for the creation and maintenance of a cohesive team. The data collected from the triangulated study was both quantitative [student engagement inventory, and content knowledge exam] and qualitative [semi-structured interviews] in nature.

To describe the online video-game environment, the researcher deployed Computer programming skills to create a javascript based series of Single Web Page Game Applications freely accessible for students to interact with the games both inside and out of the classroom and made available on the world wide web through a site called http://www.birdog.net/ The hope of using the site in and out of the classroom was for students to successfully learn helpful team cohesion concepts in a virtually competitive environment that video game playing naturally produces among today's college students. Concepts such as learning how each participant had an important role to play on the team [one student could only participate in one game in the competition, and needed to provide a different role to the other students on the team when they were competing], and then, being able to identify roles that are a good fit for each member of the team based on their individual personality profiles was a strong point of emphasis in the gamified curriculum. Using Bo Hansen's "Athlete Assessments" as the curriculum for this unit in the undergraduate Sport Psychology Course, the difference between both technical and non-techincal roles on the team were presented, as well as curriculum that helped individual members of the team learn how to identify the individual role on the team that best fit their particular personality type in each particular situation. The video games that were presented to the students in the study were mostly in the format of known computer games such as Astroids, Tetris, Snake, and Pong. There were a couple of news games called Downhill Skiier, and Battle that were also integrated into the competition.

The Author of the study, after using gamification techniques to engage the students in the classroom to identify and establish suitable roles for each member of each team in the classroom competition collected data to evaluate the results of the gamification methods to engage the students in the content of the course material, and in particular, how it better engaged them with the students own interview question responses as the qualitative component of the study. Results showed significant improvement in engagement over the three weeks in the unit on Team Cohesion [ p<.05] and meaningful comments regarding the student experience with the curriculum and with fellow students that can built upon for further research.

Keywords:

Gamification, computer technology, educational software, software design, javascript, functional programming.