Gamification is a means to design systems that motivate people to do things [Wer 12]. It applies to non-game contexts, digital or non-digital, targeting activities that people are not motivated to perform. Gamification must also be meaningful. It should aim to foster the players’ intrinsic motivation and not only act on their extrinsic motivation. Target activities in a gamified system must also have intrinsic value, that is, if the game elements are removed from the system, the remaining contents must still have value. With gamification it is possible to integrate game elements with learning contents and make learning activities more attractive and engaging. Gamification has remarkable
potential in education and training and can create a wide range of opportunities for research and a market for new educational tools and technological platforms.
Schoooools.com, in its current release, can be seen as a gamified system resulting form the initial SLE powered with gamification features. From the proposed architec- ture it has a gamification engine, an analytics engine and a player profile module. An activity manager keeps track of all the players’ actions and according to a set of rules, defined in the gamification engine, the system provides feedback to the players using points and badges. A progress bar let players see how far they they have progressed in achieving all sets of badges in three different categories. Social interactions between users are facilitated through the platform’s social features.
The next step will be to evaluate the gamified platform in real scenarios. In the fu- ture, it is intended to extend the digital context to the real classroom. The teacher will then be the human mediator, acting as an interface between the gamified SLE and the outside, non-digital, world, the classroom. Other system stakeholders, such as par- ents, should also be able to access the gamified system to view reports about their childrens’ behaviour. A further step would be for teachers and parents to be players in the sense that they also need to be motivated and engaged with the system.
The proposed framework was applied to schoooools.com but it is not restricted to social learning environments. Instead, it is a general-purpose gamification framework that can be used in different non-game contexts to build gamified systems. The archi- tecture shows how to build a gamified system and the guide is intended to help the effective use of the system in order to provide meaningful experiences.
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fiGurEs
Figure 1 Architecture for a Gamified Application: Main Components Figure 2 A Three-tier Architectural Model for a Gamified Application Figure 3 Schooools.com: Categories of Achievements
Figure 4 Schooools.com: Badges from “Platform Explorer”
ContaCt dEtails Jorge Simões
Instituto Superior Politécnico Gaya Av. dos Descobrimentos, 333 4400- 103Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal Phone: +351 (0) 223 745 730 E-Mail: [email protected]
Rebeca Redondo
School of Telecommunications Engineering University of Vigo
Campus universitario s/n. 36310 Vigo, Spain Phone: +34 (0)986 813 469
E-Mail: [email protected]
Ana Vilas
School of Telecommunications Engineering University of Vigo
Campus universitario s/n. 36310 Vigo, Spain Phone: +34 (0)986 813 868
E-Mail: [email protected]
Ademar Aguiar
Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n 4200–465 Porto Portugal Phone: +351 (0) 225 081 518
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