Browsing by Author "Beck, Anja"

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Investigating the correlation between gamification and Bloom's Taxonomy in e-learning platforms
(2023) Beck, Anja
Nowadays, teaching and learning in higher education take place on e-learning platforms. The taxonomy of Bloom is a time-proven and widely used learning approach to define learning objectives in classrooms and other learning environments. Bloom’s Taxonomy can improve the higher-order thinking skills of students. With the integration of Bloom’s Taxonomy in e-learning platforms alone, the students might not be motivated enough to learn. A way to motivate students is through gamification. It has been proved that the learning effect in the gamification domain increases the activity and the motivation of students in e-learning platforms. There are various approaches that use both of them in an e-learning environment, but Bloom’s Taxonomy has not been used with gamification elements to let students know their current cognitive competency level in the course. This thesis is about connecting both of the domains in Software Engineering (SE) education. Thus, e-learning platforms lack a concept that combines Bloom’s Taxonomy with gamification in a motivational and active way for students. This seems to be also a problem of the SE Courses at the University of Stuttgart. Many students tend to not solve the given exercises in e-learning platforms due to the lack of motivation and missing rapid feedback. Moreover, the competency level of each student is not adjusted to the given tasks, which may lead to discouragement. Through the integration of Bloom’s Taxonomy more personalized e-learning tasks should be provided. In this thesis, the goal is to find approaches, that connect the learning goals of Bloom’s cognitive Taxonomy with gamification, and close the existing gap. Through this connection, learning with e-learning platforms should be more efficient and increase the activity as well as the motivation of students. The objective is to find gamification elements that can be merged with Bloom’s Taxonomy to create a mock-up prototype to show the correlation between Bloom’s Taxonomy and gamification in the context of SE education. The literature research will be conducted to compare those two domains and to find similarities between Bloom’s Taxonomy and gamification. Furthermore, through a survey, Requirement Engineering will be executed to define the needs of students for a mock-up prototype. The prototype will exemplarily be constructed on the course “Advanced Software Engineering” at the University of Stuttgart, but it can also be used in similar courses. Afterward, this prototype will be evaluated by interviewing students to get their feedback about the concept, design and functions. It was possible to combine Bloom’s Taxonomy and gamification in the resulting mock-up prototype. The literature research helped to get ideas for the concept. During the construction with Axure RP the mock-up prototype was named “BloomTaG”. The interviewed students found the visual mock-up prototype better structured and more motivating than the e-learning platform Ilias. It was pointed out that learning with gamification and Bloom’s revised Taxonomy can be helpful to them. The gap between gamification and Bloom’s Taxonomy can be further closed with this thesis. Combining Bloom’s Taxonomy and gamification in a SE Course led to positive effects on the interviewed students. In future work, the concept can be further investigated and improved. The feedback helped to gain possible improvements for the user interface of the mock-up prototype.