Armando Toda

Durham University / University of Sao Paulo · Computer Science

There are many claims that gamification (i.e., using game elements outside games) impact decreases over time (i.e., the novelty effect). Most studies analyzing this effect focused on extrinsic game elements, while fictional and collaborative competition have been recently recommended. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, no long-term researc...

Research on tailored gamification has shifted from analysing single students' characteristics (e.g. gender or behavioural profiles) to multiple characteristics and how they are influenced by gamification (e.g. context and system log usage). Yet, few studies have been conducted that are concerned with culture, which influences many of the students'...

Gamification applied to education could impact positively (or negatively) students’ psychological and cognitive aspects, such as motivation, engagement and learning performance. Nevertheless, the perceptions of education professionals and their concerns about implicit biases and ethics that emerge from applying gamification to support learning has...

Gamification has been widely used to design better educational systems aiming to increase students’ concentration, motivation, engagement, flow experience, and others positive experiences. With advances in research on gamification in education, over the past few years, many studies have highlighted the need to tailor the gamification design propert...

Gamification refers to the attempt to transform different kinds of systems to be able to better invoke positive experiences such as the flow state. However, the ability of such intervention to invoke flow state is commonly believed to depend on several moderating factors including the user’s traits. Currently, there is a dearth of research on the e...

Students face several difficulties in introductory programming courses (CS1), often leading to high dropout rates, student demotivation, and lack of interest. The literature has indicated that the adequate use of gamification might improve learning in several domains, including CS1. However, the understanding of which (and how) factors influence ga...

Personalized gamification explores user models to tailor gamified designs to mitigate cases wherein the one-size-fits-all approach ineffectively improves learning outcomes. The tailoring process should simultaneously consider user and contextual characteristics (e.g., activity to be done and geographic location), which leads to several occasions to...

O interesse na gamificação por professores e outros profissionais da educação vem aumentando nos últimos anos. Contudo, a literatura indica que dependendo da forma como a gamificação é planejada e executada os resultados podem beneficiar ou prejudicar à aprendizagem e motivação dos estudantes. Neste contexto, é fundamental desenvolver técnicas de d...

Gamification has been discussed as a standout approach to improve user experience, with different studies showing that users can have different preferences over game elements according to their user types. However, relatively less is known how different kinds of users may react to different types of gamification. Therefore, in this study (N=331) we...

Personalization of gamification is an alternative to overcome the shortcomings of the one-size-fits-all approach, but the few empirical studies analyzing its effects do not provide conclusive results. While many user and contextual information affect gamified experiences, prior personalized gamification research focused on a single user characteris...

Programming online judges (POJs) are autograders that have been increasingly used in introductory programming courses (also known as CS1) since these systems provide instantaneous and accurate feedback for learners’ codes solutions and reduce instructors’ workload in evaluating the assignments. Nonetheless, learners typically struggle to find probl...

Teachers and learners who search for learning materials in open educational resources (OER) repositories greatly benefit from feedback and reviews left by peers who have activated these resources in their class. Such feedback can also fuel social-based ranking algorithms and recommendation systems. However, while educational users appreciate the re...

In recent years, studies in different areas have used gamification to improve users' flow experience. However, due to the high variety of the conducted studies and the lack of secondary studies (e.g., systematic literature reviews) in this field, it is difficult to get the state-of-the-art of this research domain. To address this problem, we conduc...

This text presents and analyzes the contributions of a collection of articles related to research carried out by the author and his collaborators. The articles are related to the fields of Gamification Applied to Education and use three key approaches called Gamification in Education, Gamification Planning in Educational Contexts and Data-Based Gam...

Teachers and learners who search for learning materials inopen educational resources (OER) repositories greatly benefit from feed-back and reviews left by peers who have activated these resources in theirclass. Such feedback can also fuel social-based ranking algorithms andrecommendation systems. However, while educational users appreciatethe recom...

Programming is a complex, not trivial to learn and teach task, which gamification can facilitate. However, how gamification affects learning and the influence of context-related aspects on that effect demand research to better understand how and to whom gamification enhances programming learning. Therefore, we conducted an experimental study analyz...

Personalized gamification explores knowledge about the users to tailor gamification designs to improve one-size-fits-all gamification. The tailoring process should simultaneously consider user and contextual characteristics (e.g., activity to be done and geographic location), which leads to several occasions to tailor. Consequently, tools for autom...

One of the main challenges in the field of learning technologies is the automatic students' flow experience identification in educational systems. This challenge occurs because the flow experience identification is usually conducted by using invasive techniques (e.g., eye trackers or electroencephalograms) or approaches that are not able to handle...

Gamification design in educational environments is not trivial and many variables need to be considered to achieve positive outcomes. Often, educators and designers do not know when the students' intentions on the use of gamified environments might influence their experience. Based on this premise, this paper describes an exploratory study on the u...

Understanding how each game element in isolation affects learners' motivation and contextual factors' moderator effects is needed to improve gam-ified interventions. Thus, this paper explored the impact of one of the most used game elements-Competition-on motivation and whether task-related contex-tual factors (e.g., familiarity with the task's sub...

With the increasing number of students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) being enrolled in the public education system, it is progressively necessary to think about differentiated pedagogical practices to assist in the learning of these scholars. From this angle, the usage of technologies can be an alternative for the teaching-learning process of...

One of the main challenges we face in the educational domain nowadays is the lack of student engagement in traditional teaching methods. One way to address this challenge is through the use of gamification strategies, especially in educational systems. In this paper we address some difficulties and possible solutions to this challenge, discussing h...

Personalized gamification has gained substantial interest due to the expectation that it can improve gamification's success. Considering some secondary studies on this topic, they lack to present the characteristics of empirical studies and some aspects on how per-sonalization approaches were designed. In this paper, we present a literature review...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) exhibit a remarkable heterogeneity of students. The advent of complex "big data" from MOOC platforms is a challenging yet rewarding opportunity to deeply understand how students are engaged in MOOCs. Past research, looking mainly into overall behavior, may have missed patterns related to student diversity. Using...

Gamification design has benefited from data-driven approaches to creating strategies based on students characteristics. However, these strategies need further validation to verify their effectiveness in e-learning environments. The exploratory study presented in this paper thus aims at verifying how data-driven gamified strategies are perceived by...

Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design and analysis of gamified strategies. This paper analysed the game elements employed in gamified learning environments through a...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continue to see increasing enrolment, but only a small percent of enrolees completes the MOOCs. Whilst a lot of research has focused on predicting completion, there is little research analysing the ostensible contradiction between the MOOC's popularity and the apparent disengagement of learners. Specifically, it...

An exploratory study on social interactions of MOOC students in FutureLearn was conducted, to answer "how can we cluster students based on their social interactions?" Comments were categorized based on how students interacted with them, e.g., how a student's comment received replies from peers. Statistical modelling and machine learning were used t...

This paper presents for the first time a detailed analysis of fine-grained navigation style identification in MOOCs backed by a large number of active learners. The result shows 1) whilst the sequential style is clearly in evidence, the global style is less prominent; 2) the majority of the learners do not belong to either category; 3) navigation s...

Despite many studies proposing and evaluating frameworks to design gamified environments in education, there is still difficulty in making end-users (e.g., teachers, instructors, and designers) use these services and assess which ones are most appropriate for their context. We tackled this challenge by comparing two frameworks to design a gamified...

An exploratory study on social interactions of MOOC students in FutureLearn was conducted, to answer "how can we cluster students based on their social interactions?" Comments were categorized based on how students interacted with them, e.g., how a student's comment received replies from peers. Statistical modelling and machine learning were used t...

This chapter demonstrates a temporal analysis in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), towards identifying at-risk students through analyzing their demographical changes. At-risk students are those who tend to drop out from the MOOCs. Previous studies have shown that how students interact in MOOCs could be used to identify at-risk students. Some stu...

This paper presents for the first time a detailed analysis of fine-grained navigation style identification in MOOCs backed by a large number of active learners. The result shows 1) whilst the sequential style is clearly in evidence, the global style is less prominent; 2) the majority of the learners do not belong to either category; 3) navigation s...

The impact of gamification has been typically evaluated via self-report assessments (questionnaires, surveys, etc.). In this work, we analise the use of gamification elements as parameters, to predict whether students are going to fail or not in a programming course. Additionally, unlike prior research, we verify how usage of gamification features...

Tools for automatic grading programming assignments, also known as Online Judges, have been widely used to support computer science (CS) courses. Nevertheless, few studies have used these tools to acquire and analyse interaction data to better understand the students’ performance and behaviours, often due to data availability or inadequate granular...

One of the main goals of gamification in educational settings is to increase student motivation and engagement. To facilitate the design of gamified educational systems, in recent years, studies have proposed various approaches (e.g., methodologies, frameworks and models). One of the main problems, however, is that most of these approaches are theo...

This paper presents an experience report concerning the use of a platform called “Storium” in the subject of “Interactive Fiction” for undergraduate students, from a Digital Design Course. The objective was to use the learning theories of constructivism and multimedia learning to create an instructional plan devised to teach the students how to cre...

Recent research has shown that using gamification can prone to impact negatively on the motivation of students in educational systems. One of the reasons is that people are motivated or demotivated by different gamification elements according to their "gamer type". Thus, one of the main challenges in this field is to tailor gamified educational sys...

Abstract Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design and analysis of gamified strategies. This paper analysed the game elements employed in gamified learning environments t...

One of the main challenges in the field of educational games is the automatic and implicit users' game experience identification. To face this challenge , we present an exploratory study by using a data-driven based approach for collecting and identifying this experience. We used two different data-mining techniques aiming to associate the user's d...

Gamification design has benefited from data-driven approaches to creating strategies based on students' characteristics. However, these strategies need further validation to verify their effectiveness in e-learning environments. The exploratory study presented in this paper thus aims at verifying how data-driven gamified strategies are perceived by...

Several studies on gamification applied to educational systems aim at encouraging students to do certain tasks and improving their learning. According to the literature, most gamification frameworks are structural (e.g. scoring systems, ranking, etc.), with few content-related frameworks. To the best of our knowledge, there is no narrative framewor...

Selecting gamification elements suitable for specific players (personalization) has been sought to improve the impacts of Gamified Educational Systems (GES). However, the lack of context might be a factor on the inconsistent results of those approaches. To address this lack, we introduce a method for personalizing GES based on learning activities t...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continue to see increasing enrolment, but only a small percent of enrolees completes the MOOCs. Whilst a lot of research has focused on predicting completion, there is little research analysing the ostensible contradiction between the MOOC’s popularity and the apparent disengagement of learners. Specifically, it...

Gamification applied to education studies are often related to the student's motivation and performance in specific tasks. However, what stimulates one student does not always have the same result with another one. Thus, some methods were developed to group and identify gamification users preferences, called "gamer types". By identifying the "gamer...

Flow is a state of deep engagement that is highly related to the learning experiences. One of the biggest challenges in this field is to provide automatic and implicit students' flow experience identification in educational systems, contributing to the educational systems design and evaluation improvement. In this paper, we propose a theory-driven...

Gamification applied to education studies are fo-cusing to encourage students to perform specific tasks, however many of these studies are still inconclusive about how much gam-ification can influence engagement. Also, the frameworks used to apply gamification in those systems are mainly structural (e.g. scoring and ranking systems) rather than con...

Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design of gamified strategies. This paper aims to create a taxonomy for the game elements, based on gamification experts' opinions. Aft...

Gamification frameworks can aid in gamification planning for education. Most frameworks, however, do not provide ways to select, relate or recommend how to use game elements , to gamify a certain educational task. Instead, most provide a "one-size-fits-all" approach covering all learners, without considering different user characteristics, such as...

Gamification frameworks can aid in gamification planning for education. Most frameworks, however, do not provide ways to select, relate or recommend how to use game elements, to gamify a certain educational task. Instead, most provide a "one-size-fits-all" approach covering all learners, without considering different user characteristics, such as g...

In the last few years, gamification studies have increased in the field of education and digital technologies, showing different results on the use of gamified educational systems in relation to students' learning aspects. These studies, however, often keep the focus on quantitative or qualitative approaches directly related to student learning, wi...

A gamificação tem sido bastante utilizada para aumentar o engajamento e a motivação dos estudantes em contextos educacionais, ampliando o interesse por parte de professores e instrutores. No entanto, há um consenso na literatura quanto a necessidade de abordagens sistemáticas (métodos, processos e/ou frameworks) para apoiar o planejamento da gamifi...

Students' motivation plays an important role in their educational process. Several studies indicate that the lack of motivation hinders students' learning. To mitigate this problem researchers have been using Gamification to solve engagement and motivational problems, which aroused the interest of teachers and instructors. However, those education...

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, ther...

Gamification has a great number of studies in the education area since the emergence of the term. However, there is a lack of primary and secondary studies that explore the negative effects that gamification may have on learners, and lack of studies that analyze the gamification design that are linked to those negative effects. Based on this premis...

The role of computing in society is fundamental for the political, economic and cultural development of countries, especially in a globalized context. Computational thinking is an extremely important skill in the education of young students, since the ability of intuitively abstracting information and knowledge promotes an expansion of the learning...

Gamification strategies aligned with social network features increase student’s engagement and motivation, along its interactions. However, there is a lack of models or processes that aids the instructors to deploy gamification and social network features within their educational environments in an effective way, since most of these instructors do...

A gamificação vem sendo difundida no contexto educacional como uma forma de aprimorar o engajamento e a motivação de alunos. Vários estudos mostram os resultados positivos de sua aplicação, o que faz com que as pesquisas nessa área estejam ganhando espaço na ciência. No entanto, para alcançar estes resultados, é necessário realizar um bom planejame...

Software testing is a relevant activity to provide evidence of qualifty of software products. However, there is a lack of qualified professionals in this area. This can be caused due to difficulty in teaching software testing through approaches that use only theoretical classes and traditional tools. In addition, there is a lack of motivation due t...