The impact of opt-in gamification on students’ grades in a software design course

An achievement-driven methodology strives to give students more control of their learning with enough flexibility to engage them in deeper learning.

We observed in the course Advanced Software Design, which uses the achievement-driven methodology, that students fail to get high grades, which may hamper deeper learning. To motivate students to pursue and get higher grades we added gamification elements to the course.

To measure the success of our gamification implementation, students filled out a questionaire rating the enjoyment and motivation produced by the game. We built a statistical regression model where enjoyment and motivation explain 55% of the variation in grades. However, only the relationship between motivation and grade is significant, which implies that notivation drives the overall effect of the model. The results suggest that the more the students were motivated by the game, the higher their grades on the course (and vice versa). This implies that if gamification indeed motivates students, then it makes them go beyond what is expected.

The impact of opt-in gamification on students' grades in a software design course

Kiko Fernandez-Reyes, Dave Clarke, Janina Hornbach
MODELS '18 Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems: Companion Proceedings, 2018