Implementing Gamified Teaching: Exploring the Effects of Gamification and Personal Types in an Economics Course

Introduction

In higher education context the goal of this study was to examine if gamification can be a useful method to enhance the motivation or engagement of the students. It also examines whether there are differences between the player types in terms of their entertainment or their perceived relevance of the course when they receive gamified education. Would gamification provide enjoyment besides the utilitarian value of the educational instructional processes? Gamification had demonstrated positive effects in former research efforts, in the context of education (Adukaite et al. 2017; Eynard et al. 2017; Gil-quintana et al. 2017; Stoyanova et al. 2017; Yildirim 2017). Experiments that aim to measure the efficiency of gamified tools are mostly empirical, case-based research processes. Many results report that gamified learning strengthens learning activity and engagement. However, in order to help gamification designers to implement the most necessary game elements in each context, one of the most important research directions in the literature is to reveal the differences of the users in terms of their personality traits, gender and player types (Hamari et al. 2014; Nacke and Deterding 2017; Tondello et al. 2016). This article focuses on the impacts of gamification according to the player types.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the gamified methodology used in an economics course and to build an empirical test, that measures the different indicators such as the enhancement of student’s engagement, entertainment, motivation, knowledge increase, participation and the perceived relevance of the courses. The basic assumption of the authors is that points, badges, challenges, levels, and rankings result various effects in case of different player types. In this empirical experiment a course with classic syllabus was gamified where the students participated offline lectures. The main questions in this article are the following: What type of differences can be discovered comparing the evaluation of gamified and non-gamified participations, and player types?

The article contributes to the literature of instructional effectiveness in the classroom in higher education context. This activity has the potential to increase educational performance on classic, lecture type instruction, where a large group size and descriptive course materials might prevent students from becoming motivated and engaged.

The first part of the article offers a literature review that explores the traits of gamification in higher education and provides a short summary of existing gamification tools and the possible ways to differentiate the users. In the next session the authors introduce the process of gamifying a course. Then the measurement will be introduced. Finally, the researchers offer a discussion, highlighting the effects of gamification in terms of the variables of knowledge increase, participation, motivation, engagement, entertainment, and perceived relevance of the course on the students. The article contributes to the literature by analyzing these effects on differentiated player types.