Beyond Motivation and Engagement: Students’ Voices on the Use of Game-Based Learning in a Bachelor Computer Science Online Degree

Video games have many potential uses beyond pure entertainment, including their use in educational contexts. Yet, it remains really challenging to put together guidelines to design effective game-like interventions in educational contexts. This study examines existing work relating to gamification, game-based learning, and serious games, and finds there is still limited qualitative work concerning the student perspective and limited work developing pedagogical guidelines for developers wishing to develop effective game-based learning experiences. The study focuses on the perception of students in regard to game-based learning activities in the context of a BSc Computer Science online degree. Students enrolled in the online degree were invited to fill in an online survey after their experience with a selection of game-based learning activities in the online degree. Reflexive Thematic Analysis was used to evaluate the open-ended responses from 55 participants. First, quantitative and qualitative results revealed insightful information along with four overarching themes (“Complementary to lectures on topics that are usually hard or too abstract to teach”, “Allow students to take on identities and learn from different angles and perspectives”, “Balanced challenge and context relevance to minimise students wasting their time”, and “Reward players for their effort with meaningful rewards and provide a safe space for failure”), suggesting that game-based learning interventions offer more than just motivation and engagement. Second, technical and pedagogical principles emerged from the data analysis, proposing guidelines for future designers of game-based learning activities in similar educational contexts. Finally, the study provides a selection of twelve open-source and browser-based game-based learning activities, the ones students encountered in the BSc Computer Science online degree.