Improving student creativity with gamification and virtual worlds

Abstract

Games are of great interest in education. Their motivational qualities make players more persistent and resilient. In particular, virtual environments have proven to be good learning engagers, as they generate opportunities to create, explore and communicate. Here we present an exploratory study on how student autonomy and creativity can be improved by mixing virtual environments and gamification. To attain this, we added to a gamified course a 2.5D virtual environment that grows along with student grading, called AvatarWorld. There, students are represented by customized avatars, and they also can create custom content. Preliminary results suggest that even though students did not spend too much time in AvatarWorld, they were motivated to perform creative tasks that required knowledge acquired in the course.