Pathfinder: The Behavioural and Motivational Effects of Collectibles in Gamified Software Training

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Abstract

Designers of instructional software use gamification to help motivate and engage learners. Typically focusing on gamifying a single task, designers aim to provide a straightforward path through learning. In contrast, video games frequently provide optional secondary tasks using collectibles. Collectibles-like coins-are secondary, non-essential goals that encourage players to selectively take on additional challenges and engage more with a game. While research supports the idea that by increasing engagement learning can be improved, exactly how collectibles-an extremely common element in games-might be employed in gamified learning and how it might affect the play experience is underexplored. We present the results of a study comparing a gamified photo-editing training game that uses collectibles to one without collectibles. Our results show that learners choose to engage more when collectibles are present, and that this has a positive effect on software skills applied to a representative out-of-game challenge. Our findings provide a nuanced view of the tradeoffs in motivation and experience when collectibles are used.

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APA

Naglé, T., Bateman, S., & Birk, M. V. (2021). Pathfinder: The Behavioural and Motivational Effects of Collectibles in Gamified Software Training. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (Vol. 5). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3474691

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