Armando Toda

Recent Publications

• For whom should we gamify? Insights on the users intentions and context towards gamification in education

  2020 Armando Toda, Filipe Dwan Pereira, Ana Carolina Tomé Klock, Luiz Rodrigues, Paula Palomino, Wilk Oliveira, Elaine Harada Teixeira Oliveira, Isabela Gasparini, Alexandra Ioana Cristea, Seiji Isotani

  Gamification design in educational environments is not trivial and many variables need to be considered to achieve positive outcomes. Often, educators and designers do not know when the students intentions on the use of gamified environments might influence their experience. Based on this premise, this paper describes an exploratory study on the users intention to use gamification, focusing on its influence in the field of education. We conducted a survey study with participants (N= 1.692) and analysed their answers using unsupervised data mining techniques. As a result, we obtained empirical evidence showing that demographic and contextual variables influence (positively and negatively) peoples intention to use gamification. This evidence can support designers and educators better understand whether and when they should or should not gamify a learning environment.

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• Using learning analytics in the Amazonas: understanding students’ behaviour in introductory programming

  2020 Filipe D Pereira, Elaine HT Oliveira, David BF Oliveira, Alexandra I Cristea, Leandro SG Carvalho, Samuel C Fonseca, Armando Toda, Seiji Isotani

  Tools for automatic grading programming assignments, also known as Online Judges, have been widely used to support computer science (CS) courses. Nevertheless, few studies have used these tools to acquire and analyse interaction data to better understand the students’ performance and behaviours, often due to data availability or inadequate granularity. To address this problem, we propose an Online Judge called CodeBench, which allows for fine‐grained data collection of student interactions, at the level of, eg, keystrokes, number of submissions, and grades. We deployed CodeBench for 3 years (2016–18) and collected data from 2058 students from 16 introductory computer science (CS1) courses, on which we have carried out fine‐grained learning analytics, towards early detection of effective/ineffective behaviours regarding learning CS concepts. Results extract clear behavioural classes of CS1 students, significantly differentiated both semantically and statistically, enabling us to better explain how student behaviours during programming have influenced learning outcomes. Finally, we also identify behaviours that can guide novice students to improve their learning performance, which can be used for interventions. We believe this work is a step forward towards enhancing Online Judges and helping teachers and students improve their CS1 teaching/learning practices.

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• GamiCSM: relating education, culture and gamification-a link between worlds

  2020 Armando Toda, Ana Carolina Tomé Klock, Paula T Palomino, Luiz Rodrigues, Wilk Oliveira, Craig Stewart, Alexandra I Cristea, Isabela Gasparini, Seiji Isotani

  The potential of gamification to improve users' motivation and engagement influenced many researchers and professionals to analyse its effects in educational settings. While some studies focus on adapting game elements according to demographic and behavioural information of the user profile, few of them explore (or even consider) cultural factors. These cultural factors play an essential role in our societies' development. Thus, this work proposes and evaluates a representative model to understand better the relationship between cultural factors and gamification within educational domains, namely the Gamification for Cultural Studies Model (GamiCSM). Through a qualitative approach, we map Hofstede's cultural dimensions (i.e., power distance, individualism/collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity/femininity, long/short-term orientation, and indulgence/restraint) with a Taxonomy of Gamification Elements for Education (TGEEE), a recent model for gamification elements for educational environments. Furthermore, we adapted a survey to evaluate the resultant model with eight domain experts in gamification and education. Based on this evaluation, we are able to propose a starting model, containing some additional refinements and improvements. Thus, the main contributions of this work are: (i) the first model to relate game elements and cultural dimensions within educational domains and (ii) a state-of-the-art empirical study intersecting culture, gamification and education.

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• Gamification Works, but How and to Whom?: An Experimental Study in the Context of Programming Lessons

  2021 Luiz Rodrigues, Armando M Toda, Wilk Oliveira, Paula T Palomino, Anderson Paulo Avila-Santos, Seiji Isotani

  Programming is a complex, not trivial to learn and teach task, which gamification can facilitate. However, how gamification affects learning and the influence of context-related aspects on that effect demand research to better understand how and to whom gamification enhances programming learning. Therefore, we conducted an experimental study analyzing how gamification worked and the role of context-related aspects in terms of intervention duration and learners' familiarity with programming (i.e., the task's topic). It was a six-week study with 19 undergraduate students from an Algorithms class that measured their learning gains, intrinsic motivation, and number of completed quizzes. Mainly, we found gamification affected learning via intrinsic motivation, effect that depended on intervention duration and learners' familiarity with programming. That is, intrinsic motivation strongly predicted learning gains and gamification's effect on intrinsic motivation changed over time, decreasing from positive to negative as learners had less familiarity with programming. Thus, showing gamification can positively impact programming learning by improving students' intrinsic motivation, although that effect changes over time depending on one's previous familiarity with programming.

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