APPLICATION OF GAME MECHANICS TO IMPROVE STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
Ben Leong, Luo Yanjie · 2011
The new generation of students poses a challenge to educators. Given their obsessive use of online social networks and video games, they have shorter attention spans and are more easily distracted, making it harder to engage them in class. In this paper, we describe how we experimented with game mechanics to engage students enrolled in CS1101S, an introductory programming methodology course taken by first year undergraduates in the School of Computing. To investigate how well the use of game mechanics can encourage students to work consistently and improve their learning process, we built JFDI Academy, an online learning platform that supplements CS1101S. The platform is used by students to submit their assignments and to discuss their solutions with tutors. As students complete assignments, they are awarded experience points, and "level-up". Students are also motivated to work hard via other game mechanics such as a leaderboard and a storyline that advances as they complete missions. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach by administering surveys to them, once during the middle of the course and once at the end. We found that the average assignment submission times improved from less than a day (15.5) hours before the deadline to more than two days (51.2 hours) before the deadline. The students also claimed that the game system made the course interesting and motivated them to work beyond what is minimally required. This shows that the use of game mechanics can indeed help to engage the new generation of students. However, our survey results also show that game mechanics work best only when the fundamentals of the course, such the lectures and the quality of the teaching staff, are already sound.