Ludimoodle +: adaptive gamification to improve learner motivation and performance

Presented on Tuesday March 14, 2023 by Elise Lavoué, Ludimoodle + was one of the winners honored at a gathering of e-FRAN project leaders at the Pap Ndiaye Ministry of National Education. An opportunity for Pimenko to tell you more about this project, where pedagogical innovation puts all our Moodle know-how to good use.

The LudiMoodle + project, led by the ComUE Université de Lyon, is the winner of the “Support for the deployment of e-FRAN projects” call for projects launched by the French National Research Agency as part of France 2030.
Conducted over a two-year period, it aims to improve learning performance and academic success through the development of fun resources tailored to students. The project consortium includes the ACADEMIE DE LYON RECTORAT, the LIRIS IT laboratory (CNRS and INSA Lyon), the Pôle d’Accompagnement à la Pédagogie Numérique (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3), the ECP education sciences laboratory (Université Lumière Lyon 2) and PIMENKO, a Lyon-based company specializing in Moodle LMS platforms.

The LudiMoodle+ project has three objectives:

1. Scientific: Deepen knowledge of the impact of adaptive gamification on student performance.
2. Technological: Consolidate and enhance the Moodle gamification tool, available as open source.
3. Formative: Create a training course on the M@gistère platform to disseminate the scientific results obtained to the educational community.

The project revolves around the development of a course format for Moodle, the world’s most widely used OpenSource LMS. This course format offers a number of game elements and innovative features to tailor games to learners’ preferences and expectations.

In concrete terms, if we take the example of the algebra course for^4th grade classes used for the experimental and scientific part of the project, a student could be assigned a different game element according to his or her profile to encourage success.

A total of 6 game elements are planned for the scientific study, such as score (obtain maximum points), avatar (collect objects), timer (answer as quickly as possible), etc.

Pimenko draws on years of technical and pedagogical experience in plugin development and course creation on Moodle. We work closely with the other members of the project on the development of the plugin.
Over the last few months, we’ve been developing the version of the plugin that will be used to test it on 1,500 schoolchildren in the Rhône, Loire and Ain regions. This phase of the project will be used to collect the project’s scientific data.

In the second part of the project, we’ll build the generic version of the plugin. Ele will take into account both the scientific results of the project and feedback from the teaching teams who used the plugin during the experimental phase.

To develop the generic version of the plugin, it will be necessary to add a range of features so that the course format can be used whatever the discipline (an algebra, art history or accounting course), the training audience (middle school, high school, adult) or the destination Moodle platform!

The aim of the project is to distribute the generic plugin in 2024, to enable as many people as possible to benefit from the advantages of adaptive gamification, both for initial training (secondary school students) and for adult training.

To find out more, visit the project’s official website: https: //bit.ly/3GLV2lQ

The LudiMoodle+ project, led by the University of Lyon, has been awarded government funding under the France 2030 program, managed by the French National Research Agency (ANR-22-FRAN-0005).