"I Need More Motivation": Engaging Students in the Gamification Design Process

Gamification in a technology-enhanced learning context has drawn much attention to increasing students' motivation, engagement, and learning performance; however, past research points to a bag of mixed results from these. These results could be partially due to the lack of involvement of end-users (i.e., students and teachers) in the design process. To this end, this work reports a pilot study to explore students' feelings, perceptions, and engagement with EasyNewton, a gamified application to practice physics-related problems. This pilot study gathered 1) students' interactions with EasyNewton and 2) design workshops and interviews with students. We report design recommendations based on students' engagement and perceptions to inform the next design iteration of EasyNewton. This work is a step towards engaging students early in the design process and using engagement metrics to understand students' behaviors.