Design of tailored gamified educational systems based on gamer types.

Abstract

One of the main contemporary challenges in the field of computers and education is to provide gamified educational systems tailored according to the students’ gamer types to be most effective than traditional counter-tailored gamified educational systems in terms of students’ learning aspects. In order to start to solve this problem, we proposed an approach to tailor gamified educational systems based on the students’ gamer types. An instance of the proposed approach was implemented and an empirical experiment with 121 elementary students was conducted in order to comparatively evaluate the tailored and the counter-tailored versions of the system in terms of students’ concentration and flow experience. The main results indicate that for some gamer types the tailored system was more effective, however, in some cases, the flow experience and concentration was larger in the counter-tailored version of the system, surprising and contradicting the expectation of recent theoretical studies and making room for further studies in this field. A second empirical experiment was conducted in order to identify which are the most suitable gamification element for each gamer type, allowing us to provide a guideline for tailor gamified educational systems based on students’ gamer types.