Introducing Social Gamification to a Biomedical Signal Processing Course: A Case Study

There is a trend towards larger and more diverse classes in higher education. In order to account for this diversity and consider different student profiles, we introduced social gamification elements to the structure of a B.Sc. course from the field of Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In this work, we report results of this case study for winter semester 2022. The basic idea was to offer students different types of tasks from that they can choose from according to their preferences: Taking end-of-lecture quizzes, submitting solutions to Jupyter Notebook exercise sheets, presenting a solution orally in front of the class, or answering questions to a scientific paper as a group task. With each task, a certain amount of points was associated that the students could “earn”. In order to gain insight into the acceptance of the gamification elements, we analyse the points reached by each student over time and results of a voluntary lecture evaluation at the end of the course. 29 students from multiple study programs took part in the course and reached an average of 639 out of 1,405 points with a standard deviation of 336. We observed different types of student behaviour being either competitive vs. cost-effective behaviour, or social vs. self-dependent behaviour. The course was evaluated positively and the overall rating based on the questionnaire was improved compared to previous years.