An approach for planning and deploying gamification concepts with social networks within educational contexts

Gamification planning has been a topic of discussion in the last years since it can be used to increase performance, engagement, and motivation of end users. When properly applied in educational settings, gamification can lead to better learning. Furthermore, it can be boosted when tied to social networks. However, according to the literature, there are three main concerns regarding this topic: (a) instructors and teachers does not have the resources to plan and develop gamification strategies into their classes; (b) gamification needs a systematic approach to achieve the desired positive results; and (c) inexistence of systematic approaches that connect and help in the design of gamification and social network tasks within these contexts. Thus, this work proposes a solution to help instructors and teachers to plan and deploy gamification concepts with social network features in learning environments. In this paper, we detailed our approach depicting the set of items to analyze and compare it with other solutions that are focused on education. Then, it was conducted a case study over a programming course (N = 40) to analyze the planning and deployment phases. Our results demonstrated that our approach is the first to consider the stakeholders (i.e. instructors and teachers) as part of the process. Moreover, even though there are still some obstacles to overcome, the gamified strategies that were created achieved positive acceptance among the students and professor.