Topic 4

  

Welcome back to my blog! Today I am going share about evaluation of the gamified applications. I have selected one academic paper to discuss the evaluation of gamified applications. I hope everyone understand what the game is and how games are attractive to us. Nowadays many industries apply the use of game design elements into non-game contexts to attract users and make application more fun and engaging. The objective of this research paper is that there is a little exploration about the individual gamification elements. Three basic gamification elements are badges, leaderboards and points. The goal is to understand which of the elements have a more significant effect of effectiveness, attractiveness and acceptance from the user perspective regardless of limitations identified in previous study. In this paper, the researchers evaluate the gamified elements in one of the educational applications which is Knowma+ with 10 participants, 5 are students and 5 are teachers. The gamification in education aims to gain the attention of students and motivate them to actively involves in the learning process. I have listed the strengths and weaknesses of the research paper in order to gain the knowledge of how gamified applications can be evaluated.

Strengths

1)Background of application(Knowmo+) before evaluation can get the basic knowledge of how gamification elements can be applied in educational application.

2)Using mix method approach allows researchers to analyze numerical data of quantitative research together with the verbal data for qualitative research in order to get more in-depth insight.

Evaluation was conducted with the four method of study:

1.Eye tracking (It is useful method for both usability problems and attention to the gamification elements implemented.)

2.Think Aloud observation (Participants are observed with thinking aloud while interacting with the system)

3.Questionnaires (SUS and UES-SF has applied to evaluate perceived usability, usability scale and user engagement)

4.Interviews (semi-structured interviews with open and close-ended.) By using semi-structured interviews, researcher can collect the ideas from participants. Ideation is another important factor in gamification. This evaluation type to come up with the ideas for gamification designs from participants would be advantage.

The result of using verbal data from think-aloud enables the researchers to understand better the gaze data. With the help of eye-tracking, researchers are able to infer some usability issues.

3)Based on the prior associated study, feedback mechanism is another important weakness in education. Therefore, researchers emphasize to understand the issues relating to feedback because feedback mechanism contributes to increased positive affect and self-efficacy by making user feel directly responsible for their success.

Weaknesses

1)      Another key element of gamification is motivation and how to sustain it. Therefore, the researchers should consider different user types to involve in the evaluation process to understand what the teachers and students’ motivation are.

2)      The paper did not state what the semi-structured interview questions are for reader’s better understanding.  

3)      Participant may not be motivated to involve interviews and observations without any kind of compensation.

 

Reference

Pamela Andrade 1, Effie Lai-Chong Law 1 User-based Evaluation of Gamification Elements in an Educational Application