The Effects of Ontology-Based Gamification in Scripted Collaborative Learning

Scripted Collaborative Learning (CL) promotes meaningful interactions among students. Unfortunately, in some situations, the use of scripts causes motivational problems which in turn may lead to negative learning outcomes. In the last years, gamification has emerged as a promising technique to motivate and engage students towards learning process. However, gamification requires personalization based on knowledge about game design, and their impact on the students' motivation and learning outcomes. To address these issues, we proposed the formalization of an ontology to support the gamification of CL scenarios in which the game elements are tailored for each situation. These CL scenarios are known as ont-gamified CL sessions, and this paper presents the results of one empirical study conducted to evaluate their effects on the participants' intrinsic motivation and learning outcomes. This study was carried out as quasi-experiment with 62 undergraduate Brazilian students who participated either in non-gamified or ont-gamified CL sessions. Findings indicate that the intrinsic motivation was better in ont-gamified CL sessions, and that there was no significant difference on learning outcomes. Based on these results, we concluded that our approach is likely to deal with motivational problems in scripted CL.