This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents a new digitized Draw-A-Scientist Test (DAST) tool and discusses the results of deploying it to minority students in at-risk schools. Pervasive science stereotypes, particularly stereotypes of scientists, continue to negatively affect minoritized students' perceptions of science and commitment to pursuing STEM-related careers. One helpful tool for better understanding students' perceptions of scientists through projective tests is Chambers's DAST, initially created in 1983. The original protocol for deploying the DAST in a research setting asked students to “draw a scientist” on paper. Then, researchers could assess the seven indicators of stereotypical scientists (i.e., eyeglasses, facial hair, white lab coats, symbols of knowledge, symbols of research, technology, and captions). However, to improve inter-rater reliability and capture a more accurate reflection of students' perceptions of scientists, Finson, Beaver, and Cramond reenvisioned DAST scoring and assessment in 1995 to include eight additional indicators (i.e., indicators of danger, indicators of secrecy, mythic figures, presence of light bulbs, sex indicator for male, Caucasian, middle-aged or elderly, and scientists working indoors). Finson and team called the new DAST scoring rubric the DAST-C, which remains the most widely used one. However, methodological issues still impact DAST assessments, and updated tools for technology have made paper/pencil tasks obsolete, even for young students. With support from the National Science Foundation's Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (NSF ITEST) program, our collaborative interdisciplinary team infused technology-rich STEM learning modules that incorporated a proof-of-concept digitized version of the DAST into at-risk 3rd–5th-grade classrooms serving minoritized students. We compared findings from the digitized DAST with a priori paper/pencil data to highlight critical differences in DAST implementation and scoring. The current study had two primary objectives related to updating the DAST as a tool and in terms of streamlining DAST scoring: 1) digitizing the DAST to bring the paper/pencil version into the 21st century and 2) streamlining DAST assessment by integrating digital assessment tools into the new digitized DAST tool. Here, we discuss digitizing the DAST tool, assessing indicators of stereotypical scientists, and deploying the digitized DAST to a population of minoritized students studying in at-risk schools in America.

Effective gamification can only be based on understanding the relationship between learner motivation and the game elements which are used to gamify learning activities. Although frequently mentioned, Virtual Currency (VC) remains underused and scarcely studied in educational gamification. As a motivational affordance, VC can be thought of as supporting different types of motivation, but currently, there is a lack of empirical studies which investigate this. Recognizing this gap, the purpose of our study was to empirically investigate whether and how gamifying learning activities with virtual currency can engender motivation for out-of-class practicing and what type of motivation. In the limited research others have conducted, VC has been studied largely in combination with other game elements, which does not allow reaching reliable conclusions about the impact of the individual elements. For this reason, we studied the effects of VC in a gamified Discrete Math course isolated from other game elements. The study showed that using VC to gamify practicing increased students’ practicing activity, which resulted in improved academic performance. The study also revealed that while gamified practicing did not increase students’ intrinsic motivation, it supported internalization of motivation towards this learning activity.

This Full Paper in the Research-to-Practice track builds on research in gamification of instruction. A primary objective of gamifying learning is to encourage and sustain students' engagement in activities by making them more gamelike. However, it is still unclear what structures borrowed from games could afford such a “game-like” experience and in what contexts. Embedding classmates' duels in learning settings seems a promising gamification strategy for exploration due to its potential of increasing motivation and engagement through a “game-like” experience. Similar effects are expected from using virtual currency, another design element popular in video games. Accordingly, the goal of this study is to empirically investigate whether the incorporation of dueling leads to increased interest in out-of-class practicing. In addition, we were interested in investigating to what an extent adding virtual currency can boost students' interest in dueling. An introductory class in Python programming served as the experimental environment. Unlike most studies in which the control group works in a non-gamified condition and the experimental group works in a gamified condition, this experiment uses a different approach. We investigated the impact on learners' engagement of adding duels to an ongoing gamified activity. Engagement indicators were measured and logged throughout the semester while student motivation was examined through surveys. The opportunity to challenge classmates appeared after the first exam (around one-third of the semester) and continued for the remaining two thirds of the class time. Thus, the same students in the new condition served as the experimental group. After the third exam, we added virtual currency. Students were able to earn virtual currency by issuing and responding to duel requests as well as by doing extra practice. This had a noticeable effect on the use of dueling. The empirical results of the study show that overall, for this group of students, adding duels alone had no positive effect on students' engagement with the gamified practicing system. However, evidence from the survey suggests that the studied combination of gamification elements (points, badges, leaderboard, avatars, duels, and virtual currency) did increase student intrinsic motivation.

There has been an increasing effort to make activities that are not inherently interesting for all learners more attractive through gamification. Although the research on the effectiveness of educational gamification has been growing, the effects of some gamification elements on learners' motivation and engagement are not well understood. In response to this gap, in this paper we describe an experience of gamifying out-of-class practicing with Virtual Currency (VC) in a Computer Networking course. The results of our study show that the VC-based gamification (without interactions with any other gamification elements) had a positive impact on student engagement compared to non-gamified online practicing. The learners' VC earning and spending behaviors indicate also that Virtual Currency brings additional objectives for students to strive for, besides grades.

Gamification in education still lacks systematic studies assessing its impact on learning. This poster will present the design of our empirical studies on the effect of various combination of game elements on student motivation and engagement in CS courses.