Effect of personalized gameful design on student engagement.

Many recent studies of gamification applied to higher education have demonstrated a wide range of positive results. However, most of them fail to consider any personalization factor for the student experience, despite recent studies having shown that gameful systems may be more engaging when they are personalized to each user. Therefore, the goal of this work is to investigate if gameful learning experiences can better motivate and engage students if they are personalized. In this way, we present the design and analysis of a personalized gameful learning experience within a Computer Network Design course. The general purpose of this study is to determine whether a personalized gameful learning experience affects both the students' behavioral and emotional engagement. The results of a descriptive analysis reveal that personalization works better than generic approaches in all items regarding the behavioral and emotional engagement of the students, being a promising standpoint to further investigate in subsequent studies.