Two Years of Gamification of the Course - Lessons Learned

Gamification has been applied in different levels of education (elementary, high school, university) for roughly last 5 years. Many researches deal with how to improve education process by usage of game mechanics and other game based elements in their teaching activities. One of the important part of research in the area of education is what part of the course is involved in the research. If it covers some smaller part of the course, for example, one topic that correspondents to a chapter from common course literature and the gamification is limited to few weeks then we could not get the full picture of its real good and bad sides. Some students got excited when teacher use new methods and lost interest after few weeks. However, the course lasts much longer then few weeks and it is much harder to apply gamification for the full course content and to keep students’ interest during the whole education process like semester with 15 weeks. The paper presents our experience with gamified course in two consecutive academic years. We gamified whole course content and learning activities. First year we had half students in gamified version of the course as an experimental group and the other half of students as a control group. The experimental group based on their groupings had all gamified experiences that standard Moodle distribution and chosen plugins provide. The control group was not formally and fully included in all aspects of gamified version of the course but the teachers manually record all their earnings (badges, experience points etc.) even the students were not aware of it. We made some comparisons based on those groups and their achievements, usage of the Moodle etc. We analysed the students’ survey they fill at the end of the course, also our remarks we made during the course. Those were inputs to smaller adjustments for next year (for example we provided more information about the best award). In the second year, the whole course student population was using gamified version of the course. Again, we analysed the students’ survey they fill at the end of the course. We compared those two years in many elements. Some of results were expected but some were not. Finally, we compare our experience with other researches in the area of gamification