A Primer on Gamification Standardization

Computer science education has always been a challenging topic for both sides of the trench: educators and learners. Nowadays, with the pandemic state that we are facing, these challenges are even greater, leading educators to look for strategies that promote effective virtual learning. One of such strategies includes the use of game mechanics to improve student engagement and motivation. This design strategy is typically called gamification. Nowadays, gamification is being seen as the solution to solve most of the issues related to demotivation, complexity, or tedious tasks. In the latest years, we saw thousands of educational applications being created with gamification in mind. Nevertheless, this has been an unsustainable growth with ad hoc designs and implementations of educational gamified applications, hampering interoperability and the reuse of good practices. This chapter presents a systematic study on gamification standardization aiming to characterize the status of the field, namely describing existing frameworks, languages, services, and platforms.