A tool to help teams build gamification projects without starting from scratch
Ludimila da Bela Cruz defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis proposing a tool to support teams building gamification projects, anchoring the process in structured motivational elements.
Brasília, July 2, 2016
Gamification became a corporate buzzword — but for teams tasked with designing and implementing it, the rails are still missing: which elements to pick? In what order? Under which metrics? This project-infrastructure vacuum is what the undergraduate thesis defended by Ludimila da Bela Cruz in July 2016 seeks to fill, under the advising of Prof. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas .
The work opens with a reflection on motivation — what drives a person toward a goal, toward solving a problem, toward persisting. Gamification, the author argues, offers a vocabulary to model that drive in contexts that are not originally games. The next step is turning that vocabulary into a tool: an artifact that helps teams compose gamification projects without starting over each time, using reusable components and an organized decision path.
By pairing technology with motivational design, the author contributes to widening the reach of Gamification beyond niche projects — along a line of work that would become a hallmark of CEDIS over the decade.
The undergraduate thesis is also connected to the paper Metodologia para avaliação da gamificação em jogos, published at the XXVII Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education, in Uberlândia, in 2016, on pages 510-519, with Ludimila among the authors. The paper formalizes a methodology for evaluating gamified projects.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions with strong presence in Gamification .