Abstract:

This poster presents an innovative pedagogical approach to teaching a Gamification in Business course at the undergraduate level, in which the entire course is structured as a collaborative card-based game. The course is delivered in English to approximately 40 second-year Business Management students at a Polish university, including Polish, Ukrainian, and Erasmus exchange students. It comprises 30 contact hours in biweekly 3-hour sessions combining lectures and exercises.

The central innovation lies in its meta-pedagogical design: students learn about gamification by experiencing it firsthand. Rather than following a traditional format, the course unfolds as a semester-long game in which student teams progress through challenges aligned with the syllabus. At the outset, students voted unanimously to adopt the game-based format, self-organised into teams, and set up shared digital project boards to manage collaboration and document their progress.

The game is set in a narrative scenario: teams act as consultants tasked with designing a gamification system for a selected department of Apathic Corp, a fictional organisation suffering from low employee motivation and poor customer engagement. The game employs physical card-based mechanics combined with a board that visualises team progression through thematic stages mirroring the course curriculum: core gamification concepts, psychological foundations, real-world successes and failures, gamification techniques, system analysis, and system design. Cards serve multiple functions: theory cards unlock psychological frameworks that teams must master and teach to peers using a Jigsaw cooperative learning structure, challenge cards introduce design problems and constraints, and resource cards provide tools and templates for building solutions. This layered mechanic ensures that theoretical knowledge is actively constructed and immediately applied to the ongoing design task. The final deliverable is a comprehensive, evidence-based gamification system proposal for the chosen department of Apathic Corp.

Crucially, students are aware that the game is a pilot edition and are invited to critically evaluate it as they play. Each printed card includes a dedicated feedback field where students can annotate observations, rate the card's usefulness, and suggest improvements. This dual role of player and play-tester fosters critical thinking about game design while generating valuable formative data for iterating on the game itself.

A mixed-methods evaluation framework accompanies the course. Pre- and post-course surveys will measure changes in student motivation, engagement, and self-reported understanding of gamification principles. Team project outcomes will be assessed against predefined learning objectives encompassing knowledge, practical skills, and social competences. Qualitative data will be gathered through reflective questionnaires and card-level feedback annotations capturing student perceptions of both the content and the game format. As the course concludes shortly before the conference, preliminary results will be available for discussion at the poster session.

This work contributes to game-based learning in higher education by demonstrating how gamification can serve as both the subject and the method of instruction, creating an immersive learning experience that bridges theory and practice in a multicultural classroom.

Keywords:

Gamification, game-based learning, card-based game, Jigsaw method, cooperative learning, meta-pedagogical design, undergraduate education, business education, pilot study, multicultural classroom.