Sketching skills are developed over time through practice, requiring students to stay motivated to continue improving. Gamification has been shown to be helpful in keeping users motivated, so this work seeks to investigate the impact of gamification on the user's motivation to practice sketching skills in the intelligent tutoring system, SketchTivity. Specifically, this work will evaluate the impact of gamified elements including achievement banners, star ratings, and performance statistics to give users feedback about their level of success after a sketching lesson. This concept will be explored through withinsubjects focus group testing where participants will interact with each version of the interface, describe their experiences in a think-aloud fashion, and discuss their preferences in a post-interview. The motivational impact of the gamified elements will be synthesized through thematic analysis of the think-aloud comments and interview data as well as statistical analysis of performance diferences in terms of SketchTivity's sketch quality metrics.
back and game elements to the SketchTivity platform was done in order to foster this true learning experience.
Sketching is a skill that requires practice and motivation The importance of these engaging elements is elevated by
to continue to improve. In informal education environ- the nature of the informal education environment since
ments, this motivation can be dificult for students to teaching is done in a non-traditional manner, without a
muster on their own. Students face numerous challenges physical teacher present, and therefore a higher degree of
when attempting to learn sketching techniques such as self-discipline from the students is required [
for students to practice and receive feedback on their
sketching ability. It focuses on training fundamental
sketching skills, guiding users through basics,
perspective, and primitives, as shown in the lesson categories in
2.2. Gamification in Education Figure 1a. Lesson types include lines, arcs, squares,
cirGamification is a common approach to education. One cles, planes, ellipses, cubes, cones, cylinders, and spheres.
such study that explored this idea was conducted by Ra- When a user starts a lesson, they are given eight
exerhayu, et. al. In his study, twenty two students were cises with randomized prompts to provide variety. Each
studied with three primary goals in mind: 1) understand exercise provides a prompt with appropriate scafolding;
the behavioral change due to e-learning with gamifica- an example of a Cube lesson is given in Figure 1b. Sketch
tion, 2) examine diferent gamification elements and their recognition algorithms are used to automatically assess
impacts on students’ motivation and engagement, and 3) the quality of the sketch in terms of precision,
smoothinvestigate if "population characteristics" play a role in ness, and speed. Precision refers to the accuracy to the
influencing the motivation and engagement. Some of the prompt in terms of average deviation. Deviation is
calcugamification elements examined in this research were lated as sum of the best match distances to the prompt for
also focused on in this study, such as points and badges. each point in the drawn stroke. Smoothness refers to how
Rahayu, et. al, discovered through their research that straight or consistent the drawn strokes are. This aspect
both points and badges positively influenced the students’ is quantified by calculating the change in angle between
motivation to continue learning and get better at the as- points in the stroke. The more the angle changes, the
signed material. Badges provided a more personalized more jittery the line and the lower the smoothness. Speed
experience that motivated students to continue on. Points refers to the average speed of the pen in terms of pixels
were less impactful since students simply needed to earn over time. Both precision and smoothness are
normala passing score for their assignment to have credit [
This work focuses on the design and evaluation of a ment of where the user is doing well; these elements
gamified interface for an intelligent tutoring system for are shown in Figure 2. The no-feedback version will
reteaching sketching skills, SketchTivity [
3.2. Experiment Design A within-subjects user study will be used to measure diferences in motivation between the two variations of the SketchTivity interface. This design allows for each participant to give feedback on the interface both with and without gamified elements and identify which variation they prefer. To avoid presentation bias, the order of (a) Sketchtivity Lessons Page (b) Example Sketching Canvas for Cube Lesson exposure to the interfaces will be counter balanced, i.e., suggestions to avoid biasing the participants’ choices Group One will interact with the non-feedback version during the study. They will be strongly encouraged to ifrst, whereas Group Two will see the gamified version speak aloud their thoughts and make comments on the ifrst. interface as they interact with it. Time for comments
A focus group testing model will be utilized for this and a break will be given before transitioning to the next research where participants will interact with both inter- interface variation. The study will follow the same forfaces in one sitting. Each person will receive a pre-study mat of interface exploration followed by discussion. The handout that asks demographic questions and has a list last assignment of the group will be to complete the postof statements in a Lickert-scale format. The pre-survey study handout. The purpose of this survey is to obtain will be used to identify the user’s experience with tablets, written opinions on the users’ preference between the sketching, and their confidence in using the tablets to non-feedback and gamified interface. sketch. Then, participants will each be given a tablet that displays the SketchTivity interface and will sign in with an ID number. The participants will be tasked with 4. Next Steps exploring the application and completing as many, or as few, sketching tutorials as they wish. The researcher will answer questions about the interface but will not make The next steps for this research include conducting the user study and analyzing the collected data to draw conclusions about the impact of the gamified elements on the (a) Results page with performance summary (b) Precision Banner (c) Smoothness Banner (d) Speed Banner user’s motivation. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis will be used to derive insights from the participants’ actions and comments during the study. The statistics gathered from the SketchTivity platform itself will be quantitative in nature. Those data values include the number of attempts taken per lesson, the scores for precision, accuracy, and speed for each attempt, and lastly, the number of lessons completed. Analysis techniques for this data will include confidence intervals and the two sample t-test. Qualitative data will take the form of the answers written on the pre-study and post-study surveys and the commentary transcripts during the focus testing. Thematic analysis will be conducted on the responses gathered to extract common sentiments and observations about the interface variations and the gamified elements. Overall, we expect to see an increase in motivation to practice sketching skills when using the gamified version.