Social learning environments (SLEs) are software suites that enable the application of both traditional and innovative teaching methodologies, blending activities tailored to the specific goals of the teaching style. In particular, SLEs have been used to introduce, on a medium and large scale, gamification strategies as a complement to traditional learning procedures. In this context, the existence of gamified activities can probably change the type and strength of the social relationships encouraged by the SLE among students. In this case study, we examine an SLE endowed with gamification capabilities and discuss the interplay between the designed gamified tasks and the resulting network of communications among the agents. Our findings reveal that the network structure reflects the interactions within the class in a nontrivial way and conversely that the network structure can be used to anticipate or predict the evolution of the student groups throughout the course. The results of this study support the claim that when the activities are designed around well‐conceived gamification and reward mechanisms, they quite easily capture the interest of the participants, whose engagement does not diminish with the progress of the academic term.

中文翻译：

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社交学习环境中游戏化与网络结构之间的相互作用：案例研究

社交学习环境 (SLE) 是一套软件套件，可同时应用传统和创新教学方法，结合针对教学风格特定目标量身定制的活动。特别是，SLE 已被用于在中型和大型范围内引入游戏化策略，作为对传统学习程序的补充。在这种情况下，游戏化活动的存在可能会改变 SLE 鼓励学生之间的社会关系的类型和强度。在本案例研究中，我们检查了具有游戏化功能的 SLE，并讨论了设计的游戏化任务与代理之间由此产生的通信网络之间的相互作用。我们的研究结果表明，网络结构以一种非平凡的方式反映了班级内的互动，相反，网络结构可用于预测或预测整个课程中学生群体的演变。这项研究的结果支持这样一种说法，即当活动围绕精心设计的游戏化和奖励机制设计时，它们很容易吸引参与者的兴趣，他们的参与度不会随着学期的进展而减少。