Increasing student motivation in computer programming with gamification

Abstract

Games have important motivational power. They take advantage of a set of tools to encourage people to engage with them just for the joy of playing and the possibility to win. While gamification is gaining ground in a lot of areas in our society, its application in education is still an emerging trend. In recent years, gamification has attracted the attention of researchers from different areas such as teaching and learning computer programming. Ever since the first programming languages emerged, the problems inherent to programming teaching and learning have been studied and investigated. The theme is very serious, not only for the important concepts underlying computer science courses but also for reducing the lack of motivation, failure, and abandonment that result from student frustration. In most of these studies and research one factor prevails, lack of student motivation or how to motivate students to learn programming. One way to combat this problem is to use gamification. Using game design elements in non-game contexts is one of the good ways to motivate and encourage students to learn programming. To assess how gamification impacted the learning experience, we compared data from one gamified and non-gamified year. In general, the results show significant improvements in terms of attendance to class, participation, and proactivity. They also suggest that our approach can reduce the high rate of failure grade among students. In conclusion, this case study, we show how the use of concepts related to gamification can improve motivation, passion, beauty, joy, awe, e naturally the succeed in programming.