In late November 2016 we started with a series of gamification experiments in our test elementary school Trnjanska. The mathematics „adder game widget”. The experiments included three different implementations of leaderboard, a typical game element used in gamification (besides points and badges). In the first experiment, a typical leaderboard was implemented, second experiment included the progress bar, while the third experiment had a scoreboard - leaderboard minimized to only two contestants (class versus a virtual opponent - computer virus).

Here, another common gamification element is used – so called narrative. Students were presented with a story of the „evil computer virus that has infected our server and is now spreading to all the tablets. We cannot get rid of it, and it seems that the only way to clean the tablets is that each student plays and wins the game of math knowledge against the virus. And in order to completely expel the virus from the server, all of the students together must solve more math tasks than the virus."

Each experiment lasted for 15 minutes, and the tasks were randomly chosen from a set of 60 tasks per experiment. A set of tasks changed from experiment to experiment in order to follow the material students were learning in the class at that moment.

Non-gamification experiment

The initial experiment served as a reference - to provide baseline data, evaluate the capabilities of each student and estimate motivation of students in usage of non-gamified digital mathematics teaching lessons.

 

The First Experiment

The first gamification experiment used a typical leaderboard implementation. The leaderboard is a separate application, running on the teacher's laptop computer, and the screen was projected on the smartboard. The students were solving tasks on their tablets and all the solutions were sent and saved in the activity log on our database server.

 

The Second experiment

The application of the leaderboard game element in a way as in the first experiment has some known shortcomings – most notably the loss of motivation among average or underachieving students (those who know or sooner or later realize that they have no chance of reaching the top of the leaderboard"). Therefore, in the second experiment, the global leaderboard was replaced with a personal one. Rather than competing against their classmates, students were competing against themselves – trying to push their own limits.

The Third experiment

By the structure and implementation, the third experiment is very similar to the first one, but this time the leaderboard showed the sum of the points of the whole class (versus the points achieved by virus). The goal of this experiment was to find out to what extent cooperation and fight for a common goal improves and sustains students' motivation and engagement. Students were competing against "big strong virus on our server" (one student immediately noticed the similarity between virus and "bosses" appearing at the end of the level in many computer games).

 

Of course, in the end the big evil virus was successfully defeated and expelled from our servers and tablet computers :)