Gamification Design for Educational Contexts: Theoretical and Practical Contributions

Have you ever wondered how to best add game-like elements to your (online) courses? What makes some game features desirable, and others boring? This book covers gamification design in educational domains. It is aimed at practitioners, researchers and academics alike. Gamification design is a recent and relevant topic in many domains; however, it is not well explored in the domain of education, with only a few frameworks available and most of these being only academic (e.g., theoretical) and not addressing practical issues related to education practitioners (e.g., teachers and instructors). The book is divided into 3 parts, in part 1 we explain some basic concepts related to gamification and gamification design, its importance for the education domain, possible negative effects if gamification design is neglected, and aspects that are still not encompassed by this field. Following, part 2 focus on explaining data-driven gamification design concepts as well as a research framework on how to use data mining algorithms to analyze and interpret data to generate strategies that can be used in education domain. It also presents a conceptual framework on how to apply those strategies in the education domain, focusing on the teacher and instructor; Finally, part 3 presents discussions regarding the concepts covered in the book, as well as possible research directions