Making gamification easy for the professor: Decoupling game and content with the studynow mobile app

Abstract

Many university students struggle with motivational problems, and gamification has the potential to address these problems. However, gamification is hardly used in education, because current approaches to gamification require instructors to engage in the time-consuming preparation of their course contents for use in quizzes, mini-games and the like. Drawing on research on limited attention and present bias, we propose a “lean” approach to gamification, which relies on gamifying learning activities (rather than learning contents) and increasing their salience. In this paper, we present the app StudyNow that implements such a lean gamification approach. With this app, we aim to enable more students and instructors to benefit from the advantages of gamification.