Abstract There are many claims that gamification (i.e., using game elements outside games) impact decreases over time (i.e., the novelty effect). Most studies analyzing this effect focused on extrinsic game elements, while fictional and collaborative competition have been recently recommended. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, no long-term research has been carried out with STEM learners from introductory programming courses (CS1), a context that demands encouraging practice and mitigating motivation throughout the semester. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to better understand how the impact of a gamification design, featuring fictional and competitive-collaborative elements, changes over a 14-week period of time, when applied to CS1 courses taken by STEM students (N = 756). In an ecological setting, we followed a 2x7 quasi-experimental design, where Brazilian STEM students completed assignments in either a gamified or non-gamified version of the same system, which provided the measures (number of attempts, usage time, and system access) to assess user behavior at seven points in time. Results indicate changes in gamification’s impact that appear to follow a U-shaped pattern. Supporting the novelty effect, the gamification’s effect started to decrease after four weeks, decrease that lasted between two to six weeks. Interestingly, the gamification’s impact shifted to an uptrend between six and 10 weeks after the start of the intervention, partially recovering its contribution naturally. Thus, we found empirical evidence supporting that gamification likely suffers from the novelty effect, but also benefits from the familiarization effect, which contributes to an overall positive impact on students. These findings may provide some guidelines to inform practitioners about how long the initial contributions of gamification last, and how long they take to recover after some reduction in benefits. It can also help researchers to realize when to apply/evaluate interventions that use gamification by taking into consideration the novelty effect and, thereby, better understand the real impact of gamification on students’ behavior in the long run. 

/pdf/gamification-suffers-from-the-novelty-effect-but-benefits-3dkx2ary.pdf

Gamification suffers from the novelty effect but benefits from the familiarization effect: Findings from a longitudinal study

Students face several difficulties in introductory programming courses (CS1), often leading to high dropout rates, student demotivation, and lack of interest. The literature has indicated that the adequate use of gamification might improve learning in several domains, including CS1. However, the understanding of which (and how) factors influence gamification’s success, especially for CS1 education, is lacking. Thus, there is a clear need to shed light on pre-determinants of gamification’s impact. To tackle this gap, we investigate how user and contextual factors influence gamification’s effect on CS1 students through a quasi-experimental retrospective study ( \( N = 399 \) ), based on a between-subject design (conditions: gamified or non-gamified) in terms of final grade (academic achievement) and the number of programming assignments completed in an educational system (i.e., how much they practiced). Then, we evaluate whether and how user and contextual characteristics (e.g., age, gender, major, programming experience, working situation, internet access, and computer access/sharing) moderate that effect. Our findings indicate that gamification amplified to some extent the impact of practicing. Overall, students practicing in the gamified version presented higher academic achievement than those practicing the same amount in the non-gamified version. Intriguingly, those in the gamified version that practiced much more extensively than the average showed lower academic achievements than those who practiced comparable amounts in the non-gamified version. Furthermore, our results reveal gender as the only statistically significant moderator of gamification’s effect: in our data, it was positive for females but non-significant for males. These findings suggest which (and how) personal and contextual factors moderate gamification’s effects, indicate the need to further understand and examine context’s role, and show that gamification must be cautiously designed to prevent students from playing instead of learning.

Are They Learning or Playing? Moderator Conditions of Gamification’s Success in Programming Classrooms

Programming online judges (POJs) are autograders that have been increasingly used in introductory programming courses (also known as CS1) since these systems provide instantaneous and accurate feedback for learners’ codes solutions and reduce instructors’ workload in evaluating the assignments. Nonetheless, learners typically struggle to find problems in POJs that are adequate for their programming skills. A potential reason is that POJs present problems with varied categories and difficulty levels, which may cause a cognitive overload, due to the large amount of information (and choice) presented to the student. Thus, students can often feel less capable, which may result in undesirable affective states, such as frustration and demotivation, decreasing their performance and potentially leading to increasing dropout rates. Recently, new research emerged on systems to recommend problems in POJs; however, the data collection for these approaches was not fine-grained; importantly, they did not take into consideration the students’ previous effort and achievement. Thus, this study proposes for the first time a prescriptive analytics solution for students’ programming behaviour by constructing and evaluating an automatic recommender module based on students’ effort, to personalise the problems presented to the learner in POJs. The aim is to improve the learners achievement, whilst minimising negative affective states in CS1 courses. Results in a within-subject double-blind controlled experiment showed that our method significantly improved positive affective states, whilst minimising the negatives ones. Moreover, our recommender significantly increased students’ achievement (correct solutions) and reduced dropout and failure in problem-solving.

A Recommender System Based on Effort: Towards Minimising Negative Affects and Maximising Achievement in CS1 Learning.

Gamification design in educational environments is not trivial and many variables need to be considered to achieve positive outcomes. Often, educators and designers do not know when the students intend on the use of gamified environments might influence their experience. Based on this premise, this paper describes an exploratory study on the users intention to use gamification, focusing on its influence on the field of education. We conducted a survey study with participants (N=1,692) and analyzed their answers using unsupervised data mining techniques. As a result, we obtained empirical evidence showing that demographic and contextual variables influence (positively and negatively) people intention to use gamification.

/pdf/for-whom-should-we-gamify-insights-on-the-users-intentions-1msxkchx15.pdf

For whom should we gamify? Insights on the users intentions and context towards gamification in education

Marcos A. P. de Lima Instituto de Computação Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM) Manaus, Amazonas, Brasil marcos.lima@icomp.ufam.edu.br Leandro S. G. de Carvalho Instituto de Computação Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM) Manaus, Amazonas, Brasil galvao@icomp.ufam.edu.br Elaine Harada T. Oliveira Instituto de Computação Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM) Manaus, Amazonas, Brasil elaine@icomp.ufam.edu.br

/pdf/uso-de-atributos-de-codigo-para-classificacao-da-facilidade-1ov3q0surd.pdf

Uso de atributos de código para classificação da facilidade de questões de codificação

The impact of gamification has been typically evaluated via self-report assessments (questionnaires, surveys, etc.). In this work, we analise the use of gamification elements as parameters, to predict whether students are going to fail or not in a programming course. Additionally, unlike prior research, we verify how usage of gamification features can predict student performance not only as a discrete, but as a continuous measure as well, via classification and regression, respectively. Moreover, we apply our approach onto two programming courses from two different universities and involve three gamification features, i.e., ranking, score, and attempts. Our results for both predictions are notable: by using data from only the first quarter of the course, we obtain 89% accuracy for the binary classification task, and explain 78% of the students’ final grade variance, with a mean absolute error of 1.05, for regression. Additionally and interestingly, initial observations point also to gamification elements used in the online judge encouraging competition and collaboration. For the former, students that solved more problems, with fewer attempts, achieved higher scores and ranking. For the latter, students formed groups to generate ideas, then implemented their own solution.

Can We Use Gamification to Predict Students’ Performance? A Case Study Supported by an Online Judge

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Can We Use Gamification to Predict Students’ Performance? A Case Study Supported by an Online Judge