Measuring learner engagement to create a gameful learning environment

Abstract

If educators were to be skilled game designers, then they would be better equipped to design engaging education scenarios. The importance of learner engagement within a learning environment is without question. Yet there can is ongoing struggle to quantify learner engagement throughout teaching strategies. In the field of game design, engagement is a fundamental metric used to assess player participation throughout, often compared or interchanged with the term Flow. It is the aim of this research to investigate the potential for educators to leverage game design mechanisms, proposing that educators would then be better equipped in designing engaging educational scenarios for the classroom and able to adjust the accordingly. Subsequently this research aims to offer a framework for designing educational scenarios, based around a core principle: we must stop being educators dissecting and borrowing game elements, but rather that we are game designers building educational scenarios. This will allow for identification and definition of a framework for Gameful Learning by mapping engagement using established game development formats like that of Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics (MDA) (Hunicke et al. n.d.). and Flow (Csikszentmihalyi et al. 2014) to established engagement metrics such as the Student Course Engagement Questionnaire (SCEQ) (Handelsman et al. 2005) providing a quantifiable outcome for use in class design.