Increasing student engagement and motivation through gamification

We believe increasing student engagement works best by introducing gamification for this course. We were able to introduce a tool to visualise the “skill circuits” we had designed for the course the year before. At ad-cs.ewi.tudelft.nl students can track their progress. The tool indicates which parts of the material they have studied (and how) and which material they should now move on towards.

With the help of the e-learning developers, we have also gamified other elements of our course and tried to use more attractive language use for students. Our course now features “Ingenious implementations”, ‘Written Wisdom’, ‘Saucy Secrets’, and ‘Tantalizing TA-checks’. As they proceed through our course, students can unlock summaries we have provided for them and add them to their ‘Knapsack of Knowledge’. From the description of our course in Brightspace: Like any good touring company, we have a variety of tours available for you to choose from. Each of these includes its own activities (of the types listed above), and you are free to choose which tour fits your needs and interests best. All tours start from the same point, and get you to the exact same exams, but they follow a slightly different route to get there.

We are still processing the feedback we have received from the students in an extra survey which was handed out during their final exam, but initial feedback was largely positive. After our introductory lecture, over 80% of the respondents indicated they were ‘slightly excited’ or ‘excited’ to be working with skill circuits in this gamified approach.

Unfortunately, participation quickly declined during the run of the course. We could do more to promote the existence of the peer evaluation assignments and encourage students to participate.

For next year we should examine if we can make the peer evaluation assignments a more integral part of the course. 

For this course we used a custom tool (ad-cs.ewi.tudelft.nl)* as well as MapleTA, WebLab*, Brightspace and another custom tool (peer.ewi.tudelft.nl)*.

* These tools have been developed at the faculty of EEMCS and are not centrally supported.