OneUp Learning: Gamifying Academic Courses for Motivating and Engaging Students

Games have remarkable motivational power. They utilize a number of mechanisms to encourage people to engage with them, often without any reward, just for the joy of playing and possibility to win. This is the reason why many instructors are willing to use educational games in their classes. 

But what if you are willing to employ these powerful mechanisms in your class and cannot find appropriate educational games to use?

Don’t worry! Here are some good news for you. You can still gamify your course and there is a course gamification platform – OneUp Learning – that makes this possible.

Gamifying with OneUp

Do you wonder what gamification is? Gamification of learning refers to the process of making learning experiences more engaging and game-like by using game design elements to improve learners’ engagement and motivation.

OneUp Learning is an educational gamification platform aimed at facilitating the gamification of academic courses or other structured learning activities and fostering experimental research on gamifying learning. It enables instructors to define course activities and create exercise problems for practicing and self-assessment, as well as exams or quizzes for testing particular skills. The platform enables gamifying these instructional activities. It is course independent and highly configurable. The instructor chooses what game elements to use and how to use them. The system currently supports the following game elements: points (challenge points, skill points, and activity points), progress bar, content unlocking, goal setting, streaks, badges, leader boards, skill board, virtual currency, avatars, duels, chat, and learning dashboards. In addition to selecting the gamification elements to be used in the particular course, the instructor has to specify the ‘gaming rules’. These rules define the conditions upon which certain game elements will be applied, for example, a specific badge will be awarded. The rules have the format IF condition THENaction, for example, IF a student completes 20 challenges THEN award her the badge, “Persistent Practice Level I.” The rules are specified by the instructor in a simple to use interface and carried out automatically by the Rule Engine which is built into the platform.

An example of the supported game elements is Virtual Currency. Virtual currency uses made-up digital coins/tokens (specific to a given game application) to reward users/players and create an in-game economy. Typically, completing the work required to earn the currency is core to the gamification design and game play. In OneUp, the virtual currency is earned through practicing or completing other course activities or requirements. The earned ‘course bucks’ are tradable for course-related goods in the Course Shop. Both the rules for earning virtual currency and spending it are defined by the instructor. Thus learners who earn some virtual currency from practicing can spend it to purchase some course benefits from the Course Shop that can help them mitigate some negative outcomes in the future.  This way, virtual currency is used as a psychological factor intended to support sustainable engagement, e.g. keep learners continuing to practice.

Another example of gameful experience supported by OneUp is enabling students to challenge their classmates through Duels. A student can send another student a duel. If they accept, the system randomly selects a warm-up challenge from the pool of warm-up challenges (not taken yet by any of the students), filtered according to parameters set by the challenger, and presents it to both students. The challenger specifies the topic of the challenge, the level of difficulty, and for what period of time it has to be solved. The winner is the student with the higher score.  The duels enable learners to engage in a meaningful and fun competition that results in learning driven by intrinsic motivation.

In OneUp’s vocabulary, learning objectives are “Skills,” tests and quizzes are “Challenges,” and the questions in them are “Problems.” The platform supports two types of Challenges: warm-up Challenges (for student practice and self-assessment) and serious Challenges (graded course quizzes and tests).  For each problem included in a challenge, the instructor specifies the Challenge points earnable from that problem. The instructor could also specify Skill points, which indicate how the problem contributes to increasing the level of student mastery of related skills (from a pre-defined set of skills for the course).

All the Benefits of a Gamified Course

Since freedom to fail and instant feedback are among the fundamental game design principles, special attention is given to supporting online practice with automatic assessment. OneUp supports two type of problems: static and dynamic. Static problems (for which the correct solution is given at creation) include the standard multiple-choice questions, multiple answer questions, true/false questions, and matching questions. To ensure a sufficient pool of exercises of a particular type for the students to practice, OneUp supports dynamic generation of problem instances from templates. Dynamic problems are problems for which the system does not contain solutions entered by the instructor. For these problems the instructor enters ‘templates’ and the system uses a random seed to generate unique instances of a particular programming or calculating problem and then grade the correctness of the submitted answer. By dynamically generating problem instances, the platform makes available a sufficient pool of exercises of a particular type for students to practice.

All learning activities, such as practicing, completing quizzes, and participating in specified course activities, are provided with immediate feedback including detailed progress information and possibly some kind of reward (e.g. points, badges, virtual currency). All elements of the OneUp platform – course topics, targeted skills, warm-up and serious challenges, activities, game elements and relations between them are configurable, which makes OneUp a course independent, customizable platform.

The creation of a gamified course with OneUp includes specifying the course topics, targeted skills, and milestones, as well as the game elements and game rules to be used in the course. The instructor also has to enter warm-up challenges for student practice and self-assessment and serious challenges for course assessment (if desired).

OneUp was developed here, in the Computer Science Department of WSSU. Its design was guided by well-validated psychological theories for understanding motivation and behavior change, such as the Self-Determination Theory and the Goal-Setting Theory, in order to achieve better results from the applied gamification interventions in learning contexts.

Interested how you can gamify your course?  Interested how you can use OneUp?

Contact Us

Darina Dicheva (dichevad@wssu,edu), Keith Irwin (irwinke@wssu.edu), Christo Dichev (dichevc@wssu.edu)

For more information about educational gamification and the OneUp course gamification platform can be found at WSSU OneUp.