Limitations of the present study

The major limitation of this study is that motivation is something that cannot be physically observed. Therefore, the results are entirely based on what the students perceived that their motivation was like when playing Seppo and on the teachers’ impressions of the students’ level of motivation during the sessions. It is also very problematic to test for flow experiences, as pointed out by Kapp (2012, p. 71).

Another issue are the contradictory results of the questionnaire. This was mostly caused by the poor design of the questionnaire questions. In the third question of the questionnaire, the students were asked to mark their level of motivation during the class when they played Seppo. The question was not asking how playing Seppo affected the students’ perceived motivation, but rather how motivated they were during that class overall. Therefore, the students could have felt that they were motivated respective unmotivated for any number of reasons. Because most of the students’ answers to the Likert scale questions were not in line with their answers to the following open ended questions, which more specifically asked if playing Seppo caused an increase in the students’ level of motivation, the analysis in the present study was focused on the answers on the open-ended questions. However, an overview of the results of the Likert- scale questions is included.

In addition, the game that was designed for this study and that was played by all participants was not meaningful for the students in a sense, because the theme and tasks of the game had little to do with what the students had been doing in class lately. Playing the game might have seemed a bit random and not in line with the learning objectives that had been set by the teacher or EFL book unit. Games should be designed so that they match the groups’ learning objectives and gives them a chance to practice the skills that they are expected to learn under a certain period of time. However, given the limited time that was available for conducting this study, it would have been unrealistic to design different games for each group. I also did not know the the individual students before designing the game. In addition, using the same tasks and the same procedure with every group made the research results comparable.

Furthermore, one of the teachers that was interviewed for this study told that she was actually not very familiar with her students because she had been on a leave for most of the school year. The purpose of having the teachers observe their students was that they, knowing their students quite well at this part of the school year, would be able to spot the differences in the students’ level of motivation and engagement, if there was any. Knowing the students as individual learners was therefore crucial for this study, and that one of the teachers felt that she did not know her students very well was a limitation for this study. Overall I am not sure if the teachers properly understood the aim of this study, as the school world is very hectic and I did not have much time to prepare them for the sessions. At times they did not explicitly answer to the interview questions, and their observations were sometimes quite vague. It is also possible that the interview questions were ambiguous and therefore hard to respond to.

Also, not all of the features of the Seppo platform were used for this game. As mentioned earlier, it would have been possible to differentiate and create two sets of tasks so that the students could choose either an easier or a more difficult option. This could have resulted in an increase in motivation of those students who thought that the tasks were too difficult or too easy, although the proportion of these students was relatively small. Another feature of the game that was not used here were flash exercises. They are tasks that do not appear on the game board map (See Figure 1) at the start of the game as pink spots, but are activated later on in the game, when the teacher decides that the moment is right. Once a flash exercise is activated, it will appear on the students’ screens, and they have to answer this question before they can move on. As the flash exercises can take the students by surprise, they could potentially have increased the excitement and engagement provided by the game. The features mentioned above

were not used in this study because of the limited time that was available for carrying out the study.

Lastly, as mentioned earlier, each teacher got to decide how to divide the teams at the start of each session. The quality of the group work seemed to be an important factor in determining whether or not the students found the game motivating, so this definitely had an impact on the results. As mentioned earlier, two of the teachers decided to form the groups so that they asked the students to work with the peers that were sitting closest to them at the start of the session, while one of the teachers had decided on the groups beforehand. However, also the teacher who had divided the groups before the session said that she had done this quite randomly. To make the conditions for each session as similar as possible, it would have been better if all teachers would have used the same method when making the teams.