Know Your Types: Connecting Player Types and Learning Styles in Game-Based Learning Settings

by Hélena Gottschalk, Corinna Zimmermann

Focusing on the perspectives of teachers interested in gamifying their teaching, a pathway on gamification was developed to support teachers in implementing GBL activities.

Using game elements in a teaching setting to enhance the learning experience and the motivation of learners requires a closer look at the target group as well as the identification of respective learning styles and player types.
Each of the learning styles has particular characteristics, based on e.g. psychological reasons, which influence the development of individual learning methods. Understanding a student’s learning style helps to improve the learning process, learning experience and motivation. At the same time, games and game elements have different effects on students and their learning behaviour. Knowing the player types of a group is essential for creating a GBL experience and increasing the learning motivation. As learning styles as well as player types partly have similar characteristics, teachers can determine which game elements can be used to address specific learning styles^[23].

Within our open online-course SpielWiese 4 (Playground for GBL in the learning management system OPAL, available in German) we present a course on gamification: the different stations are based on the design thinking method and give an insight into what teachers need to consider when using GBL in their own lessons. We provided each station with fact sheets containing the most important information; these are continuously expanded. This material provides teachers with valuable insights into specific topics related to GBL. To put all these insights into practice, the workshop concept Parcours on Gamification offers a starting point and helps teachers to engage with GBL. As this course does not support the sharing of information or provision of assistance in solving problems arising from using it in classrooms, we started to build a community called edLUDO, which aims to bring together researchers and teachers to benefit from each other’s experience. This community is supposed to become a platform where participants can share GBL scenarios and help to adapt them.