The developed application implements the following gamification methods:
The time banking principle
When user acts as a student by taking lessons, virtual system currency in minutes is spent from the user account. One minute of learning is debited from the account, while 1 min of teaching is credited to the account. Thus, the user acting as a teacher earns minutes, and the same user spends minutes as a student. In this way, all users participate in the virtual economy. Users are motivated to earn minutes, pushing the user to periodically assume the role of a teacher. Each user currently gets 30 min in the system as a part of the registration process. If all minutes are spent in the account, the system does not allow to study, but offers to teach to earn more minutes. Accumulated minutes are shown on the top of the interface screen in Fig. 1. The implemented time banking goal is to motivate users to teach in addition to learning (Osipov et al. 2015).
Sequential lessons presentation
Most computer games utilize gamification principles when the next game level becomes available after previous level has been completed. New lessons become available as the user goes through the previous lessons. Moreover, there is a grade displayed for each passed lesson as a single, dual, or triple star, reflecting how well the student passed the test at the end of each lesson. Sequential opening of the lessons in batches intrigues the user to find out what’s coming next, and boosts user engagement. Explicit visibility of the grade encourages user to retake lessons with poor grades.
Achievements and badges
The user acquires nominal status, positioned as an achievement, for learning and teaching in the system. The user gets status notifications by email, while other users also see these “achievements and badges,” and can select their learning partner based on this information. Basic list of “achievements and badges” includes “The First-grader; Middle school student, and High school student.” To make it short, these are presented by the first two letters of the achievement, displayed in the corresponding language next to the user name, and are called badges. Shortened badges are used to save the space in the list, and will be replaced with medals in the future for better visibility. The goal is to motivate users to receive awards as an external evaluation, thus motivating them to come back and spend more time in the system.
Peer evaluation
For positive behavior reinforcement and encouraging polite communication between the users, peer evaluation is implemented. After each lesson, both the teacher and the student can evaluate each other. There are two types in this kind of evaluation. The fist is simple like/dislike, which are accumulated for each user and displayed in the personal profile. This information is also visible to other users in the lists of teachers and students. Thus, polite and positive users are clearly visible, based on the large number of likes, while impolite and unpleasant users are also apparent due to dominating dislikes. In addition, there is an option to report indecent user behavior to the system moderator. However, this option is a part of system moderation, rather than gamification (Osipov et al. 2015).