Analyzing Gamification Impact on a Mastery Learning Introductory Programming Course

In recent years, the use of game elements in non-game contexts has been widely adopted in different contexts, one of which education. Concerned with investigating the effect of gamification on student engagement in the context of an undergraduate Introductory Programming course that applied that Mastery Learning approach, a gamified web application was developed and integrated to a pre-existing online platform used to conduct the syllabus. N = 60 students were randomly assigned to one of two groups: an experimental group with access to the gamified platform and a control group without access to it. The randomization guaranteed a similar number of students in relation to advancement in the course, in each group. The main features explored in the gamified approach were anonymous weekly leaderboards, many categories of badges and personal record-tracking. Each student profile was private. A first 90-minute experiment showed that the experimental group solved 37% more exercises than the control group, on average. From that point onward, student activity was monitored for a period of four weeks, until the end of the course. Though student-activity decreased over time as students completed the course, the experimental group increasingly solved more exercises per week compared to the control group (at least 46% more, on average). After the course was concluded, the experimental group answered a survey which showed that the badges were the feature that motivated them the most. This research's source code is available and may be easily replicated or incremented.