A Gamification Approach to Getting Students Engaged in Academic Study

Serious games and gamification are emerging in many areas of society. In addition to an effective way of entertainment, games can be adopted as a persuading tool to guide person to achieve specific goal, citing their ultimate attraction. In this paper, we are interested in the mechanism and application of gamification in the field of academic education. Games feature a potential to promote students to learn in a spontaneous and effective manner, since the challenge and fun in games encourage students to hold on to the end. We propose a framework for gamification in education by integrating the procedures for designing academic courses and the game elements. A case study in digital circuit course, which is filled with diagrams, equations and is hence complicated and some kind of boring for some students, is conducted to illustrate the proposed approach in academic education.