Does tailoring gamified educational systems matter? The impact on students' flow experience

Abstract

Recent research has shown that using gamification can prone to impact negatively on the motivation of students in educational systems. One of the reasons is that people are motivated or demotivated by different gamification elements according to their “gamer type”. Thus, one of the main challenges in this field is to tailor gamified educational systems based on the students' “gamer type” and investigate if this kind of system presents better results than the counter-tailored gamified educational systems. This paper aims to investigate the effects of a tailored gamified educational system based on gamer type in terms of students' flow experience. We conducted an experiment with 121 Brazilian elementary school students comparing a tailored version against a counter-tailored version of a gamified educational system in terms of students' flow experience. The main results indicate that there is no significant difference in terms of students' flow experience, surprising and contradicting recent important studies in this field.