Gamification for students

In the recent times, gamification has become extremely popular and useful among the product teams to increase user-engagement.

Our product is an education app, which is used as a primary mode of learning in the schools for grades 5–12. However, for the next quarter, we are looking at expanding into the direction of remedial learning as well.

This means that the teachers would not be always there, forcing the students to learn through our platform. That would result in a potential decrease in the user engagement, and student learning overall. Because really, who wants to use an app outside school to improve learning, without any motivational factor.

What are the user problems?

This led us to reviewing our user experience across the platform, and understanding the current problems that our users are facing/will face, if one of the stake-holders(teachers) were removed from the equation.

We are not instilling any emotion in the students during their journey in the platform, that can increase the user engagement on its own, without any external impact (such as teachers).

Instilling emotions such as excitement, frustration, amusement and sensory can not only bring the students back to the platform, but can also increase student’s learning.

So what are the problems our users are facing?

Why should I study?

1. When using the platform as secondary/remedial platform, students need motivation to begin learning.
2. Most students do not find it engaging after the first few minutes, if not forced by their teachers to use it.
3. If there are no teachers, there is no external factor to keep the students engaged in the application, or to bring them back to the platform.
4. There is no initial push for the students to “open the app” in the first place.

There isn’t any story:

1. There is no standard mean for measuring the student’s progress through a lesson and a subject in the platform. Stars are distributed into different categories so can’t really take out any meaning from them.
2. The rewards accumulated are per subject per term, and it can be very demotivating for the students to “loose” their rewards when moving between terms.
3. All the students are awarded the same kind of stars from their teachers for any behaviour, so there is no way to rank certain student behaviour above another e.g. finishing a lesson on time, or a student who is improving the skillset will be awarded the same star.
4. There is no count of teacher’s awards based on categories, so the students progress in a certain category needs to be calculated manually.
5. Within practice, there is no indication of a student’s progress, so they don’t know how many questions they have completed/are remaining, which can make student’s leave in the middle.

What’s in it for me?

1. Rewards are only given to students who perform 100% in practice/ exit ticket etc. This is very demotivating for the students who are performing well but not getting 100% score.
2. For low performing students, they are already struggling and falling behind, and the lack of rewards for them makes them further demotivated.
3. The stars accumulated by students can’t be redeemed/used anywhere, so most students wont be interested in gathering the awards.
4. A student’s rewards are not shared across with other students in the group/class, so they can’t boast off the achievements and again, that reduces the child’s motivation to earn something. The desire to be a “leader” is a major motivation factor in students.
5. There isn’t any competitive game in the platform at the moment, and competition amongst each other can increase motivation in students.
6. There is no real-time feedback for the students during practice/exit ticket or in-between different modes of the depth of knowledge, to keep the students motivated when they are passing, or to increase their motivation and encouraging them to keep going when they are failing.

All these problems are valid, interrelated and can be solved through the introduction of gamification in our platform.

But, why gamification?

Image Credit: https://braveintheattempt.com/

Gamification in an application corresponds to inserting gameplay elements in a non-gaming system, in our case, the Alef platform, so that the user engagement with the app is enhanced.

If done right, we can inject an element of fun into the platform for our students, incentivising them to achieve their goals and help them overcome negative associations they may have with the platform.

We should incorporate gamification into the platform, such that it serves as an effective intrinsic motivation i.e. students begin to engage with the platform because they want to, not because they are forced to.

What is our objective?

We are looking at achieving the following:

1. Improving overall user engagement.

2. Giving the students a story to follow.

3. Motivating the students to learn.

We will be looking at how to achieve these objectives one by one.