A COLLABORATIVE GAMIFICATION DESIGN FRAMEWORK IN AN EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT

This paper presents the CGD Framework, a Collaborative Gamification Design Framework in an Educational Context that recognises the roles of both teachers and game developers, providing a collaboration mechanism to support the development of an educational game. Gamification as a discipline is associated with improvement of educational outcomes. Research has demonstrated significant positive effects of adding gaming mechanics such as rewards and leaderboards to the learning experience. Published literature on gamification in education follows two trends; teachers’ motivation and the measuring of effect elements have on students’ engagement and learning outcome. However, there is a limited discussion on the process of computer game design, in particular, the role of the teacher in the design process. In the technical gamification literature, there is a focus on the design procedures and technical issues from a game developer’s perspective. In addition, the design solutions created require a certain level of computer literacy that teachers do not necessarily possess. Although the importance of the teachers’ role in gamification has been acknowledged, it has been limited to setting objectives for the course rather than the actual design of computer games. This paper identifies the need for a collaboration platform that requires the participation of different stakeholders in design and proposes a framework which aims to bridge the current gap between the pedagogic contribution provided by teachers and the technical role of games developers. The paper discusses the process of developing the framework by describing a pilot study used to evaluate the initial framework. The findings from this study identified the need to ensure that teachers were not overwhelmed with computer games technical design details. Based on these findings, the revised version of the CGD framework presented in this paper was developed, focusing on teachers’ perception of the design process. For future work, research will be pursued to validate the revised framework from both a game developer and teacher perspective.