OpenCourse: Gamification in Computer Science Education

Abstract

Academic degrees in computer science suffer from the highest dropout rates among universities. As a result, there is a lack of technical professionals, which could threaten the digital infrastructure. For instance, the employers of companies might have difficulties hiring staff who possess the correct knowledge, which could be detrimental to the security of their companies. Therefore, this project aims to capture and analyze the students’ motivation and engagement while using an educational tool that can be adopted in a university computer science course, which employs gamification for the teaching of the subjects. Regarding the proof-of-concept, a desktop-based application named OpenCourse was developed. Afterward, a comprehensive evaluation was implemented for our proposed methods. We chose frameworks and libraries that quickly allowed us to use popular design conventions when designing OpenCourse. This was done in order to make the target users feel comfortable and get familiarized with the interface design quickly. The primary color of our desktop application was green, enlightened by a set of previous research. From this information, mockups for the theory, tasks, and score pages contained in OpenCourse were designed and were later used as bases when developing the application. In order to evaluate our methods, including the practical usage of the application, a within-subject experiment was performed. In this experiment, the results from the users when they used the application were compared to their results when using merely pen and paper. In addition, a heuristic evaluation where the application was assessed by a predefined set of heuristics was conducted. We observed that the university computer science students tended to feel more motivated and engaged when using the application than when using pen and paper when participating in the experiment. Our conclusions were obtained from a moderate size of samples, which implies that the results can be questioned. However, our work indicates and ignites the direction of bringing gamified digital artifacts into computer science education in universities.