Gamifying Computer Science Courses with OneUp Learning

The low performance and drop-outs in Computer Science classes are frequently attributed to lack of student engagement and motivation. Meanwhile, gamification increasingly attracts the interest of educators due to its potential to foster motivation and behavioral changes in learning contexts. This workshop introduces participants to the concept of gamification and the use of OneUp Learning, a platform aimed at gamifying academic courses. OneUp is aimed at encouraging students' out-of-class practicing and increasing their overall engagement in the course through employing game design elements. The platform is course-independent and highly configurable, allowing the instructor to turn on and off a number of gamification features, such as avatars, points (challenge and skill points), leaderboards, skill boards, a progress bar, content unlocking, goal-setting, badges, virtual currency, duels, chat, etc. For using OneUp, an instructor has to provide practice exercises and to specify the gamification elements to be used. Apart from the standard question types, OneUp supports Parson's problems and dynamic problems (e.g. programming problems). The workshop proceeds in two sessions. In the first session we introduce the OneUp platform and present our experience of gamifying a Data Structures course. In the second, workshop attendees engage in hands-on experience: we show them how to use OneUp in their classes. In particular, we assist them in creating problems and challenges, configuring desired gamification features, defining their own badges and rules for earning and spending virtual currency, and monitoring the engagement and progress of their students. Laptops required.