Effectiveness of Gamification in Undergraduate Education

What is the quantitative effect of gamified learning/teaching on the performance of students? This basic question has not received as much attention as it deserves in the related literature, despite the many works that analyze the benefits and design principles of gamified activities across many domains. We present in this paper an analysis of this question focused on identifying the network structure variables that quantitatively explain the improvements reported when using gamification integrated in the course design. We compare the results with those from a group that does not follow gamification at all, hence we are able to ascertain the strength and impact that gamification has on numerical grades or scores.