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After successful discussions regarding collaborative learning, my mind was stuck in one thing. How to actually motivate students to apply collaborative learning. Multiple studies have been conducted regarding this topic, but one approach that has been recently proposed and seems to have a great potential is gamification. But how could we implement gamification to support collaborative learning in computer science courses?
As an example, we will use a course that focuses on distributed software development, where students from three different universities form teams of 6-9 people with a unified goal of implementing an application according to the requirements of a specific client. The main reason for gamifying this course, is not to improve the final product, but to improve the collaboration between team members.
The following paragraph provides a description of the gamified course. The game will be separated in levels. Each level will correspond to a specific sprint (based on the SCRUM methodology). For each level, the users (i.e. team members) will have a set of implementation tasks that they need to finish, and each task will be appointed a certain amount of XP that will be awarded to the team members upon completion of the task. The students will have to voluntarily pick a task and work on it to pass the level. However, the levels are not passed individually, but as a team. Therefore in order for the team to pass the level, and get the instructions for the next level, all team members need to complete their assigned tasks. The team for which the team members have the most similar number of commits in Github will get extra XPs.
This game can also help with project management and make users aware of what other team members are working with. Each team member will have a profile where he will need to update the status; busy (working on a specific task), available (done with the assigned tasks and able to work on other tasks), and open to help (the user can help other team members if they have issues with their tasks and be rewarded for that). Other team members can check the status, and gain information on the status of each team member. Moreover, the workload of each member can be compared to others. If a team member has a lot less or a lot more tasks than others, then the entire team will receive a notification, so they can take immediate action to repair that, and get extra points.
Moreover, team members will have to organise weekly meetings. They will receive points for each meeting they attend, and they will get extra points if they keep a streak of consecutive meetings.
The aforementioned examples are only few of the approaches, that can be applied to achieve collaborative learning by using gamification. Even though positive effects have been exhibited by using the method, more studies need to be conducted to measure the influence of the gamification on collaborative learning, so that teachers, can take informed decision.
