The gamification of learning in virtual worlds

Abstract

For some students learning can be a challenging experience. This may be attributed to a variety of factors such as having a limited understanding of the learning process or not having sufficient metacognitive skills to engage effectively. For others motivation, organisation or maintaining a consistent level of effort can be a significant difficulty. Recent studies suggest that gamification can be used to help address these issues and other issues regarding learning development. Virtual worlds in particular offer rich opportunities for the gamification of learning processes due to their aesthetic nature. In addition, a range of insightful gaming metaphors can be employed within a virtual world that are not as feasible to adopt within a traditional web based virtual learning environment.

Current virtual world research focuses predominantly on content delivery and simulation of real world scenarios, and existing gamification approaches concentrate on reward systems based on generic users. This thesis investigates two novel aspects related to learning in virtual worlds: the use of a virtual world to provide learning guidance and feedback through gaming metaphors embedded within a world’s topography and its aesthetics, and the application of a gamification typology to supply motivational features within a virtual world that can appeal to different types of learners.

This thesis contains a series of user centred focus tests and experiments that were undertaken to investigate which gaming metaphors are most effective in providing aesthetic and reward based feedback within a virtual world to help motivate learners. A range of metaphors used to represent learner performance, subject difficulty and the relationship between concepts proved to be well understood by participants of the studies, aiding the comprehension of their learning state. The outcomes from these focus tests were used as a foundation to develop a virtual world learning system called Reflex. Reflex was employed to investigate the use of a gamification typology for motivating different types of learner.

The results of an experiment conducted within Reflex show that variation in student gamification types can be identified using a tailored gamification questionnaire, and that expected behaviour underlying the base typology is well correlated with tracked behaviour in the virtual world. New compound gamification types are uncovered using exploratory techniques to investigate the relationship between questionnaire response and tracked behaviour data. A key outcome from the thesis is the proposal of a new extendedgamification typology based upon the initial gamification types.

Date of Award	Dec 2014
Original language	English
Sponsors	Department for Employment and Learning (DEL)
Supervisor	Darryl Charles (Supervisor), Adrian Moore (Supervisor) & Therese Charles (Supervisor)