GADIUS: um método para gamificação adaptativa dinâmica baseada em interações do usuário

Abstract

Gamification is an approach where game design elements are used in environments outside a game. When applied in educational environments, it can promote greater motivation and student engagement with these environments. Recently, the idea of personalizing these gamification elements based on the user’s profile has shown even more efficient results in this process. However, of the gamified educational environments found in the literature, only a few have a process of dynamic personalization of their elements throughout the user’s navigation of the environment. It is known that a user can have different motivations over time, which can, in turn, make the personalization process superficial or inefficient when performed only at first. Therefore, this dissertation presents a method of dynamic adaptive gamification of educational environments, called GADIUS, describing the process of planning and development of a gamified educational environment in four stages. In this method, personalization is performed based on the user’s interactions in the environment. It uses the relationship between the user’s player profiles and their gamification elements with most affinity as metrics. During the development of the method, two instruments were used to confirm and refine the established metrics: an evaluative questionnaire applied to the public and an application developed for simulating user interactions. Following that, a panel with gamification specialists was organized to assess the quality of the method. Through this evaluation, it is possible to perceive the need to apply the method in real use scenarios to evaluate quality characteristics such as usability and flexibility. Finally, the experts perceived the viability of the method’s success and its potential contribution to the development of gamified educational environments with continuous and dynamic adaptation.