O efeito da gamificação no engajamento e aprendizagem de programação : um estudo considerado a personalidade e a orientação motivacional dos estudantes

Abstract

Online environments for supporting learning has become popular and educators had expanded the use of technology resources due the support that technology offers. In online courses, students can attend classes and complete the exercises in their own time, and the results can be seen by educators easily. However, keeping students engaged and avoiding dropout is one of the biggest challenges to be achieved. Gamification of education is a strategy that can help through the incorporation of game elements into an educational environment, to achieve levels of engaging and dedication equal to what games can normally generate, enhancing certain skills, engaging learners, maximizing learning , promoting behavior change and socialization. In the literature it is possible to observe that the effects of gamification are controversial, being the set of results both positive and negative in the engagement and learning of the students. These controversial results are linked to the fact that people react differently to gamification. To identify how gamification affects people, some works has begun to study its effect by comparing it with the motivation, player type, personality, gender, and age of people. However, it is still necessary to study the relationship between user profile, activity performed and the gamification elements applied. Thus, empirical studies are needed to verify which gamification elements are most effective for a given type of user, participating in a given activity. In this context, this work proposes to study the effect of the different gamification elements (points, ranking, badges) on the engagement and learning of different user profiles (motivation and personality) in the programming learning domain. As a case study, the gamification with points, leaderboard and badges was incorporated into a programming teaching environment, Feeper, which was used by 96 undergraduates of introductory programming learning disciplines from a private university in two experiments. Evidence was found that gamification affected participants differently according to their motivational orientation and personality traits. Regarding motivational orientation, the results indicated that there was a significant improvement in the quality of the solutions sent by the gamified group with extrinsic motivation. Regarding personality, we also found evidence of a change in the quality of the solutions sent, being positive for the participants of the introverted gamified group, gamified with low amiability and gamified with low openness and negative for group without gamification with low levels of conscientiousness. Furthermore, evidence has been found that gamification has affected the engagement of introverted and extroverted participants in different ways and is more beneficial for introverts.