Social Gamification#
The Computer Networks course is offered by the @Large research group. This course uses gamification to enhance students’ learning experience and stimulate creativity, collaboration, and engagement. If you are familiar to the concept of social gamification, you will recognize the content on this page.
Gamified courses allow students to choose their own learning path from a variety of activities, without the fear of failure. We reward students for their progress and achievements by awarding them points, and calculate their final grade by dividing their total number of points by 1000: A student with 10,000 points or more obtains a perfect grade of 10/10. See Grading for more details.
The total number of points, P, you can earn in Computer Networks far exceeds 10,000. If you obtain a grade higher than 10, we (unfortunately) round it down to 10 to meet VU regulations. This has two important implications:
- You can experiment: participating in optional assignments cannot lower your final grade. It can only increase it.
- Obtaining a 10 requires excellence, not perfection. You can make mistakes or not participate in some parts of the course and still obtain a 10/10 score.
Gamification helps to accommodate many types of student abilities and desires. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Our approach to social gamification allows students to choose their own path of advancement: students can choose which type of activity to participate in; from being active in lectures and tutorials to programming and demonstrating their technical and teamwork skills in the labs, to working in a team and solving exercises in the Self-Study activity. We allow our students to choose how to construct their own grade, by combining rewards from exams, chosen lab assignments, and small rewards from quizzes and in-class activities. Alternatively, students can choose the classic path of only completing the mandatory components of the course.
We envision the path taken by students as a quest route, offering different rewards and milestones for different types of activities. Students can get the most out of this course if they actively try to find the component they enjoy most and excel in it. In particular, students need to put into this course the 6 EC = 168 hours of study time. Only answering correctly 50% of the questions in the exam will not be enough to pass the course.