Gamification of a Higher Education Course: What's the fun in That?

Does play belong to the learning situation? What kind of sociability is promoted in the gamification of education? This article explores how student behaviour and interaction change when introducing game elements into a university course, for example by awarding points for different types of active participation during class. Based on student responses and actions during the course, as well as on the teacher experiences and observations, the article underlines the importance of understanding how the teacher can affect students' motivation, social contact and their experience of the learning situation through a balanced use of learning, play elements and game elements. This paper, which examines a course worth five ECTS points on gamification and comprised 20 students from Aalborg University Copenhagen in autumn 2013, evaluates the course and presents a qualitative data analysis (Flick 2014) of observations and interviews concerning the course. The article's empirical data consists of observations of teaching and audio recordings from the first and last lecture, a 45-minute individual interview with 14 students, 15 questionnaire responses and 16 written student evaluations of the course. Furthermore, the empirical data include 19 responses from the students on their motivation for participating in the course. This paper presents an analysis of how students felt about the interaction they experienced during the gamified course and is based on a specific framework (Bateson 2000) and the type of sociability (Simmel 1979) that occurred in relationship to the play that took place. As a result, this paper contributes to the literature by presenting and discussing its findings on the interaction we design for when using game elements in a learning context. Experimentation and the interactions that take place between peers and with teachers are how students learn about the topic at hand. Inviting students to participate in a gamified course on gamification is a meta-pedagogical approach that allowed students to experience gamification and learn from it. This means that the educational design was also supposed to provoke the students at times. We found that playful competiveness among students promotes more activity, but does so at a cost as students found the approach stressful and limiting. Playfulness that enhances affective and enjoyable sociability, however, can leave room for experimenting and having fun - but does it distract students from the task at hand?