Gamified: An Effective Approach to Student Motivation Using Gamification

Many modern teaching techniques revolve around the concepts of online courses, collaborative assignments, dynamic grading systems, real-time feedback and motivational inserts into the process of learning. Massive open online courses, which have seen a recent rise in popularity, integrate many of the aspects to enable distant students to take part in higher levels of education. However, while the perspective of migrating towards a pure online environment is in line with the trend of the generations, most professional and intellectual skills can only be effectively learned through physical attendance and practical guided work. The main concern highlighted in this paper is the weak point of most classic educational systems: the constant decreasing motivation it gives its students - individuals who have grown and are embedded in many virtual realities form where they draw intrinsic motivation and energy. We present an educational platform named Gamified, which simplifies the educational and grading systems in modern schools and universities. It relies on the fundamental aspects of the theory of Gamification, namely bringing motivational elements from (computer) games into non-game contexts. It does this through the abandonment of grades (seen by us as negative feedback, a demotivator), and integration of heroes, accumulated experience, levels, level-ups, achievements, quests, guilds, and other representative elements taken from role-playing games (positive feedback at different levels of motivation). Not only do these elements sound familiar to a vast majority of today's students, but they also trigger interest in the new approach to learning. The idea has already been tested on a control group of 50 students with remarkable feedback.