Gamification in university web app

Question

I'm working on a web app that's intended to be used in a university setting.

The app consists of two modules:

• exams module: teachers are able to add exercises (multiple choice questions, open answer questions, cloze questions, coding exercises in JS or C, and so on) to their courses, and build quizzes made up of those exercises, so students can participate and have their submissions graded

• practice module: after exams, teachers can publish exercises and add tags to them. Tags usually represent topics that an exercise touched on. Students can use those tags to build custom, ad-hoc simulations of an exam quiz (a "practice session") using the exercises that teachers added to past quizzes.

Regarding the second module, the app constitutes a long-term storage of exercises that students can search by topic in order to prepare for upcoming exams.

I'm looking to add gamification to this app, in order to make it more appealing to students.

One mechanic I though of is the following: right now, when a teacher creates an exercise, they can write up a complete solution for it which gets shown to students after they submitted their answer in a practice session. What could be done is allow students themselves to submit a solution, and have it "peer-reviewed" by other students or even teachers.

Instead of showing a single solution written by a teacher, the app could show, at the end of practice, show a thread (much like the model used by Stack Exchange) containing the student-submitted solutions graded by peers. Students could then gain points if a solution they submitted gets upvoted enough, possibly gaining privileges like the ability to tutor other students. This would also

What could be other ways gamification can be added to a didactical, university intended web application for students?

Answer 1

It looks like you're trying to start with the solution in mind ("Add gamification to a university testing app"). You might take a step back and define the problem that you're trying to solve (if you haven't already), which sounds to me like, "How can I make it fun for students to help each other with test questions so that they will participate more in learning?"

That, and other questions, can be explored with your stakeholders and some groups of students in design thinking sessions. There's a lot written about design thinking approaches, and if your university promotes continued staff education (like mine did :) ) then I would highly recommend finding a class that teaches these workshops so you can lead them. Workshops are often taught in a half or full day, and they're definitely work it -- your sessions are going to give you much more relevant and valuable information than you can find online.

Also - as you're exploring adding gamification to your app, think about which behaviors you want to incentivize, and which you don't want to reward. For example, StackExchange incentivizes sharing questions with other experts who can help, and it disincentivizes downvoting. This leads to a community that is invested in helping each other rather than just providing criticism. Think about how the app could potentially be used for abuse, and how you can make it not fun nor productive to do so.