Can Ontologies Support the Gamification of Scripted Collaborative Learning Sessions?

In the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), scripts orchestrate the collaborative learning (CL) process to achieve meaningful interactions among the students and so improve the learning outcomes. Nevertheless, the use of scripts may cause motivational problems over time. To deal with this issue, we propose the gamification of scripted CL sessions through an ontology that encodes knowledge from game design practices and theories of motivation and human behavior. This knowledge may be used by intelligent theory-aware systems to avoid the one-size-fits-all approach, providing support for the personalization of gamification. In this paper, we reported the results obtained in an empirical study to validate our ontology-based gamification of scripted CL sessions. Findings from this study indicate that intrinsic motivation, perceived choice, and effort/importance of students were significantly better when our ontology was used to support the gamification. The learning outcomes were significantly better in scripted CL sessions gamified through our approach, with positive correlations to the intrinsic motivation and perceived choice. Based on these results, we can state that the use of ontologies provides adequate support to carry out well-thought-out gamification of scripted sessions.