This paper presents a case study on adopting a custom design system (DS) in a research and development project, where resistance from the development team was encountered. To address this challenge, a user-centric approach was taken, treating the development team as the primary users of the design system. Through interviews with developers, their pain points were identified and addressed, resulting in a refined development process and successful design system implementation. This approach enhanced collaboration between the UX and development teams, fostering a sense of ownership among developers. The case study highlights the importance of understanding and empathizing with the development team’s needs when introducing a design system. It emphasizes the value of user research within the development team and the iterative refinement of the system based on user feedback. The insights from this experience provide valuable lessons for organizations aiming to bridge the gap between UX and development, promoting the adoption and utilization of design systems.

Flow experience is one of the most ambitious targets of any user interface designer. However, it has remained elusive to evaluate how well user interfaces give rise to flow experience outside conducting invasive self-reporting-based questionnaires, which remove the users from the flow experience and can't be massively applied. At the same time, otherwise, well-built systems do track the behaviour of users on the interface, and therefore, user behaviour data could act as a reliable proxy for assessing the experience of users. Currently, there is little empirical research or data about which indices of user behaviours might correspond with having a flow experience as well as the different psychological constituents of the flow experience. Therefore, facing the challenge of using users' behaviour data to model users' experience, we investigated the associations between users' behaviour data (e.g. mouse clicks, activity time in the system, and average response time) and their self-reported flow experience by using data mining (i.e. associations rules) analysing data from 204 subjects. Results demonstrate that the speed of users' actions negatively affects the flow experience antecedents while also positively affecting the loss of self-consciousness. Our study advances the literature, providing insights to identify users' flow experience through behaviour data.

Abstract Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) platforms are considered a distinctive way to deliver a modern educational experience, open to a worldwide public. However, student engagement in MOOCs is a less explored area, although it is known that MOOCs suffer from one of the highest dropout rates within learning environments in general, and in e-learning in particular. A special challenge in this area is finding early, measurable indicators of engagement. This paper tackles this issue with a unique blend of data analytics and NLP and machine learning techniques together with a solid foundation in psychological theories. Importantly, we show for the first time how Self-Determination Theory (SDT) can be mapped onto concrete features extracted from tracking student behaviour on MOOCs. We map the dimensions of Autonomy, Relatedness and Competence, leading to methods to characterise engaged and disengaged MOOC student behaviours, and exploring what triggers and promotes MOOC students’ interest and engagement. The paper further contributes by building the Engage Taxonomy, the first taxonomy of MOOC engagement tracking parameters, mapped over 4 engagement theories: SDT, Drive, ET, Process of Engagement. Moreover, we define and analyse students’ engagement tracking, with a larger than usual body of content (6 MOOC courses from two different universities with 26 runs spanning between 2013 and 2018) and students (initially around 218.235). Importantly, the paper also serves as the first large-scale evaluation of the SDT theory itself, providing a blueprint for large-scale theory evaluation. It also provides for the first-time metrics for measurable engagement in MOOCs, including specific measures for Autonomy, Relatedness and Competence; it evaluates these based on existing (and expanded) measures of success in MOOCs: Completion rate, Correct Answer ratio and Reply ratio. In addition, to further illustrate the use of the proposed SDT metrics, this study is the first to use SDT constructs extracted from the first week, to predict active and non-active students in the following week.

Students face several difficulties in introductory programming courses (CS1), often leading to high dropout rates, student demotivation, and lack of interest. The literature has indicated that the adequate use of gamification might improve learning in several domains, including CS1. However, the understanding of which (and how) factors influence gamification’s success, especially for CS1 education, is lacking. Thus, there is a clear need to shed light on pre-determinants of gamification’s impact. To tackle this gap, we investigate how user and contextual factors influence gamification’s effect on CS1 students through a quasi-experimental retrospective study ( \( N = 399 \) ), based on a between-subject design (conditions: gamified or non-gamified) in terms of final grade (academic achievement) and the number of programming assignments completed in an educational system (i.e., how much they practiced). Then, we evaluate whether and how user and contextual characteristics (e.g., age, gender, major, programming experience, working situation, internet access, and computer access/sharing) moderate that effect. Our findings indicate that gamification amplified to some extent the impact of practicing. Overall, students practicing in the gamified version presented higher academic achievement than those practicing the same amount in the non-gamified version. Intriguingly, those in the gamified version that practiced much more extensively than the average showed lower academic achievements than those who practiced comparable amounts in the non-gamified version. Furthermore, our results reveal gender as the only statistically significant moderator of gamification’s effect: in our data, it was positive for females but non-significant for males. These findings suggest which (and how) personal and contextual factors moderate gamification’s effects, indicate the need to further understand and examine context’s role, and show that gamification must be cautiously designed to prevent students from playing instead of learning.

Programming is a complex, not trivial to learn and teach task, which gamification can facilitate. However, how gamification affects learning and the influence of context-related aspects on that effect demand research to better understand how and to whom gamification enhances programming learning. Therefore, we conducted an experimental study analyzing how gamification worked and the role of context-related aspects in terms of intervention duration and learners' familiarity with programming (i.e., the task's topic). It was a six-week study with 19 undergraduate students from an Algorithms class that measured their learning gains, intrinsic motivation, and number of completed quizzes. Mainly, we found gamification affected learning via intrinsic motivation, effect that depended on intervention duration and learners' familiarity with programming. That is, intrinsic motivation strongly predicted learning gains and gamification's effect on intrinsic motivation changed over time, decreasing from positive to negative as learners had less familiarity with programming. Thus, showing gamification can positively impact programming learning by improving students' intrinsic motivation, although that effect changes over time depending on one's previous familiarity with programming.

Personalization of gamification is an alternative to overcome the shortcomings of the one-size-fits-all approach, but the few empirical studies analyzing its effects do not provide conclusive results. While many user and contextual information affect gamified experiences, prior personalized gamification research focused on a single user characteristic/dimension. Therefore, we hypothesize if a multidimensional approach for personalized gamification, considering multiple (user and contextual) information, can improve user motivation when compared to the traditional implementation of gamification. In this paper, we test that hypothesis through a mixed-methods sequential explanatory study. First, 26 participants completed two assessments using one of the two gamification designs and self-reported their motivations through the Situational Motivation Scale. Then, we conducted semi-structured interviews to understand learners' subjective experiences during these assessments. As result, the students using the personalized design were more motivated than those using the one-size-fits-all approach regarding intrinsic motivation and identified regulation. Furthermore, we found the personalized design featured game elements suitable to users' preferences, being perceived as motivating and need-supporting. Thus, informing i) practitioners on the use of a strategy for personalizing gamified educational systems that is likely to improve students' motivations, compared to OSFA gamification, and ii) researchers on the potential of multidimensional personalization to improve single-dimension strategies. For transparency, dataset and analysis procedures are available at https://osf.io/grzhp.

Abstract Gamification has been discussed as a standout approach to improve user experience, with different studies showing that users can have different preferences over game elements according to their user types. However, relatively less is known how different kinds of users may react to different types of gamification. Therefore, in this study ( $$N=331$$ N = 331 ) we investigate how user orientation (Achiever, Disruptor, Free Spirit, Philanthropist, Player, and Socializer) is associated with the preference for and perceived sense of accomplishment from different gamification designs. Beyond singular associations between the user orientation and the gamification designs, the findings indicate no comprehensive and consistent patterns of associations. From the six user orientations, five presented significant associations: Socializer orientation was positively associated with Social, Fictional, and Personal designs, while negatively associated with Performance design; Player orientation was positively associated with Social (Accomplishment), Personal, and Ecological designs, while negatively associated with the Social design (Preference); Disruptor orientation was positively associated with Social design; Achiever orientation was positively associated with Performance and Social designs; and Free Spirit orientation was negatively associated with Social design. Based on the results, we provide recommendations on how to personalize gamified systems and set further research trajectories on personalized gamification.

Gamification applied to education studies are focusing to encourage students to perform specific tasks, however many of these studies are still inconclusive about how much gamification can influence engagement. Also, the frameworks used to apply gamification in those systems are mainly structural (e.g. scoring and ranking systems) rather than content frameworks (where the game elements are applied to the content). Therefore, this paper aims at creating a narrative definition exclusively for gamification purposes. First, we developed an empirical research starting with a literature review of the narrative concept in other medias, such as games. Then, we mapped these definitions into features and crossed the similarities and differences across them, to find a common ground that could be applied in gamification contexts. Our results show that the narrative element definition to use in gamification contexts best drifts from the games ones, however its definition is unique to the point it could be isolated and used in future frameworks. We also found that the characteristics of this concept resembles some of User Experience.

Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design of gamified strategies. This paper aims to create a taxonomy for the game elements, based on gamification experts' opinions. After a brief review from existing work, we extract first the game elements from the current state of the art, and then evaluate them via a survey with 19 gamification and education experts. The resulting taxonomy taxonomy included the description of 21 game elements and their quantitative and qualitative evaluation by the experts. Overall, the proposed taxonomy was in general well accepted by most of the experts. They also suggested expanding it with the inclusion of Narrative and Storytelling game elements. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is proposing a new, confirmed taxonomy to standardise the terminology used to define the game elements as a mean to design and deploy gamification strategies in the educational domain.

The role of computing in society is fundamental for the political, economic and cultural development of countries, especially in a globalized context. Computational thinking is an extremely important skill in the education of young students, since the ability of intuitively abstracting information and knowledge promotes an expansion of the learning dimension. This study aims to gather approaches used for teaching computational thinking exclusively to high school students, highlighting their performance and motivation resulting from the applications of such approaches. In order to answer our research question, a systematic mapping of the analysis of 15 studies was conducted. The use of computer programming proved to be the most used way to disseminate computational thinking. The students who participated in approaches regarding the insertion of computational thinking in the classroom showed positive impact on the development of classroom activities, as well as motivation to learn.

Software testing is a relevant activity to provide evidence of qualifty of software products. However, there is a lack of qualified professionals in this area. This can be caused due to difficulty in teaching software testing through approaches that use only theoretical classes and traditional tools. In addition, there is a lack of motivation due to the work environment and the strategies of allocation and responsibility of these professionals in development and testing teams. To mitigate these problems, approaches have been used to support software testing education, such as: educational games, integrated teaching of software testing with programming, educational modules, among others. The objective of this paper was to develop an educational game named Testing Game, addressing the following topics: functional testing, structural testing and mutation testing. To support the development of the Testing Game, we performed a systematic mapping aiming at selecting a game engine. To evaluate the efficiency of the game, we conducted a feasibility study to evaluate the quality regarding motivation, user experience and learning from the point of view of the students. We also evaluate the usability of the Testing Game. Approximately 85.64% of people who participated in the study assessed the quality of the game in a positive perspective regarding motivation, user experience and learning from the point of view of the students. Regarding the usability of the game, students identified minor problems. Through this work, we realize that the game Testing Game can constitute as a complementary resource to support software testing education.

Gamification has achieved many positive outcomes in many fields, ranging from economics to education. This method consists in applying game concepts, mechanics and aesthetics in non-gaming applications, aiming to improve a person or group's engagement and commitment to perform a task. These concepts can range from extrinsic motivators as points, levels, leaderboards and achievements, to intrinsic ones as competition, cooperation, sense of achievement and decision making. It also have been proved that these concepts also aids in the construction and improvement of cognitive, social and emotional behaviour of a person or group. Based on the previous work of developing an online learning environment to aid in Math Lessons on basic education, this paper presents the evaluation of a Gamified Online System (SiGMa) focused on Math problems solving. The application contains a module that randomizes the values of the users' selected problems, which are divided in three areas (Arithmetic, Combinatorics and Geometry) in order to make them memorize the logic rather than answers when solving Math based questions. The system was also implemented with Gamification concepts to improve the engagement of students. The tests were applied with a group of 30 Math teachers that were exposed to the system for 3 consecutive months. Those professionals evaluated the usability and pedagogical properties of the Gamification concepts implemented within the application as: problem solving, correct classification, difficulty, context, engagement, reflection, support, interaction, visual interface, information, error recovery, message exchange. The tests also evaluated the relevance of each one of the implemented gamification concepts as: goals, rewards, points, levels, progress, time pressure, achievements, leaderboards, chances, renewal and relevant statistical information. The tests achieved positive results, above the average stipulated by the authors in the evaluation. The paper also present the preliminary tests that were made with a group of selected students, in order to test the systems' efficiency.

The use of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has been increasing in the past years. But there's still some problems that need to be solved and a lot of discussion can be done around this subject. Also, there is a lack of courses available to people who does not speak or understand English. Because of that, this project proposes a platform for Portuguese speakers tied up with gamification concepts to motivate and engage more students than the usual MOOC platforms. This approach was decided because the rate of students who accomplish courses on MOOCs are slightly below 10%. We believe in the potential and impacts of this platform, and we aim to help countries such Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and so many others that have Portuguese as primary language. The advantage of MOOCs is that they generally don't require fees nor prerequisites other than Internet access. This make MOOCs an excellent tool for countries that need to improve their educational system.

Programming Languages and its uses play a vital role in IT higher education courses, because it is necessary that students have a good understanding in order to become full fledged developers. We made a study to verify the initial reception of this method regarding the students satisfaction and so, this meta-paper proposes the continuation of this research. It involves the utilization of a Social Network and gamification concepts, like badges, points, levels and leader boards to improve students participation.