How (not) to Introduce Badges to Online Exercises Lassi Haaranen, Petri Ihantola, Lasse Hakulinen and Ari Korhonen Department of Computer Science and Engineering Aalto University, School of Science Espoo, Finland firstname.lastname@aalto.fi ABSTRACT Achievement badges are increasingly used to enhance edu- cational systems and they have been shown to affect stu- dent behavior in different ways. However, details on best practices and effective concepts to implement badges from a non-technical point of view are scarce. We implemented badges to our learning management system, used them on a large course and collected feedback from students. Based on our experiences, we present recommendations to other educators that plan on using badges. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Infor- mation Science Education—Computer science education Keywords Gamification, Achievement badges, Computer science edu- cation 1. INTRODUCTION Gamification is a fairly new and rapidly growing field de- fined by Deterding et al. [5] as “the use of game design el- ements in non-game contexts.” Motivation behind this is to bring elements which are considered fun and engaging into tasks which might not inherently possess those qual- ities. Thus, perhaps, improving the user’s experience and leading to an enhanced performance, which can be anything from exercises submitted earlier than necessary to increased activity in a forum. Interest in gamification has increased over the past few years and it has even ‘earned’ its place in the Gartner’s Emerging Technologies 2012 Hype Cycle nearing the peak of inflated expectations [9]. Whether it can move in the Hype Cycle past the peak and ‘trough of disillusionment’ into something that provides considerable value remains to be seen. A common way to bring game-like elements to educational systems is by adding badges (aka achievements, achievement Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. SIGCSE’14, March 5–8, 2014, Atlanta, GA, USA. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-2605-6/14/03 ...$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2538862.2538921. badges, or trophies). Badges can be defined as optional sub-goals which are not required for completion of the main task [13]. Badges in gamification have their parallels in the real world, for instance, in the form of boy scout badges, which are awarded for acquiring a new set of skills or mas- tering certain skill levels. Even airline bonus point systems, which aim to encourage customer loyalty, employ game-like mechanics. If these real world achievements and points are considered gamification, then the concept dates further back than the actual name gamification. Education in the past centuries has already had certain game like elements embedded into the system. Students are awarded points in tests and in different types of assign- ments. In universities, students complete courses and credit by credit work towards unlocking the last challenge – the fi- nal thesis. There are also certain known problems in educa- tion, such as procrastination of studying until the deadline and motivational problems in general. Gamification (e.g. badges), at least in the minds of its proponents, could offer some alleviation to these problems. The purpose of this study is to increase understanding how badges may affect students when introduced to a large course where automatic assessment is already in place. Even though automatic assessment is a valuable tool, especially in large courses, it also might bring some negative side ef- fects. For example, it can promote bad learning habits such as trial-and-error in some exercise types. In addition, we are looking for novel ways to teach some latent learning goals in our courses such as time management. Our research ques- tion related to this is: How will the students react to gamification features such as badges and will it have any positive or negative effect on their behavior? We are especially interested in their attitudes towards badges. Previous research related to this question is described in Section 2. After that, data collection and the research meth- ods are described in Section 3. The course where badges were introduced had eight rounds of automatically assessed exercises and the badges were used only on the last four rounds. Right after the course we sent a survey to all stu- dents to learn their reactions. The survey results and other data we collected are described in Section 4. The results and badges in general will be discussed in Section 5. Fi- nally, in Section 6 we make some recommendations based on our observations described in previous sections.