Using Game-based Educational Rewards and Social Networks to Encourage Students’ Academic Success
Abstract: Educational rewards normally positively affect students’ learning performance. However, the traditional rewards – such as stickers and candy – might have less attraction to older students and be impractical to students participating in distance learning. On the other hand, gamification becomes a new tool to engage youth in various aspects, including learning. This paper integrates the learning management system and in-game objects as educational rewards to encourage students having better performance in learning activities. The research also integrates social media sharing mechanism in the proposed system due to popularity in youths. With the proposed system, students might want to get the rewards shared by their friends and work harder in the learning activities. To prove the hypotheses, an evaluation plan is proposed to find out whether or not the rewarding and sharing mechanism will engage students’ learning motivation.
Presider: Fu-Shing Sun, Ball State University