Armando Toda

Recent Publications

• A Taxonomy of Game Elements for Gamification in Educational Contexts: Proposal and Evaluation

  2019 Armando M. Toda, Wilk Oliveira, Ana C. Klock, Paula T. Palomino, Marcelo Pimenta, Isabela Gasparini, Lei Shi, Ig Bittencourt, Seiji Isotani and Alexandra I. Cristea

  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 of gamified strategies. This paper aims to create a taxonomy for the game elements, based on gamification experts' opinions. After a brief review from existing work, we extract first the game elements from the current state of the art, and then evaluate them via a survey with 19 gamification and education experts. The resulting taxonomy taxonomy included the description of 21 game elements and their quantitative and qualitative evaluation by the experts. Overall, the proposed taxonomy was in general well accepted by most of the experts. They also suggested expanding it with the inclusion of Narrative and Storytelling game elements. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is proposing a new, confirmed taxonomy to standardise the terminology used to define the game elements as a mean to design and deploy gamification strategies in the educational domain.

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• Validating the Effectiveness of Data-Driven Gamification Recommendations: An Exploratory Study

  2019 Armando M. Toda, Paula T. Palomino, Luiz Rodrigues, Wilk Oliveira, Lei Shi, Seiji Isotani and Alexandra I. Cristea

  Gamification design has benefited from data-driven approaches to creating strategies based on students' characteristics. However, these strategies need further validation to verify their effectiveness in e-learning environments. The exploratory study presented in this paper thus aims at verifying how data-driven gamified strategies are perceived by the students, i.e., the users of e-learning environments. In this study, we conducted a survey presenting 25 predefined strategies, based on a previous study, to students and analysed each strategy's perceived relevance, instanced in an e-learning environment. Our results show that students perceive Acknowledgement, Objective and Progression as important elements in a gamified e-learning environment. We also provide new insights about existing elements and design recommendations for domain specialists.

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• Exploring Content Game Elements to Support Gamification Design in Educational Systems: Narrative and Storytelling

  2019 Paula T. Palomino, Armando M. Toda, Wilk Oliveira, Luiz Rodrigues, Alexandra I. Cristea and Seiji Isotani

  Several studies on gamification applied to educational systems aim at encouraging students to do certain tasks and improving their learning. According to the literature, most gamification frameworks are structural (e.g. scoring systems, ranking, etc.), with few content-related frameworks. To the best of our knowledge, there is no narrative framework available. Therefore this paper analyses data obtained from a survey about the students' preferred game elements in an educational context, with focus on Association Rules found concerning Narrative and Storytelling elements. We show that Narrative and Story-telling are tightly related and provide insights of their use in groups with other game elements, enabling the creation of gamified strategies based on these aspects .

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• Thinking Inside the Box: How to Tailor Gamified Educational Systems Based on Learning Activities Types

  2019 Luiz Rodrigues, Wilk Oliveira, Armando M. Toda, Paula T. Palomino and Seiji Isotani

  Selecting gamification elements suitable for specific players (personalization) has been sought to improve the impacts of Gamified Educational Systems (GES). However, the lack of context might be a factor on the inconsistent results of those approaches. To address this lack, we introduce a method for personalizing GES based on learning activities types. The assumption is that selecting gamification elements for specific types of learning activities has the potential to improve GES impact on users by considering the context of each activity and, thus, contributing to their learning process. We describe how to apply our approach, how it differs from user-based methods, as well as discuss three cases of application and challenges yet to be tackled.

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