Applying a New Game Element Called Backward Grading For Student Engagement

Abstract

Student engagement refers to how actively involved and enthusiastic a student is about their learning process. Engaged students are actively involved in their education, show a willingness to learn, and are motivated to achieve their academic goals. Student engagement is important for learning activities and can be achieved via gamification. In this work, a gamification approach was designed that incorporates game elements such as tournament, teams, multidisciplinary challenges, grading, backward grading, badges, points, and leaderboard. Especially the new game element backward grading is designed to achieve student engagement. The game element grading promotes competitions among student teams. On the other hand, the novel game element backward grading promotes contributions to competitions. The designed gamification setting is applied to an emerging technologies course, and the results show that student engagement is achieved.