How to Gamify Your Computing Classes

ABSTRACTThe low performance and drop-outs in Computer Science classes are frequently attributed to lack of student engagement and motivation. Meanwhile, gamification increasingly attracts the interest of educators due to its potential to foster motivation and behavioral changes in learning contexts. This virtual workshop introduces participants to the concept of gamification and the use of OneUp Learning, a platform aimed at gamifying academic courses. OneUp is aimed at encouraging students' out-of-class practicing and increasing their overall engagement in the course through employing game design elements. The platform is course-independent and allows the instructor to turn on and off a number of gamification features, including avatars, points, leaderboards, progress bar, content unlocking, goal-setting, badges, virtual currency, duels, etc. For using OneUp, instructors have to provide practice exercises. Apart from the standard question types, OneUp supports Parson's and programming problems, as well as Flash cards. The workshop offers an interactive tutorial and individual work. The tutorial will introduce the OneUp platform and will demonstrate its use for gamifying a course. Workshop attendees will be engaged in hands-on experience. An OneUp course shell will be created and populated with sample data for each workshop attendee. After the tutorial, the participants will be able to explore and further gamify their own OneUp demo course. We will also demonstrate Quest, a repository for sharing OneUp problems.