A Taxonomy of Game Elements for Gamification in Educational Contexts: Proposal and Evaluation

Toda, Armando; Oliveira, Wilk; Klock, Ana; Shi, Lei; Bittencourt, Ig Ibert; Gasparini, Isabela; Isotani, Seiji; Cristea, Alexandra I.; Palomino, Paula

Abstract

Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design of gamified strategies. This paper aims to create a taxonomy for the game elements, based on gamification experts' opinions. After a brief review from existing work, we extract first the game elements from the current state of the art, and then evaluate them via a survey with 19 gamification and education experts. The resulting taxonomy taxonomy included the description of 21 game elements and their quantitative and qualitative evaluation by the experts. Overall, the proposed taxonomy was in general well accepted by most of the experts. They also suggested expanding it with the inclusion of Narrative and Storytelling game elements. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is proposing a new, confirmed taxonomy to standardise the terminology used to define the game elements as a mean to design and deploy gamification strategies in the educational domain.

Citation

Toda, A., Oliveira, W., Klock, A., Shi, L., Bittencourt, I. I., Gasparini, I., Isotani, S., Cristea, A. I., & Palomino, P. (2019, July). A Taxonomy of Game Elements for Gamification in Educational Contexts: Proposal and Evaluation. Presented at International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies and Technology-enhanced Learning, Maceió, Brazil

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies and Technology-enhanced Learning
• Start Date: Jul 15, 2019
• End Date: Jul 18, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Mar 22, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Sep 2, 2019
• Publication Date: 2019-07
• Deposit Date: Jul 3, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 3, 2021
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Volume: 2161
• Pages: 84-88
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/icalt.2019.00028
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1142410
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8820847