3.1. Principles of Gamification

Gamelet integrates selected elements of play and game into learning and training activities that relate to reading fluency, to foster motivation of learners in self-guided learning activities and simply to make learning and practicing more fun. Such a utilization of game design elements in typical non-game contexts is denoted as Gamification (Deterding et al., 2011). Typical approaches to Gamification add elements such as points, levels, leaderboards, achievements and badges to learning activities. In GameLet, these are cautiously used, only to show the group progress at the end of each mission, in order to avoid too much competition within the groups and typical effects of decay of motivational impact. In specific, no class leaderboard is included. Instead, we rely on concepts and elements of Meaningful Gamification (Nicholson, 2015), rather focussing on play, exposition, choice, information, engagement, and reflection. Most importantly, all learning activities are embedded in a coherent story, putting learning activities into context and, in general, increasing players' immersion. Hereby, we also target to relate learning activities to real-life situations and make those more meaningful. In addition, gamification elements have been selected to allow students also to express themselves and to foster creativity.

In the next chapter the gamification elements of GameLet are described more in detail.