Towards an effective methodology for the integral gamification of classes

Gamification serves various purposes. In the context of education, it can be used to create visually appealing and engaging activities for students. However, as experts have noted, simply gamifying the content of a class may not be enough to improve student learning. To develop an approach that would enable us to gamify both class content and instructional design, we started a new project. As our initial step, we consulted relevant literature. Drawing inspiration from our findings, we formulated a methodology named GamiClass. To assess its potential, we held a workshop where we taught university professors how to utilise it, seeking their input. Subsequently, with an enhanced version, we designed an undergraduate Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) course. Finally, we conducted a randomised, controlled trial making use of a third iteration of the methodology. The results indicate that both educators and students benefit from its implementation. In this paper, we present our findings, discuss the pros and cons of our integral approach to gamifying classes (i.e., gamifying both content and instructional design), and outline our future work aimed at consolidating its effectiveness.