Analysing gamification elements in educational environments using an existing Gamification taxonomy

TL;DR

This paper expands and details an existing gamification taxonomy to better support the design and evaluation of gamified educational environments, based on analysis of game elements used in such settings.

Contribution

It provides a detailed, expanded taxonomy divided into five dimensions, enhancing tools for designing and analyzing gamification in education.

Findings

Extended the existing taxonomy with five new dimensions

Demonstrated the taxonomy's applicability in educational settings

Provided a structured framework for gamification analysis

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 through a previously proposed and evaluated taxonomy while detailing and expanding this taxonomy. In the current paper, we describe our taxonomy in-depth as well as expand it. Our new structured results demonstrate an extension of the proposed taxonomy which results from this process, is divided into five dimensions, related to the learner and the learning environment. Our main contribution is the detailed taxonomy that can be used to design and evaluate gamification design in learning environments.