Background

Past research shows that symbolically educational rewards are invaluable to students if chosen appropriately. Monetary rewards, however, are not encouraged for educational purposes. Additionally, students, regardless of ages and educational levels, tend to enjoy playing card games, though most of them are either commercial or particularly challenging to be used in educational settings. This trading card game therefore is intended to serve as a rewarding system for educational purposes through a variety of learning activities, including classroom participation, discussions, assignments, quiz, exams, to name a few. Importantly, we, instructors and students, which are intended end-users of the game, design the game bu ourselves. The game supports multiple languages, so players who use different languages can still play and compete with one another.

Use Case

The game is a discipline independent game, which means, the in-game rewards can be delivered by any teacher in any course. The game is a sort of board game, therefore, the in-game rewards are cards and students need to compete with each other. In order to make students have correct perception and positive attitude towards the competitions, a student’s ranking among all students is based on his/her credits rather than how many matches s/he has won or lost before. The student can get credits for the efforts s/he has tried to make in the match, so s/he still receives credits even s/he loses the match, sometimes, a student who loses the game could even receive more credits than the winner. A student might be able to have more options and strategies in the match if s/he has more in-game rewards and even might be able to defeat his/her opponents easier. Well-designed peer competitions have been proved as a good way to get students motivated and it is the basic idea of this mechanism. For those students who don’t want to compete with others, the in-game rewards (i.e., the cards) have collectable feature just like coins, stamps and hockey cards; students may want to see higher level cards as well as rare cards in their card collection book. The effect of the game-based educational reward mechanism will be kept in student’s mind and the learning motivation engaged by the mechanism can be carried to the followed course. The students may want to get better in-game rewards in the followed course by learning harder and putting more efforts in the assignments, participation, discussions, and etc.