on the development of an open-source system for ...

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN OPEN-SOURCE SYSTEM FOR INTRODUCING GAMIFICATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION Krzysztof Jassem, Bartosz Piskadło Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań (POLAND)

Abstract Gamification, namely applying game-like thinking to non-game applications, has been becoming a common practice in business (e.g. in frequent flyers programs or loyalty programs). Although education seems to have a promising future for gamification, the attempts have been few so far and the idea is yet to gain ground. One of the underlying reasons for this is that preparing and running a gamified course is time-consuming. [1]

Iosuo and Epema suggest using a toolbox, which consists of 7 core tools, for course gamification. The authors hold that the application of such toolbox has a strong, positive impact on students’ attendance. We follow their ideas. Our contribution is an open-source computer system, developed under a working name of CyberAcademy, which helps teachers gamify their courses at minimum time expense. A prototype of the system was put to use during the fall semester (October 2013 – February 2014) at the Software Engineering course. Currently the system is used there for a course on Natural Language Processing. Our intention is to demonstrate CyberAcademy at EduLearn. We hope that the system will be further developed as an open-source project. The main idea of the system is straight-forward. The teacher systematically uploads short tasks to be completed by students. The teacher has to define how each task will be scored: automatically, by the teacher or through peer review. In the last case the solutions are being graded by a fixed number (10 by default) of randomly selected students (excluding the author). The scores for all task solutions are then generated automatically. Solutions uploaded by students are given rewards (according to their ranking) by experience points and credits. Experience points reflect the student’s progress during a single course. Credits form virtual currency valid for all courses run within CyberAcademy. Credits serve as a means of trade within system users. The following gamification techniques are implemented in CyberAcademy: 1. Competition 2. Challenges 3. Story-telling 4. Decision making 5. Role-playing 6. Progress Information 7. Virtual goods and badges 8. Immediate rewarding 9. Information gap The prototype of the system was deployed in the winter semester of 2013. Out of 63 students 51 gave preference to the gamification program over the standard procedure. Keywords: Gamification, Open Source Projects, Information Technology Education.

1

GAMIFICATION

Gamification is the art of picking out interesting elements of games in order to use them in areas not directly related to games. The purpose of gamification is to modify the participants’ behavior in

Proceedings of EDULEARN14 Conference 7th-9th July 2014, Barcelona, Spain

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ISBN: 978-84-617-0557-3

compliance with the designers’ intentions. The pleasure felt by the players is the means that leads to achieving a business objective. The objectives can vary (and relate to all areas of life) - ranging from the down-to-earth ones like boosting product sales, through dealing with social problems (e.g. promoting a healthy lifestyle), to solving specific scientific problems. All these areas have one thing in common – standard routines suffer from a shortage of people’s activity motivating factors. Gamification is the remedy for this disease.

1.1 1.1.1

Gamification Techniques Competition

Most people like to compete. The feeling of being better than others makes people feel stronger and enhances their self-esteem. This is why rankings are so important in computer games. They show the current status of the players compared to others and motivate them to work harder in order to defeat the closest rivals.

1.1.2

Challenges

A player has got missions to complete. Completing even the simplest task is noticed and appreciated properly. Well-designed tasks are neither too short (the player doesn’t feel dissatisfied), nor too long (the player isn’t bored with the game and feels like continuing it). Appropriate duration of a mission doses a surge of positive emotions that result from overcoming successive challenges.

1.1.3

Storytelling [2]

Johan Huizinga in his Homo Ludens claims that a game should ensure uniqueness and be distinguishable from the surrounding reality. Locating a game in an extraordinary world increases players’ curiosity and maintains their concentration. An unusual scenario assigns special meaning to activities that aren’t interesting in the real world - “after all there’s no better motivation to run than [3] being chased by a group of zombies” .

1.1.4

Free Decision Making

Voluntary choices transform a passive recipient into an active participant of game. The player may animate the game world by changing the state of a game, creating the story or adjusting the character’s appearance. Decision taking makes the game more credible and immersive for the player.

1.1.5

Progress Information

Achievement levels and progress indicators mirror the player’s effort put into the game so far, as well as show the distance to the next milestone. A clear vision of the finishing-line is a strong motivating factor. Additionally, making visible progress gains respect of other players.

1.1.6

Collecting Badges

Badges allow players to memorize the objectives they have achieved. Badges also help to break effort barriers in activities undertaken for the first time.

1.1.7

Collecting Virtual Objects

The desire to possess property is timeless and the virtual reality doesn’t seem to change much in this matter. The time needed for collecting valuable items in a game is far shorter than in the real world.

1.1.8

Increasing the Level of Difficulty

In real life, the tasks people face are often - or at least seem to be - too difficult or too easy. Both of these types are equally fatal to the morale. Too high requirements may result in inability to deal with them leading to frustration and the sense of defeat. On the other hand, too simple tasks may result in the sense of boredom. Games are designed in such a way that tasks are easy at the beginning and the level of difficulty is systematically increased. Completing well-suited tasks is an incentive that helps accepting increasingly difficult challenges.

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1.1.9

Surprising the Player

Sudden twists of action or surprise gifts are common practices that significantly increase the interest in the game.

1.1.10 The Information Gap The awareness of one’s lack of knowledge in a given situation is called an information gap. Human brain needs the information gap to be filled in as soon as possible. Information gaps are used as an activity stimulating factor. Creating an information gap requires a proper preparation of the plot of the game.

1.1.11 Cooperation Most players enjoy helping others. Opportunities for sharing virtual goods or cooperation during the tasks make the game more attractive. Some computer games are set only for the multiplayer mode, while in other games the multiplayer mode grants access to special locations. Team work is often the key factor determining the success or failure of a mission.

1.2

Gamification in Social Life

If the concept of gamification is mentioned in social life, it is loyalty programs that first come to mind, especially those offered by airlines or oil companies. Some elements of gamification are successfully used in other areas, as will be exemplified in this section.

1.2.1

Encouraging to Test a Product

The creators of a web application called DevHub, which allows for designing corporate websites without any knowledge of programming, noticed that most clients build only a frame of the site and do not use payable advanced functions offered by the system. An analysis has shown that only ca. 10% of all users create a complete website. The use of gamification elements like rewards for adding new elements, competition elements and badges for achievements has increased the ratio of users who [4] completed their websites to ca. 80% .

1.2.2

Encouraging to Help Others

stackoverflow.com is one of the well-known websites, where programmers can find help when they encounter problems. Its structure resembles some popular internet fora, however, thanks to gamification elements, the designers of this system have managed to create a specific and positive atmosphere among users. Every reply to a question may be evaluated positively or negatively by any user, thanks to which useful replies are positioned better and reach a greater number of readers. [5] Additionally, completing clearly specified tasks is being rewarded by attractive titles (badges) that are visible at the user’s profile.

1.2.3

Struggling with Social Problems [6]

The aim of The Fun Theory competition was to design the gamification program for the improvement of people’s social behavior. The winner of this competition was Kevin Richardson, who offered a method for fighting speeding. He designed a camera which informs drivers of their speed. The system gives speed-obeying drivers a chance to win some proceeds from the fines for speeding. The experiment lasted three days and at that time the average speed of the cars decreased by ca. 10km/h.

1.2.4

Promoting Healthy Lifestyle

The program Zombies, Run! is a mobile application that motivates for running. While running, a player is being mentally moved to the world attacked by zombies. A runner can hear chasing creatures and at the same time receives information from other survivors. A player completes interesting missions, such as finding other survivors or retrieving a gun lost in a discharged point. Thanks to GPS each run is registered and the player can later refer to its bird’s-eye view, the distance run, the calories burned and the speed at a particular moment.

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1.3

Gamification in Education

In the Internet age, every student is being overwhelmed by the less or more important pieces of information from various sources. Gamification seems to be an attractive way to motivate students for activities that result in fulfilling educational goals: students’ acquisition of desired skills and knowledge. In fact, education is already a game with the homework missions, scores and grades. The problem is that in its standard form education is not attractive compared to games offered by computers.

2

GAMIFICATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The section reports on recent experiments undertaken in Poland related to introducing gamification into higher education.

2.1

Course Gamification at the Institute of Psychology of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (2012/2013)[7]

The experiment was conducted during a Personnel Psychology course. The authors’ aim was to examine whether there is a difference between efficiency of the gamified course and the traditional one. The students collected three types of points: experience points (for participation), knowledge points (for projects) and charisma points (for additional tasks). A student could earn up to 100 points in each category. Exceeding given thresholds was rewarded by a bronze, silver or a gold badge. To complete the course, student had to earn at least one badge in each color. Using regression analysis (data from the gamified course were compared with the standard lectures, conducted in the previous years) the researchers found out that the inclusion of gamification have not influenced, in a significant way, any of the variables under their study.

2.2

Lecture Gamification at the Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz[8]

The purpose of the experiment was to motivate students for higher attendance to not mandatory [9] lectures. The rules were relatively clear : every student had to decide whether to participate in the gamification program or to pass the standard exam at the end of the semester. Students who chose the gamification program were given a set of tasks every week. Participants had to choose and complete at least one of the tasks – otherwise they lost one of three lives. Tasks were divided into several levels of difficulty and graded respectively. The author of the experiment analyzed both [10] [11] and negative effects of the program and eventually stated the program to prove positive successful: Not only did it encourage for higher attendance but also persuaded the students to work on systematic basis and use appropriate IT tools for sharing documents. The main drawback was the lack of the appropriate system for gamification management.

3

CYBERACADEMY – GAMIFICATION SYSTEM FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

3.1

Motivation

The conclusions of the experiment described in Section 2.2. made us consider the design of a system that manages gamification in higher education. Besides educational purposes the system should satisfy the following requirements: • Ease of use for both teachers and students This postulate is crucial for the success of the system – the teacher will be willing to use the system only if its handling demands minimal effort • Selection of gamification features for teachers Not all gamification techniques may look appealing for the teacher. The system should allow the teacher to toggle some of the system features, such as story-telling, role-playing or badges. • Attractiveness for students The virtual world of the game as well as the story told should be designed by students – this will help addressing students’ imagination.

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3.2

Workflow in CyberAcademy

3.2.1

Teacher’s point of view

One of the underlying assumptions is to minimize the time the teacher spends for maintaining the gamification elements. This is done by making gamification “transparent” for the teacher. Managing the course does not require activities like story-telling, summing student’s scores or closing tasks after the deadline. The structure of the course is pretty standard – it is divided into modules, which can be sub-divided into sections. The modules are used to represent course elements which are subject to the final evaluation: lectures, laboratories and final projects. Every module has an assigned mentor, who prepares tasks and evaluates solutions submitted by students. The system calculates students’ current grade for the module. A section usually corresponds to a single lecture or a single laboratory class. A section consists of an editable content, a list of tasks and an attendance list (timesheet). In order to add a task for students, the teacher defines its type (Table 1), submits its description and assigns the maximum number of points to be achieved. Additionally, the start and end dates may be defined – then the system manages students’ access to the task appropriately. Table 1. Types of tasks in CyberAcademy Type of a task

Description

Auto-max

The completion of the task is rewarded with the defined number of points.

Mentor

The solutions are graded by the teacher

Voting

This type of task use crowdsourcing. Anonymous solutions are rated by other students (the default number of estimators is ten for each task). The final grades are based on average ratings. Students are additionally rewarded for rating other solutions.

One-time steps required from the teacher to start the course are: • creating a course: defining its name and preparing a short description • defining modules and assigning mentors to them • determining thresholds for every final grade of each module • assigning students to the course (in most universities this can be done automatically) The teacher’s job during the course consists in: • adding new sections and editing their contents (editing is helped by a WYSIWYG editor, so it doesn’t require any BBCode or HTML knowledge) • adding tasks • checking students’ attendance (optional) • evaluating students’ answers for the “mentor-type” tasks (students’ solutions are anonymous)

3.2.2

Student’s point of view

It’s 2093. The institution of country does not exist, and the world is ruled by corporations with absolute power on their own territories. The corporations took over the social networks and the whole private data has become available “for security purposes” for those, who can afford it. With the aid of special transmitters injected to everyone at birth the corporations take the full control over the society.

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This is the virtual reality a student (course participant) has to face with. The student begins the play as a technician of an independent corporation, who want to test on him their own invention – cybernetic modules that can transform a human organism into a cyborg adapted for the combat environment. The transformation ends with a temporary loss of memory. The student gets access to a set of special courses in order to recover his/her memory. The student is rewarded for completing tasks with experience points (XP) and credits (CR). The experience points are unique for every course and finally are re-calculated for the course grade. Additionally, they improve the avatar’s standard statistics: intelligence, strength or perception. Credits are the universal currency among various courses in CyberAcademy. They don’t affect the grades, however, they allow the students to buy some items for their alter-egos. Fig. 1 shows the student's character sheet and its basic elements. The plot described above is only the beginning of the story, and it’s up to a game participant which way it follows. The choices can relate to trivia like passing by stairs or by lift, or some serious issues like failing the corporation orders. Most decisions are conditioned, e.g. moving a heavy box requires strength, spotting the hidden object needs high perception, using a complicated electronic device requires intelligence and bribing the guard – a certain number of credits on the account. The story is embellished with appropriate images of the described situation. Automatic evaluation of some tasks makes the students receive the responses quickly, which makes them feel more connected with the system as compared to other applications, in which they have to wait until the teacher has time to enter the results into system. Thanks to displaying the current status of the experience points, the students know exactly how much they need to get to a higher level. The clear vision of the end not only motivates, but also reduces the risk of resignation just before the next milestone. The system cooperates with the voting system bought by Faculty of Mathemaics and Computer Science at Poznań University, thanks to which it is possible to run quizzes or surveys during lectures. Resulting scores are assigned to the students automatically. The possibility of rating the solutions of other students introduces the feature of decision making and makes students analyze ideas different from their own. The reviewers’ names are unknown to the authors. While using the system, the participants get the badges for completing certain activities. The system does not suggest what they should do in order to achieve them. It adds a curiosity element and at the same time does not veil the main educational purposes by the urge to possess the badges. Students usually get the lowest positive final grade only when they get at least 50% of the maximum number of points provided for the course. During the first half of the course students may miss the appreciation of their work. Adding virtual levels makes students feel emotions for overcoming new barriers even before they deserve a positive grade for the whole course.

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Figure 1. CyberAcademy user's character sheet includes following elements marked in the picture: 1 – personal information, 2 – three basic attributes, 3 – amount of available credits, 4 – cyborg modification slots view, 5 – equipment, 6 – table for achievement badges

3.2.3

Elements of Gamification used in CyberAcademy

The gamification techniques applied in CyberAcademy are listed in Table 2.

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Table 2. Gamification techniques applied in CyberAcademy Gamification element

Implementation method

Competition

The students compete for the best-rated solution of each task and the high position in the leadership board.

Challenges

Completing tasks given by the teacher is rewarded by experience points. The teacher may choose the value of the reward in accordance to the difficulty of the assignment.

Storytelling

The game in CyberAcademy is accompanied with the story that can diverge in various directions.

Decision Making

The students decide how their avatar will develop, in which direction the story will go.

Role-playing

Students and teachers choose their avatars in the story.

Progress Information

The system sums the points gained so far and displays the number of points missing to the next grade.

Collecting Badges and The students get badges for positive actions. They can buy (or win in the Virtual Objects lottery) special gadgets for their cyborg. Immediate Rewarding

Students are rewarded for their achievements either directly after uploading a solution (in the case of automatic ratings) or immediately after the deadline for rating has expired (in the case of manual rating).

Information Gap

The participants do not know how their decision will affect the story; the curiosity of what can happen motivates to execute new tasks.

4

CONCLUSIONS

4.1 4.1.1

Evaluation Evaluation

We have evaluated our method in a simple way. In the winter semester of 2013 the students were offered a choice whether to participate in the gamification program or not. In order to participate in the program students were required to attend lectures systematically and take up new challenges almost every week. The alternative was a standard exam at the end of the semester with no mandatory attendance. Out of 63 students 51 gave preference to the gamification program.

4.2

Future work

We plan to introduce gamification techniques for teachers. Courses will be evaluated by students and teachers efforts will be awarded by badges, etc. Another idea is to create project markets: open web portals dedicated to student projects. Visitors will vote for most interesting ideas and their votes will position projects in the score board. Potential investors, looking for innovation, may get interested in surveying the project markets.

REFERENCES [1]

Iosup Alexandru, Epema Dick H.J.: An experience report on using gamification in technical higher education. SIGCSE 2014: 27-32

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[2]

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Beacon Press (June 1, 1971). ISBN 0-8070-4681-7

[3]

Moses Toby. Zombies, Run! – review [online] [accessed 25.04.2014]. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/25/zombies-run-naomi-alderman-app.

[4]

Takahashi Dean. Website builder DevHub gets users hooked by "gamifying" its service [online] [accessed 15.04.2014]. http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/25/devhub-scores-engagementincrease-by-gamifying-its-web-site-creation-tools/.

[5]

Stackoverflow badges [online] [accessed 20.04.2014]. http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges.

[6]

The Fun Theory homepage [online] [accessed 01.05.2014]. http://www.thefuntheory.com/.

[7]

Prokopowicz Piotr, Żmuda Grzegorz. Rules of the game [online] [accessed 10.05.2014]. http://gameofpp2011.wordpress.com/rules-of-the-game/.

[8]

Mochocki Michał. How I gamified my lectures [online] [accessed 02.05.2014]. http://mmochocki.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-i-gamified-my-lectures.html.

[9]

Mochocki Michał. Gamified lectures UKW 2012 – introduction [online] [accessed 30.04.2014]. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B050ff5GuoB6eVhERjJHVnVyQk0/edit?pli=1.

[10]

Mochocki Michał. Gamified Lectures: What Went Right [online] [accessed 03.05.2014]. http://mmochocki.blogspot.com/2013/02/gamified-lectures-what-went-right.html.

[11]

Mochocki Michał. Gamified Lectures: What Went Wrong [online] [accessed 03.05.2014]. http://mmochocki.blogspot.com/2013/02/gamified-lectures-what-went-wrong.html.

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