Badge Architectures in Engineering Education
Blueprints and Challenges
Răzvan Rughiniș
Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Splaiul Independenței 313,
060042 Bucharest, Romania
Keywords: Badge Architectures, Achievements, Gamification, Motivation, Reputation, Engineering Education.
Abstract: The paper presents a critical discussion of badge architectures and an illustrative case study. We argue that
common glosses of badges as simplistic or as extrinsically motivating are misleading when designing or
evaluating badge architectures. We propose to focus on their descriptive and creative effects: badge
architectures may create user portraits, system maps, and dedicated timelines, supporting new forms of
attention within the system and at meta-system levels. By affording new activities in and about the system,
badges can offer participants resources to internalize their extrinsic motivation. Our case study illustrates the
complexity of minimalist badge architectures, presents two innovative features, and discusses challenges in
implementation.
1 INTRODUCTION
In this paper we critically review and reformulate
arguments concerning the use of badges, and we
propose orienting concepts for designers of
instructional systems. There is a rich thread of
literature dedicated to badges and related reward
systems in digital games; nonetheless, their use in
education, and particularly in engineering education,
has been rather understudied. Badges are
mainstream components of digital games, and they
are increasingly used in non-game contexts and in
boundary systems (serious games, gamified
applications, games with a purpose). This increasing
interest in badge architectures reflects two
converging trends: on the one hand, their continuous
evolution and growing importance in gaming, and,
on the second hand, the expanding relevance of
games as models and resources for the design of
other systems.
The paper is organized as follows: in the next
section we define badge architectures and discuss
their key features and rationales; we then discuss
specific issues concerning badges in educational
settings, and we present a case study to illustrate
some of our key points. We conclude by proposing a
new set of concepts to guide reflection on the design
and evaluation of badge architectures.
2 BADGE ARCHITECTURES
We use the concept “badge architectures” instead of
simply “badges” in order to underline one of our
main arguments: badges are valuable as components
of a system of rewards, related, in turn, to a system
of activities. Awareness of the systemic functioning
of badges is a key consideration for the design
process.
Seen from a critical distance, badges may seem a
simple or even simplistic mechanic. Still, successful
badge architectures often balance multiple objectives
and combine heterogeneous elements to create
smooth user experiences. Their apparent simplicity
is, at its best, a sophisticated achievement of design
and evolution.
2.1 Key Features
We cover by the term “badges” a variety of rewards,
including “achievements”, “medals”, “trophies”,
“pins” etc. Some of the key features shared by these
rewards are: a title, an icon, a description and related
points (Galli and Fraternali, 2012). Badges are
virtual artefacts that are granted to participants, who
thus become their owners. If we extend the
description of badges to include their role in the
system, we can say that, as a rule, a badge shares the
following characteristics:
548
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Badge Architectures in Engineering Education - Blueprints and Challenges.
DOI: 10.5220/0004388405480554
In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 548-554
ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
1) A graphic sign: as a rule, badges have a core
graphical descriptive component, which may be
complemented with additional elements such as text,
numbers, and/or other graphical elements (for
example, several stars);
2) A reference to a specific system event resulting
from the user’s activity; this may be an
accomplishment of a valuable task, a chance finding,
a noteworthy failure (for anti-achievements), a
memorable experience etc. The event is, as a rule,
succinctly described through the badge title and
possibly through an accompanying phrase; badges
may allow observers to reach (via hyperlinks) a
more elaborated description of the underlying
activity and performance;
3) After it is unlocked, the badge is attached to the
participant’s profile in the system and, possibly,
transferred in other systems as well;
4) Badges rely on a quality vs. quantity play:
they are virtual possessions, and, as such, can be
either possessed, or not. Still, badges may be further
quantified (by counting them, or by summing
achievement points), thus becoming again
commensurable on a continuum.
5) Badges often are secondary rewards (Montola
et al., 2009), meaning that the game can be played
without paying too much attention to them;
nevertheless, many players consider the secondary
achievements a critical game element (Jakobsson,
2011).
a. Rationales
Badges in digital games are diverse. Montola et al.
(2009) identify several types, ranging from rewards
for exploring the game (tutorial) and completing
game activities (completion, collection) to badges
for outstanding achievements (virtuosity, hard mode,
veteran, loyalty, paragon), for eccentric events
(special play, curiosity, luck) and to meta-gaming
(fandom). This diversity makes visible several
functions of badge architectures in digital games:
they show the way, they render visible certain
activities and stimulate participation, and they
encourage prolonged engagement with the game.
From the point of view of game designers,
achievements are especially valuable insofar they
retain players longer in the system. Antin and
Churchill (2011) point to five other functions of
badge systems: 1) instruction about possible
activities, 2) goal setting, 3) reputation – including
information on players’ experiences, skills, interests,
and overall dedication to the game, 4) conferring
status, and 5) group identification. They go on to
highlight two topics for further reflection: badges are
not motivational for all participants, and they may
even have adverse effects by displacing intrinsic
motivation.
Given the diversity of participants, the diversity
of possible badges, and uncertainty concerning
motivational effects, how are designers to tackle the
task of deciding whether a given badge architecture
is adequate, and how to implement it?
We propose to distinguish between two functions
of badge architectures that are analytically distinct
while depending on one another for functioning: a
descriptive mission, and a creative mission.
Figure 1: Creative effects of badge architectures.
On the one hand, badge architectures function to
map the system of activities (game or non-game) to
which they are attached. Badge architectures also
function to portray participants, making their
experiences, skills, and inferred preferences
available to others, in a system of coveillance
(Jakobsson, 2011). One step further, by specifying
valuable activities and outcomes in the system, and
by making participants visible to one another, badge
architectures allow a “Gestalt understanding”
(Antin and Churchill, 2011) of the system and its
community.
On the other hand, through this descriptive
effects, badges afford novel activities within the
system and about the system (such as various
metagaming activities – Sotamaa, 2010), and new
sets of reasons for engaging with the system. In his
ethnographic work on Xbox 360 gaming, Jakobsson
distinguishes three main types of users in relation to
BadgeArchitecturesinEngineeringEducation-BlueprintsandChallenges
549
achievements: achievement casuals (enjoying them
now and then for their scaffolding function), hunters
(aiming for the largest overall score), and
completists (aiming for an integral achievement
collection) (Jakobsson, 2011). We identify, through
his analysis, three creative effects of badge
architectures that apply to games and possibly to
other systems as well. On the one hand, they add a
resistance structure to the gameworld, by making
salient the less visible regions of the game, by
structuring gameplay time, and by extending the
duration of gameplay beyond the first game end.
Secondly, badges create a new definition of game
completeness: they compose a collectable set that
invites a new type of activity: “collecting badges”.
Thirdly, as Jakobsson notices, badges may create a
different (meta)game whatsoever out of a series of
initial games: he concludes that players of the Xbox
360 console games have become, with variable
awareness and willingness, participants in a multi-
player online game in which each achievement
represents a distinctive “quest”.
A focus on the descriptive and creative missions
of badge architectures allows us to overcome the
heated debate on whether badges foster intrinsic or
extrinsic motivation. Badges are often denounced
as depleting activities of their fun, displacing
intrinsic motivation, or making it irrelevant, at
minimum. Laschke and Hassenzahl (2011) join a
trend of denouncing badges (and other instances of
gamification) as meaning-depleting stimuli that
enforce a behaviorist theory of human motivation
(Robertson, 2012; Hecker, 2010; Bogost, 2011).
Still, their argumentation does not rely on empirical
evidence on how badges are actually taken over by
participants. They notice that “becoming a “mayor”
of a place can be solely driven by the wish to get the
according badge (…) there might be a big difference
between being there because of an intrinsic interest
in the people, the place, the atmosphere or being
there because of the badge” (Laschke and
Hassenzahl, 2011, p. 3). While this difference
certainly might obtain in some instances, empirical
research and testimonies concerning Foursquare
users / players point out that many of them have
multiple reasons for using the system, beyond
collecting badges (Lindqvist et al., 2011) – even
when cheating in the game (Berne, 2012). Jakobsson
replies to the intrinsic vs. extrinsic discussion that
badge collecting is in itself an intrinsically motivated
pursuit – but this does not directly address the issue
of whether the joy of collecting decreases the joy of
playing or otherwise engaging with a system.
Jakobsson notices that, in practice, there is a deep
ambiguity of players concerning achievements. They
can be experienced as stimulating, as addictive, as
alienating, or as informative and quasi-inert –
depending on the game the participants actually
play, within the formal system frame (ibid.). The
question then becomes not whether badges support
or displace intrinsic motivation, but what kind of
novel activities are afforded by badge
architectures, how are they taken over by
participants, with what kinds of reasons, and with
what consequences? These questions can only have
specific, empirical answers, depending on the social
context of the activity.
3 BADGES IN EDUCATION
Badge architectures in educational systems may be
embedded into a gameful system (see for example
Fitz-Walter, 2011), or may be used as independent
game-like mechanics to animate non-game learning
activities, as in the examples of the Khan Academy
and the future MITx framework (Young, 2012), in
Mozilla Open Badges (Goligoski, 2012) or in the
RSS Network (Ross et al., 2012).
Unlike gameplay that is, more often than not,
voluntary and driven by enjoyment and other forms
of individual fulfilment, students often experience
educational activities as dry and tiresome beyond
enjoyment. Therefore, the issue of intrinsic
motivation displacement is less salient for badges
granted in non-game learning systems. The problem
becomes, rather, one of attention focus, for
instructors and students as well. Badge-fuelled
instructional systems may be accused of being lazy:
do badge architectures stimulate instructors to create
relevant, engaging learning experiences, or do they
rather relieve them of this pressure? Do they
stimulate learners to seek the hidden logic and
relevance of unfamiliar notions, or just to navigate
the surface of the subject matter and collect badges?
On the other side, badge architectures promise
significant motivational effects for potential
recipients – be they students or teachers. Final,
outcome-badges are especially valued for their
descriptive force: unlike diplomas, they are specific
about underlying experiences and skills, and they
can be displayed immediately after they are
‘unlocked’, making personal growth visible on a
continuous basis (Young, 2012). Badges provide a
form of fast (if not immediate) feedback, and they
offer resources for self-presentation in front of peers
and employers. Unlike badges in digital games,
which are of interest mainly for other gamers and
CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
550
designers, badges in educational systems can speak
to a larger set of publics, including potential
employers in various fields, peers, and family
members who may belong to different generational
and occupational worlds. Educational badges may
function, therefore, as boundary objects (Star and
Griesemer, 1989; Halavais, 2011), translating
formulations of skills and experiences to support
interaction across domains of expertise.
There is another reason to consider the
motivational force of badges in education. At finer
levels of task granularity, badges that reward
intermediate progress or secondary performances
make the participant more aware of, and invested
into the system. The self-determination theory of
motivation (Scott Rigby et al., 1992; Ryan and
Deci, 2000) downplays the intrinsic / extrinsic
distinction and brings forward the issue of internal
versus external source of motivation. Insofar badges
offer pretexts for engaging with an activity,
moments of fun that give some impetus for tackling
a difficult task, they become antidotes for
procrastination. Badges may function as tools for
internalizing extrinsic motivation, enhancing
participants’ self-determination. Learners often
appreciate that study tasks are useful and relevant –
but they may lack a here-and-now impetus for
actually starting the work. Getting the work started,
for reasons intrinsic or extrinsic to that activity, is
the first step towards developing better appreciation
of a competence field, a first and necessary step
towards autonomous learning. Badge architectures
can therefore be designed not as promoters of
intrinsic motivation, but as a scaffold for what Ryan
and Deci (2000) call internalized extrinsic
motivation, which we think of as a quasi-intrinsic
motivation.
The third reason for considering badge
architectures as motivational tools derives from their
creative effects. Badges can consolidate learning by
producing structures that extend beyond the here-
and-now of instruction:
- Architectures of badges create maps of learning
fields and communities of practice (Lave and
Wenger, 1991). Therefore, they may support a better
understanding of what is relevant in a specific field,
and they can encourage convergence between
different stakeholders in formulating the curriculum:
human resource experts in the industry, K12 and
university professors, and students;
- Unlike the too-official grades, badges “give
concrete evidence for bragging rights” (Jarvinen,
2009) through detailed participant portraits, and thus
stimulate conversations around learning; badges
can also support consistent contributions on
forums, peer-learning and content generation;
- Grades are only for students, but badges are for
students and teachers alike, linking them in
horizontal social networks; this is particularly
relevant given the opportunities of social web for
education (Traușan-Matu et al., 2009);
- Badges afford comparisons between students and
teachers from different course years, crossing
classroom and generational time borders; they create
extended timelines;
- Badges create communities of members that are
attentive to one another’s progress and even compete
in educational arenas.
4 CASE STUDY: RL Hit List
In order to illustrate some challenges in designing
badge architectures, we present the “RL Hit List”.
We have designed this system for students in the
Computer Networks course (abbreviated as CN, in
translation as RL) taking place in the 3rd year of
study in a Computer Science program of a European
technical university. The course enrolls around 100
students. The Hit List is already in use: its first 21
badges were awarded to course instructors and
organizing team members, and the next 25 badges
will have been awarded by the end of the first
semester, in February 2013. The objectives of this
badge system are:
1) To assemble communities of students and
teachers:
- To create a visible, public, and course-related
merit-based elite of students, including around 25%
of each generation;
- To create a trans-generational record of
performance, linking instructors and students from
different years in a common network;
- To raise interest in computer networks and in
the CN course among top performing students, and
to recruit future student mentors and TAs;
- To position the CN course as a meaningful,
challenging learning experience for students,
instructors and employers alike – and in this process
to consolidate the identity of the CN instructor team,
and the research group in which they belong;
2) To stimulate technical and casual talk
referring to computer networks and the CN course
- To make student performance throughout the
course a public matter and a topic for conversation –
that is, to create what Jarvinen aptly called
“evidence for bragging rights” (2009) related to the
CN course concepts, participants, and memories;
BadgeArchitecturesinEngineeringEducation-BlueprintsandChallenges
551
this evidence can become a topic in students’ talk
with their colleagues, and also in interactions with
significant others from other professional fields,
including family members and friends;
- To stimulate joint reflection in the faculty
group – as teaching assistants are the ones who
deliberate and vote on the students that receive
badges for their laboratory and overall contributions.
- To position performance in the CN course as an
‘experience that makes a difference’ in students’
CVs and when interviewing for jobs in the IT&C
industry;
3) Last but not least, to motivate students to
engage with course, laboratory, and forum activities,
to raise their interest for participating in attendance-
monitoring systems (Bucicoiu and Țăpuș, 2013), and
for obtaining top grades in midterm and final
examinations.
The RL Hit List falls squarely in the set of badge
architectures, but it has two distinctive traits:
- It combines digital and material rewards: each
prize consists in a digital inscription and a metallic
pin badge (Figure 1), which is ceremonially awarded
at the beginning of a course;
- Instead of images, it uses numbers as visual
signs (Figure 2): each recipient receives an ID
number on the Hit List, in increasing chronological
order. The initial number was 256, the first value to
symbolically evade representation on one byte. ID
numbers do not represent scores or levels, but marks
in time – which, at the same time, serve to construct
a distinctive timeline and a tradition in reference to
the CN course. The system displays a minimalist
graphic, aimed at a community of professionals,
with no explicit reference to gamefulness or
playfulness.
Figure 2: Metallic pin badges for the RL Hit List.
The allocation of RL pin badges is not entirely
automated, depending, for some categories, on
instructors’ deliberation. As a consequence, this
award architecture has immediately produced a new
kind of awareness of possible and alternative
criteria for appreciating student contributions to
classroom and virtual discussions. In order to be able
to make their case, members of the course team have
had to pay more attention and to remember more of
their students’ activity in class, by name. Although it
seems that teaching assistants and course professors
would anyway remember outstanding students,
setting this as an objective visibly refines the
granularity of the remarkable contributions.
Figure 3: The online RL Hit List at 28.11.2012.
While virtual badges are swiftly allocated by
system administrators, metallic pins are awarded
festively, in front of around one hundred colleagues.
Still, this feeling of ceremony is volatile: we have
noticed that, when granting three identical pins (top
score in midterm quiz), the first student to be
announced has received intense applause, while the
third was barely applauded – at a distance of
seconds. Therefore, the most challenging aspects
that need to be managed concerning the offline pins
are not the material issues per se (designing,
ordering, depositing etc) but the symbolic issue of
creating and maintaining their ritual dimension.
We have initially assumed that the purpose and
functions of this badge architecture are transparent
for all participants, students and teachers alike, in
virtue of the simplicity and self-explanatory nature
of the system, and a shared gaming culture.
Subsequent discussions have indicated that this was
not the case: the only objective which featured
prominently in members’ talk was “to motivate
students to be more engaged with the course”. This
is why we have decided to make the architecture
more verbose – that is, to publish explicit self-
descriptions for some of its rationales. This digital
loquacity of the system was organized as a
hypertext, with increasing layers of details aimed at
different publics.
Last but not least, if there is a shared keyword
across most objectives, it is talk. Badges are
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designed for conversation: they are alive if students,
professors, employers end up discussing them one
way or another. Students can contribute to course
discussions, can “brag” about their achievements,
can mention them in their online presentations;
faculty members can talk about them as a
noteworthy feature of their course, and as a personal
accomplishment. Still, all this talk is only a
possibility, until it really happens. The most difficult
task of this achievement architecture is to kindle its
conversational infrastructure.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Badge architectures are an increasingly relevant
component of learning experiences. Engineering
education is especially inclined towards using
achievement-type rewards, due to widespread
engagement with the gaming culture. We argue that
the conceptual framework for reflecting and
evaluating badge architectures relies on two
common, but problematic, tropes: that badges are
simple mechanics added to an activity, and that they
operate within the intrinsic / extrinsic motivation
dichotomy. Instead, we propose that badge
architectures can be more productively thought of in
light of their descriptive and creative functions for
the system in which they are implemented. In brief,
badges are productive elements: they can generate
maps, portraits, timelines, and they open up a
meta-system level of activity. At their best, badge
architectures may help participants internalize
extrinsic motivations for study and work, and they
may open a communication space centered on the
experiences and skills that they reward.
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