Our work explores gameful approaches, which typically involve deliberately increasing student autonomy—and mitigating the impact of failure—so that students are encouraged to put forth effort in academic areas that they might have otherwise shied away from. To that end, we report on the latest progression of a larger design-based research project that seeks to both understand and support gameful course designs. This latest iteration represents an examination of two gameful courses within the same institution, but with varying designs. Both courses were undergraduate, high-enrollment, gateway courses, were designed with an eye towards gamefulness to support student engagement, and were supported by “GradeCraft”, an in-house Learning Management System (LMS) designed specifically to support gameful instruction and pedagogy (Holman, Aguilar, & Fishman, 2013). The nature of the course’s gameful grading systems, however, differed substantially. We examine if the divergent design decisions made by the instructors resulted in similar or different outcomes in terms of the motivational pathways associated with adaptive student outcomes (e.g., reporting feeling “in control” of their learning).
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