Motivation

Motivation affects job performance and effectivity and amount of time a person is willing to sacrifice. Whether it is in school or in job, motivation is present at every moment of our lives. Motivation is very important in the context of education. Students with motivation will learn faster and their knowledge will be better. There are several theories thinking about motivation theory. One of the latest theories is theory of gamification, what is the use of game mechanics in non-game systems. In this paper, we focus on students' activity evaluation and motivation in the context of web-based learning system. We propose a method for score computation in dynamic point system. Students' work will be rewarded using game mechanics. Implementation and evaluation will be made in ALEF learning system.

Method

In our method we focus on the behaviour of students in an educational web-based system. We proposed the method for dynamic score computation and used it to replace the old one present in the system. The new score computation method observes for a behaviour of a group of students in the system and by evaluating this activity it tries to achieve more or less same effort made from students to work with all types of activities system provides.

This is done by already mentioned method proposed which relies on several factors affecting score. It is

• activity weight, what is value estimating effort necessary to perform this activity,
• activity preference set by the teacher, defining how important is the activity in the certain time period and
• activity priority computed by the system itself, which is based on current status of activity of all students that is amount of activities performed and their relative ratio.

To give the student feedback from the system to know when and how factors affecting score regulation change, part of our method is also a feature called activity stream, which is similar to news streams popular on many social networks. In the stream student can see messages about preference or priority changes. To avoid case stream is overloaded with many similar messages, system regulates content and time interval of generated messages and also provide simple personalization. Example of stream message is shown in the figure below.

Finally, to get more aspects of gamification into system, we proposed a set of simple badges students can receive thanks to their activity. All of the badges already received (as well as unreceived ones) can student see in their profile page containing stream as well.

Evaluation

Experiment was performed in the course of Principles of Software Engineering at Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies. It was performed in uncontrolled form. Students were told to use system as usual. After two weeks, we collected data from all 254 students registered for the course and evaluated 300 changes of priorities. In the final, we used collected data to see if priority changes as expected – increasing for less performed activity types and decreasing for more performed activity types.

Publications

Filipčík, R.

Web-page annotation. Bachelor thesis, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava 2014. 49p. pdf (in Slovak)

Filipčík, R.

Dynamic Score as a Mean for Motivation of Students in an Educational System. In Proc. in Informatics and Information Technology Student Research Conference, IIT.SRC 2014. 2014, pp. 3-8.

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