Developing a Quest-Based Gamification System to Motivate Student Engagement; Exploring the History of Gamification to Better Understand its Merits in Increasing Student Engagement

Student engagement is defined as student involvement both in and out of class along multiple dimensions. It goes beyond just in-class engagement with actions such as participating in discussions or doing assignments, to include engagement with peers, faculty, and the community, which can be seen in collaborating with other students, attending office hours, and more. Being engaged is shown to be beneficial to students and can lead to better grades and material retention, though a lack of student engagement has become a growing problem. When students aren’t engaged, it can lead to students doing worse academically and socially, leading to stress and falling behind in classes. Thus, gamification comes up as a potential solution to the problem. To understand the merits of gamification as a tool to motivate student engagement, I examine the history of gamification and compare its usage in business versus education in my STS research paper. As a tangible example of gamification use, I cover my implementation of a gamified quest system to encourage students to do engagement-related activities in my technical report. My two papers relate by having my STS research paper examine the solution I propose in my technical report, and future work includes tracking if my project is successful in motivating student engagement, and modifying my technical project to make it more effective using the results I learned from my STS paper.