# Design, Development and Use of a Digital Badges System in Higher Education
## 2 Related Work
Badges are of particular importance as an element of prestige, despite the fact that they are not taken into consideration in assessment and evaluation. The results show positive sentimental attitudes towards the lessons and a moderate effect on achievements. Although there is not difference between the final grades of the gamified and the control groups, teacher candidates regard gamified activities positively. More recently, the article [20] presents the gamification process, iterations made into the game elements and their features and students' perceptions in a gamified teacher education course. Related to badges, several of the participants value the feedback about their performance and progress, and for some of them their supportive messages help them to boost their confidence. The study [21] investigates college students' experiences of a gamified informatics course. Badges are used as social capital and minor rewards. Results show positive trends with respect to students' perceptions of gamification's impact on their learning, achievements and engagement in the course material. In [22], authors present a customizable platform aimed at facilitating the process of gamifying academic courses and enabling contextual studies on educational gamification. The platform offers by default a chain of badges given for mastery of skills. In addition, the instructor is able to define their own badges together with rules for receiving them. A user-friendly graphical interface enables easy defining of a badge with the rules for awarding it. The authors of [23] explore the effects of gamification on students' engagement in online discussions in an undergraduate level course. Badges are the basic units of the gamification system and several other features are built upon the badge system. Two main categories of badges exist: system (automatic) badges and instructor (manual) badges. Automatic badges are assigned by the system based on the quantity of student activities, and manual badges are assigned by the instructor considering the quality of discussion posts. Conclusions and interviews with students and teachers suggest a positive effect of the game-related features of the platform. The work [24] studies the usefulness of gamification to motivate students to carry out quality out-of-class activities in a master level course on statistics. Results obtained reveal higher quality in the work of the students enrolled in the gamified version of the course. The work [25] analyses the effect of using gamification elements in a course related to software development where badges reward the successful completion of tasks. The study confirms that students' grades and motivation increase as a result of applying gamification to their learning process. In the experiment described in [26], university students are randomly assigned to three different conditions: no badges, badges visible to peers and badges only visible to students themselves. Contrarily to expectations, the last one is evaluated more positively than the second one. The study of the effects of using gamification elements in courses that make use of a wiki environment on the participation rates as well as on student academic success is addressed in [27]. In the gamified experimental group, badges are obtained at the end of each activity rewarding the participation. Authors conclude that wiki activities positively contribute to student academic success, while gamification increases student participation. In [28] authors measure the impact of the gamification methodology used in a university course on the evolution of motivational levels of students. Related to badges, teachers do not announce in advance which ones could be collected in order to avoid that students adscribe their behaviour to the promised rewards. The findings illustrate the significance of the individual nature of motivational processes, the importance of sensitive longitudinal motivation measurements and the relevance of the implemented game elements' design characteristics.