Gamification for Blended Learning in Higher Education

The main objective of this study was to evaluate the use of gamification in an extended learning management system (LMS). Tournament and leaderboards are the gamification features that were implemented in the LMS. As case studies, a number of experiments were performed in an informatics Bachelor programme subject, i.e. Introduction to Programming (IP). Education data mining (EDM) techniques were used to extract from the experiments compelling patterns in the form of association rules and decision tree. Analysis of the technical evaluation results and the questionnaire shows that students need learning activity outside the classroom to sharpen and deepen the learning materials given during college hours.