Climbing up the Leaderboard: An Empirical Study of Improving Student Outcome by Applying Gamification Principles to an Object-Oriented Programming Course on a University Level

This research aimed to evaluate the impact of including gamification principles into the course Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) at the university level. Adopting object-oriented principles by students has been a well-known challenge for a long time. Most instructors agree that there is a problem for some students to understand object-oriented programming logic because it is abstract to them. The most important thing is to encourage and motivate them to practice more and exchange ideas among themselves. Gamification could be of great help in this case. Gamification represents the usage of game-design elements and principles in a non-game environment. When used in education, increasing students' motivation is often the main goal. This paper contributes to this area by asking the research question: Does the use of gamification elements in the teaching process increases students' motivation to practice more, and consequently score better on the exam (Q1). There were 112 students taught by the same instructor included in the study; one experimental group with 21 randomly selected students lectured with the use of gamification elements, and one control group with 91 students lectured without gamification elements. Both groups were given the same exam. The paper will show the results of the experiment.