Planning Gamification Strategies based on User Characteristics and DM: A Gender-based Case Study

TL;DR

This study proposes a data-driven, gender-sensitive approach to gamification in education, providing tailored game element recommendations based on user preferences to enhance learning engagement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel survey-based analysis of user preferences, offering specific, gender-based recommendations for gamification strategies in educational contexts.

Findings

Identified key game elements: Objectives, Levels, Progress, and Choice.

Discovered gender-specific associations among game elements.

Provided actionable guidelines for educators to tailor gamification.

Abstract

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 gender. Therefore, this work aims to adopt a data-driven approach to provide a set of game element recommendations, based on user preferences, that could be used by teachers and instructors to gamify learning activities. We analysed data from a novel survey of 733 people (male=569 and female=164), collecting information about user preferences regarding game elements. Our results suggest that the most important rules were based on four (out of nineteen) types of game elements: Objectives, Levels, Progress and Choice. From the perspective of user gender, for the female sample, the most interesting rule associated Objectives with Progress, Badges and Information (confidence=0.97), whilst the most interesting rule for the male sample associated also Objectives with Progress, Renovation and Choice (confidence=0.94). These rules and our descriptive analysis provides recommendations on how game elements can be used in educational scenarios.