Ready Player One: Gamification of a Criminal Justice Course

Abstract

In 2021, the global video game industry was estimated to be worth more than $178 billion. That year, there were more than 2.9 billion active gamers in the world who spent an average of 12 hours a week playing video games. What if we could get our students as invested in their coursework as they are in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare? The purpose of this study was to examine whether gamification techniques could be employed in a criminal justice course and to assess student engagement and attitudes towards the gamified course structure. Class observations and survey data suggested that the gamified structure of the course was received favorably by the students and increased student engagement with the course material. The findings indicate that gamification made the learning experience unique and resulted in a layer of meaning and engagement to the students’ classroom experience.

Keywords:

• Gamification
• student engagement
• student learning
• innovative teaching practices

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Examples include For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business (2012) by Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter and Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards (2019) by Yu-Kai Chou.

2 Examples include The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (Sheldon, 2020); Explore Like a Pirate by Michael Matera; and The Gamification of Learning and Instruction (Kapp, 2012).

3 This was a free online course on Coursera on Gamification taught by Kevin Werbach from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

4 To keep the pacing of the course current and ensure students were completing the learning activities for that week, students were not allowed to complete earlier assignments once the class had moved to a new topic or module.

5 A digital badge is an indicator of accomplishment or skill that can be displayed, accessed, and verified online. Some Learning Management Systems have them embedded already (e.g., Blackboard Learn’s “Achievements”) and some LMSs allow you to connect the LMS to an outside digital badging platform (i.e., Canvas). Popular badging platforms and apps include Accredible, Badgr, CertifyMe, Credly, and Hyperstack Credential Cloud.

6 Cutting out the individual badges did take some time, but it was not excessive or unmanageable.

7 The first author created a spreadsheet to record badge earnings and distributions. It was important to keep up with grading and badge distribution, as students were eager to receive their badges after they had completed their assignments.

8 For instructors considering using gamification techniques in their courses, consider employing one or two components to test what works and what does not. Including too many gamification components into a course may cause both the instructor and students to feel overwhelmed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Krista S. Gehring

Krista S. Gehring, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Social Work at the University of Houston-Downtown. Her research interests include justice-involved women; gender-responsive policies, practices, and programs; criminological theory; correctional rehabilitation; risk/needs assessment and classification; and pretrial risk/needs. Her work has appeared in Criminal Justice and Behavior, Feminist Criminology, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and Journal of Youth and Adolescence. She is also author of CrimComics, criminology comic books published by Oxford University Press. These comic books trace the development of various criminological theories with attention given to the social, cultural, and political events that shaped theorizing at that moment in history.

Ethan Marshall

Ethan Marshall, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Social Work at the University of Houston-Downtown. His research interests include scale development, risk assessment, and sexual deviance, specifically pertaining to justice-involved women; women who have been convicted of sexual offenses; and the association between pornography and sexual coercion. During his academic career, he has presented at the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers conference, the American Society of Criminology conference, and the American Criminal Justice Society conference, as well as published research in the Aggression and Violent Behavior, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, The Journal of Sexual Aggression, and Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment.