An Experience Of Evaluating Different Designs Of Gamifying Homework For Primary Education

Gamification has emerged in recent years as an innovative approach to increase motivation and engagement.The growing interest in adopting gamification encouraged many researchers and educators to implement it in their educational practices.Educational gamification has been employed for gamifying course contents,lectures,activities,and assessments.Homework is an essential instructional activity in the learning process,which supports concepts and skills acquisition and one of the most controversial issues in education.Although the benefits of the assigned homework for students,primary school students suffer when doing their homework assignments with a lack of motivation to achieve it besides their reluctance to solve assignments.This research suggests gamifying homework by deploying the game design elements in homework context to overcome the challenges of homework accomplishment and help students to enjoy their homework.The initial findings figured out that gamifying homework practices are facing some challenges.i.e.,homework completion,gameful design,gameful experience,and the tendency to complete the short gamified assignments.Therefore,this dissertation sought to solve these problems through proposing a novel design approach,i.e.,the micro design approach for gamifying learning assignments.This dissertation aims to evaluate the gameful design of homework for primary education and promote the micro design approach for gamifying learning assignments.It also investigates the effects of the gamified homework for primary school students on motivation,engagement,cognitive load,performance,and the perceived gameful experience.To achieve these objectives,Design-Based Research(DBR)was mainly used to enhance both design,research,and practice through iterative cycles of developing and evaluating the gamified homework.Moreover,concept-driven approach was implemented to formulate theoretical concepts in particular design for proposing the micro design approach.This dissertation includes four design iterations for developing the gamified homework.The first iteration aims to develop an application for gamifying homework and investigate the gamified homework's effects on perceived satisfaction,behavioral intention,and intrinsic motivation.The second iteration seeks to identify students' experience and satisfaction with game elements when gamifying homework assignments by performing the learning analytics.The third iteration examines the impact of gamifying homework assignments on homework performance and perceptions of the gameful experience.Consequently,the fourth iteration investigates the effectiveness of implementing the micro design approach on the gameful experience,intrinsic motivation,cognitive load,and engagement.The results of conducting these iterations show significant findings: the positive effects of gamifying homework on motivation,engagement,behavioral intension,and the perceived gameful experience;gamification does not guarantee increasing homework performance and completion rates;students felt optimistic with the gamified homework and valued using the gamification elements;the adverse effect of some game elements.Moreover,the micro design approach is a promising approach for gamifying homework to reduce the cognitive load of homework assignments.The main contributions of this dissertation are summarized as follows: a critical analysis and comprehensive synthesis of state-of-the-art gamifying education reviews published between 2016 and 2020,the instructional design process for gamifying homework with evidence of its effects,evaluation of different designs of the gamified homework through iterative cycle's experiments,and the proposed micro-design approach for gamifying learning assignments with an empirical validation of its effect in terms of the gameful experience,intrinsic motivation,engagement,and cognitive load.