Design and evaluation of gamification experiences in computer science studies

Abstract

This paper presents two gamification experiences developed in the Computer Science (CS) degree at the University of Barcelona. Usually, the CS degree suffers from low class attendance, which impacts the participation of students in in-class programming activities. Additionally, this degree includes a basic course related to human computer interaction that, despite of being valuable for the formation of students, they feel as boring and useless, far from their - heavily computer focused - interests. Then we decided to gamify a basic course of programming skills and the mentioned HCI course. We decided to use two different formats, online and physical. First, one experience was performed in “Human Factors in Computing” course of third year of studies, with 70 enrolled students. First, students attended to a 3D online theoretical class related to emotional design in “The education district” (TED) platform, which is a 3D Virtual World (VW) for educational purposes, developed by Virtway corporation. Afterwards, they participated in the 'Game of thrones' gamified activity where they evaluated the usability of TED. Second, we designed 'physical' gamified classes to increase attendance to Data Structures course, and in consequence, augment the number of programming exercises that students perform and the assistance they receive from the teacher. During the gamified sessions, the 120 enrolled students enhanced their skills in solving programming problems. The experience consisted of three kinds of challenges (with easy, medium, and hard difficulty level) solved in large, medium, and low-sized groups of students, respectively. The results of both experiences were satisfactory as evidenced by the percentage of students (>=66,7%) that rated the activities between 6 and 10 (in a 0 to 10 scale).