Proposal for a gamification strategy applied to remote learning

Abstract

With the rapid and drastic evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of 2019, interventions in the social interaction of the world population were necessary. Despite the distance from socializing, people’s routines needed to remain normal as far as possible, and this includes student learning. Thus, the solution for educational institutions was to migrate activities to the remote teaching format as an emergency. As expected, some obstacles were encountered, and others were accentuated and requiring strategies to help mitigate such problems. Several studies point to demotivation as one of the main elements that affect students in terms of low academic performance and, consequently, culminating in low learning achievement, high failure rates, and dropout rates. The objective of this study is to propose, for Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) activities, a simple gamification strategy aimed at student engagement. An exploratory literature review was carried out to identify potentially key points that could be adopted, which could influence student motivation. Based on this, the primary motivational activators for the gamification strategy were listed in Framework Octalysis. As a way of validating the technique, two not mandatory classes were taught in a remote format containing the same course content (Introductory to the Internet of Things (IoT)), differentiating between the control group (without interventions) and the group with the application of the proposed strategy of gamification. The expected result was the perception of greater engagement in the class with the application of the gamification strategy against the control class, but it was not achieved as expected. The research found that students had low participation and engagement in both traditional and gamified classes, even after intervention. This could be due to factors such as course duration, lack of collaboration, and teacher involvement. Both classes had the same completion and dropout rate (2 completions and 13 dropouts). As future works, the authors suggest interviewing students to understand the causes of demotivation and using Design Thinking, plan to investigate the root causes of low participation and develop actions for the ”Ownership and Possession” motivational activator, apply improvements to larger classes, introduce a student/monitor role, and compare gamification in regular and non-mandatory classes.