Gamification Design Principles and Mechanics to Improve Retention

Introduction

The design and guidelines for Gamification have always been outstanding for the designers to find a range of solutions to provide empowerment, engagement, and assist with retention within Education. It is essential to think of the learner's perspective and find new ways of creating challenges and motivation techniques to provide value and learner engagement (Gatti, Ulrich & Seele, 2019). To assist with motivation, engagement, and influences, as pointed out by Gatti et al. (2019), Bhatti (2019), and Herman et al. (2020), maintaining the learner attitudes is essential when dealing with learners. This is extremely important when looking at 21^st-century skills of literacy and how game-based learning disciplines are supporting the learners (Hung, Yang & Tsai, 2020). This chapter explores design principles associated with Gamification and how different sections can improve the educational experience. Principles of Gamification can be applied not only to Education but also to industries to empower the employees. Types of applications that Gamification applied to are that of Military (Hancock, Sirizzotti & Martin, 2019); Health & Medical (Cotton & Patel, 2019); Disabilities (Shaban & Pearson, 2019); Education (Costello, 2020) and Literacy (Hung, Yang & Tsai, 2020).

Gamification is changing the world in profound ways. Educators, having recognized the contributions that the use of gaming mechanics is having on the learner's growth and wellbeing, are now thinking about how they can strengthen the learning process through creating innovative ways to challenge and support the learner (Costello, Lambert & Smith, 2019; Tolks et al., 2019). Through engagement via MLearning (Costello & Lambert, 2018), the learner with productive media interaction and feedback is used to inspire the individual to gain a sense of accomplishment; educators are spicing up the classroom activities to immerse the learner through adding enjoyment and motivational techniques so that learners can achieve great heights. The main drive of Gamification is to influence the learner's own goal and alter their perception of their educational experience through the use of severe gaming mechanisms. Aspects of long-term engagement should be considered to assist the learner in growing and developing new competencies within a set framework identified by the institution/lecturer (Hammerschall, 2019; Udara & De Alwis, 2019). It is vital when exploring frameworks that institutions explore and embed social-cultural contexts and how work, learning, educators, policy-holders play an essential part in designing skills within the 21^st Century and Gamification (Maqsood, 2020).

Prior research has shown that incorporating community-based activities within Gamification has led to the higher success of outcomes relating to performance and integration (Berkling & Neubehler, 2019; Ayastuy et al., 2021). The educator can use gaming elements to systematically map concepts onto the academic subject matter to create a novel instructional approach that can offer problem-solving, collaboration, and communication, as documented through the research conducted by Putz, Hofbauer and Mates (2019) and Costello (2020) who applied gamification techniques to individuals within a situation that involved “monotonous and non-challenging tasks”. These ideas of bridging ownership of the learning process, as pointed out by Maqsood (2020), as assisted with developing 21^st-century skills of literacy in which learners have managed to improve searching for information (Shmelev, Karpova, Kogtikov & Dukhanov, 2016), improving team working (Mesko, Győrffy & Kollár, 2015), and discussions (Hung, Yan & Tsai, 2020). Gamification has remarkable motivational influences to utilize and encourage learners to engage in the learning environment by deploying intrinsic and extrinsic motivational techniques.