Gamification of E-Learning apps via acceptance requirements analysis

In the last few years, and particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, E-Learning has become a very important and strategic asset for our society, relevant both for academic and industry settings, involving participants ranging from students to professionals. Different applications have been developed to support E-Learning to be an effective tool, particularly in relation to the software engineering and programming areas. However, in order to be effective, in particular within academic settings, such tools require students to be continuously engaged and motivated to learn both practical and theoretical aspects. The integration of gamification in educational environments has gained considerable prominence as a potential mean to augment students’ motivation and involvement, providing them with immediate feedback and reinforcement, bolstering their sense of accomplishment and motivation to persist in their studies. However, to design gamified applications that can effectively engage and motivate users, as the literature has demonstrated, it is required to consider psychological, sociological, and human behavioural aspects, often referred to as Acceptance Requirements. This study presents a case study, where a Goal Modeling-based, Systematic, Acceptance Requirements Analysis and Gamification Design process, has been applied, by using the Agon framework, to prototype a gamified tool, aiming at engaging students towards learning both theory and practice related to a “Web-Based Mobile App Development” university module. To evaluate our proposed prototype, students were involved to use our proposed gamified prototype. The results show that our gamification solution can engage and motivate students towards learning both theoretical and practical aspects of the module.

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2024), pages 291-298, ISBN: 978-989-758-696-5; ISSN: 2184-4895
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